Ash Wednesday, February 10, 2016
In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed the human one from the dust of the ground, and breathed into the human’s nostrils the breath of life; and the human one became a living being. –Genesis 2:4b-7
More than thirty years ago, I learned hatha yoga at a Christian-Hindu ashram high in the Himalayan mountains of India. One of my favorite parts of each morning’s yoga was the “Salutation to the Sun,” a series of yoga poses that flow together.
One morning, almost by accident, I discovered that the flow of the postures corresponded beautifully with the phrases in the Lord’s Prayer. The movements–looking up, reaching down, stretching, folding–seemed to match the intention of the words.
It was a powerful moment of discovery, and since then I periodically pray the Lord’s Prayer as I do a Salutation to the Sun. The physical movements help me avoid the trap of turning prayer into an intellectual exercise. They helped me experience the prayer as an expression of my whole being.
This evening, at our Ash Wednesday service, we will explore the Lord’s Prayer as an “embodied prayer,” using gentle yoga poses to deepen our experience. We will move from embodying the prayer Jesus taught to offering one another ashes on our foreheads.
There are many ways to understand the meaning of the ashes we use tonight. One meaning comes from Genesis 2. The ashes remind us of our connection with the earth. We are creatures with bodies that come from the earth and ultimately return to the earth.
And so “embodied prayer” is especially appropriate for Ash Wednesday. We claim that God created us as whole creatures–body, mind, and spirit–, and so we honor that wholeness as we pray with our whole beings.
God our Creator, may we pray with all of who we are. Amen.
–Debbie Clark