A Few Words...
Black Ashes
March 2007
Thirty years ago on March 7, 1976, a three-story eyesore beside Sacred Heart Church on Broadway and Ferry Avenue in Camden crumbled in a cloud of dust as the bulldozers crushed it to the ground. Later a park with trees and benches took its place.
Lent began that year with the dirt and dust of that demolition. I remember that Mary Hicks who worked here at the time said: “We should take some ashes from those ruins and wear them on Ash Wednesday.” We did. In time the grass grew and the trees bloomed. But as in years passed, the weeds came to Eden, not as natural vegetation but as human degradation. The place where the ruins were and the trees grew is now the beaten ground of prostitutes. Poor unfortunate women, most of them damaged by molestation at early ages and out of it with drugs, are there. Not so easy to demolish the old patterns and replace them with the new. No easy road to restoration at this level.
So, this Ash Wednesday, we will add some black ashes from burned out buildings in the neighborhood to the pot of burned palm before we bless them.
We will add too the ache of the burned out women with our own empathy for their pain and try to take on the ashes of lives lost on our streets. We will cry for transformation. It’s not easy to touch the leper as Jesus did, but we must try… and cry out for healing.
Who had hope for the battered body of Jesus in the darkness of a Friday long ago? But life got to its feet from the ashes of Calvary and rose gloriously on the first Easter Sunday morning.
