A Lenten reflection on how the Spirit meets us between tradition, honest questions, and the slow schooling of the soul.

So it was Ash Wednesday, and as pastor, not seeking to add burdens of custom and tradition to the people, The spirit within drew me to Awareness.

What if this year we reversed some of the regular customs and conventions and entered this crucible in an entirely different way?

What might emerge from these forty days? Could the smoke rise a different color — something unimagined, kaleidoscopic beyond the visible spectrum of the human eye and senses perhaps?

By grace — or perhaps divine orchestration — I asked my seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Trinity (how fitting the name), if she and her friends would like to go with us. Gleefully, the quartet said yes.

Buoyed by this infusion of youthful wonder, I planned my message with a decided lean toward teaching, knowing this would be a formative experience for them — and, truth be told, for many others as well.

In the Black Baptist tradition, Lent is certainly no stranger in the camp. Yet the Imposition of Ashes — not application (too clinical), nor placement (too procedural) — but Imposition, the weight and witness of the mark, is not customary liturgy.

Indeed, even the word liturgy itself rarely inhabits the everyday vocabulary of the average Black church, ours included.

These ashes, formed from the fronds of last season’s Palm Sunday procession, carried their own quiet testimony: yesterday’s hosannas become today’s humility.

I found myself wondering whether there might be some deeper sacramental connection — linguistically, spiritually — between this flow of ashes and the fire of Pentecost: dust upon the brow, flame upon the head; mortality confessed, Spirit bestowed.

We concluded the service with the observance of the Lord’s Supper — Holy Communion, as we more commonly call it — and the five of us rode home, reflecting, discerning, and commenting on the many facets of this new encounter.

Then the unexpected denoument appeared. Trinity asked the pointed and piercing question: “Babu… what happened? Y’all on low budget?”

Not quite in sync with her query, I asked, “Low budget? What do you mean?”

“That wafer we had for communion — it was disgusting! Y’all on low budget and had to get the cheap brand?”

And there it was. Not riding on a donkey this time, but Presence entered our vehicle.

Understanding her question now, I explained to her and her friends — my adopted grands — that this is what it is supposed to taste like: no salt, no yeast, flat, plain. Even al dente would be too pleasant to the palate.

Because the wafer represents the body of Jesus — broken by suffering, marked by injustice, bearing wounds so that we might be made whole; enduring pain so that we might know peace; carrying stripes so that healing might reach us.

“Okay,” she said, with her friends nodding approvingly. And back to their music and merriment they went as we zipped around the beltway.

I smiled — humored, instructed, and accompanied by four young theologians riding home from Calvary back to Bethany, where reflection lives after revelation.

And I realized that night that faith and questions are not enemies. They meet wherever real life meets holy truth.

Honest inquiry. The question was not irreverent. It was incarnational.

And truth be told, it is the open, sincere questions of youth that safeguard the future of the Church

In some small way, I mused again: Tertullian’s ancient question — "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" — had once more found itself at the crossroads of inquiry and faith, philosophy and lived experience, nearly two millennia later.

Right here is where they meet, wherever honest questions are asked, where tradition is tasted and tested, where the sacred interrupts the ordinary, and where a young voice dares to ask why.

And so I came to understand that the mark of ash upon the brow and the blandness of the bread upon the tongue belong to the same holy grammar.

Lent does not dazzle the senses; it disciplines them. It strips away excess so that truth may be tasted without seasoning and mercy received without spectacle.

For the journey from dust to resurrection does not begin in glory — it begins in honesty, in hunger, and in the slow schooling of the soul.

Trinity’s question revealed this unmistakable truth to me: before we can recognize the Bread of Life, our taste for comfort must be retrained by the cross.

Yes, sometimes the Spirit chooses the youngest voice in the car to ask the question the Church most needs to hear.