It may happen more often than I realize, but I cannot remember Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day landing on the same day—ever!
Being a congregational minister and a husband for over 25 years, this is something I would have remembered. In fact, a quick search engine inquiry just told me that the last time this happened was in 1945.
The juxtaposition of love and death provides a powerful intersection for contemplation, especially using the Together for Hope (TFH) lens.
We fight poverty in the 338 counties that experience persistent rural poverty in the United States. Our counties are full of people who daily live at the dangerous intersection of ashes and roses.
There are so many good human beings living in these counties who all want the same thing as any of us want: a safe place for their kids to play, a good school where their kids can learn, a good job that can provide for their families, reliable transportation for their job and family, access to affordable health care and access to healthy food.
None of these desires are excessive. Almost all are the foundations of human survival based on food, water, and shelter. The nature of our work at TFH is to address these three basic principles of human survival.
There is a housing crisis in the United States. It is a crisis caused mainly by our country’s refusal to support or enforce affordable housing legislation. We systemically make it more difficult for families who experience poverty to have access to affordable housing.
Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City” chronicles the tragedy of America’s housing insecurity. Desmond tells one story after another of families struggling to survive and keep shelter over their heads in a system built against them. Yet, in each family story, he shows the care and love within families just trying to survive.
These stories occur at the intersection of ashes and roses, of human devastation and love.
We don’t have to read a book at Together for Hope to see this. We know thousands of families across rural America who experience ashes and roses every day.
This coincidence of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day is no coincidence in their lives. It is a daily lived experience.
Entire towns are constantly on boil-water notices, with water so contaminated that citizens must boil it to drink it safely. In the worst cases, water systems fail entirely, leaving no running water at all. This recently occurred in Helena-West Helena, Arkansas.
Many of the town’s water mains burst during a rare freeze, leaving residents without water. Through our local TFH coalition members—Delta Circles and Together for Hope Arkansas—we sent thousands of gallons of potable water to help the community until their water was turned back on.
Because of local community-based organizations Delta Circles, led by Patricia Ashanti and TFH Arkansas, led by Karen Williams, community members (including Patricia and Karen) didn’t suffer without water for long.
Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, is not an exception to the rule. Failed infrastructure often creates water insecurity. This is caused by the divestment in and abandonment of rural America, all compounded by federal and state policies. This is true in all of our ethno-geographies of persistent rural poverty.
But there are roses in the ashes, like Patricia and Karen, incredible people who have stayed in or returned to their hometowns to make a difference. They relentlessly pursue better ways for their communities and shine the light of hope on the dust of capitalism gone awry.
As we prepare to put the ashes on our foreheads as a reminder of our mortality and to set the contemplative mood of Lent, may we remember all those suffering in an unjust system of economic exclusion based on where they live.
Think about these good people and let their goodness guide you to be better, too.
National director of Together for Hope, CBF’s rural development coalition, and the coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi. He is the author of Faded Flowers: Preaching in the Aftermath of Suicide and James in Postcolonial Perspective: The Letter as Nativist Discourse (Fortress, 2015). His co-edited volume Bible and Theory: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Stephen D. Moore (Fortress Academic, 2020) will be released this fall.
