So my new book, my novel, kind of sort of starts today. By which I mean Ash Wednesday. Not that my character recognizes it. She’s in Italy for undisclosed but pressing reasons and she starts noticing people with smudges on their faces, black smudges. She eventually realizes these are crosses and looks up why people might have ashy crosses on their faces — and discovers it is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent.

Neither my character nor I grew up with Lent but it has been part of most of my adult life. There have been years I’ve given up Facebook and other years when I gave up something like chocolate or coffee (I think of those as unholy Lents because they certainly weren’t anything other than gritting my teeth and being cranky. For 40 days.) Last year I gave up swearing which was probably my best Lent ever.

Given that my character goes to work in the olive grove of a convent, it might be easy to react like those who find out she is doing so, like her airplane seatmate on the way to Italy — “He jolted, shifting in his chair, as if to sit more upright. ‘You’re a nun?'” he said.” No, she is not a nun but she is a person of faith. She might not be observing Lent with its fasting but in another sense she is because she certainly isn’t in Italy simply for a pleasure trip as a tourist. She’s wrestling with big questions.

As we all are.

One of the things I hope this book does is to allow the reader to have insight into the life of faith in the same way that a novel set in a different culture does that. I hope this book will be read by people who would identify as having a particular faith of one sort or another, but I also hope it will be read more broadly, both to give those insights into this other culture, but also to remind us of our common humanity, the ways in which we all wrestle and find joy.

Four years ago today I began leading a series of lunch hour gatherings. After one of them, the idea popped into my mind to take on new work, a role that led me back into academic studies, and to lead other gatherings today.

Three years ago, I joined with a group of people celebrating Ash Wednesday and I already knew that Italy was swamped with this novel coronavirus so that the occasional, usual coughs among those attending caused me to wonder and worry.

Today I headed out to an Ash Wednesday midday service and arrived to find it had been cancelled due to weather. The two of us who showed up said the words — ashes to ashes, dust to dust — to one another, talked for a few minutes and went our way.

When I got home, I went looking for something to burn. In my basement I discovered the branches of olive trees I had squirreled away in my suitcase during our springtime visit to Florence, Italy more than a dozen years ago. They are dessicated and faded now. We gathered them on the day we referred to as Burn Your Trees day, the day people around the valley seemed to be brushing leaves and branches from their olive trees. That pruning and burning makes it into my Italy novel.

I set a few leaves alight in a small aluminium pie pan. They smoked up the kitchen and I took them outside to crumble into ash. I also decided I would look up whether the smoke was toxic or why people burned olive leaves and branches. It turned out that not only is this good horticultural practice but in some cultures it is believed that burning olive leaves wards off the evil eye. So I’m now covered for that, I guess.

But the cancelled service reminded me of the small weirdnesses of any subculture, including religious ones. It made me think of the day that two people handing trays of communion up and down the rows of the church I was attending miscommunicated so that suddenly I was receiving trays of wine from both sides. What did it mean to double-dip?

There’s also the beauty — two years ago, deep in yet another lockdown, I realized I had saved old palm branches in my house from a previous Palm Sunday, Knowing that the ashes for Ash Wednesday are usually made from the previous year’s Palm Sunday palms, I burned them for my own ritual. When I realized I had too many ashes, I left the remainder out on the retaining wall in front of my house with an open written invitation for others to use them if this was — or was not– part of their tradition. I later saw a message of appreciation written in the snow by someone who had used them, and still later in the waning light of the day watched two young men impose the sign of the cross on one another’s foreheads. They looked up to see me taking groceries out of my car. “Hey,” one of them said, face radiant, “thanks for this.”

The words of Ash Wednesday remind us of our mortality — “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Physicists remind us that we are made of stars. It’s that kind of blend of humility and glory that a novel reminds us we share in common even with people who are seemingly so different from us.

My publisher released the cover for my new book today. It’s got a glorious, ancient olive tree on the cover and its name suggests that even in death there is still hope.