You Are Dust: Reflecting on Ash Wednesday

February 17, 2021

Across the years, several descriptions of the human person have captured my imagination: humans are complex tubes; we are stardust animated by an electrical spark; we are nephesh chayyah; we are dust and to dust we shall return. If you were to attend a traditional Ash Wednesday service today, you would hear the cleric intone that final description as she smudged your forehead with ashes in the shape of a cross. “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Those traditional services may be harder to find as we continue to wrestle a pandemic that has threatened all of us and taken some of us. If nothing else, the coronavirus has reminded us of the truth that we are dust. Here we are, after all, manipulators of the atom, possessors of the most destructive and powerful military in the history of the world, inventors of medical marvels, the self-proclaimed apex creature of the evolutionary ladder. And, a virus has felled almost a half million of our fellow citizens in a year’s time. Dust indeed.

Did you know that traditionally the ashes that are being applied today would have been made out of the burned palm fronds from last year’s Palm Sunday services? They’re a burnt reminder that something triumphant hides in the cremated remains. I think of the pastors who sit outside the windows of elderly and infirm church members to make the pastoral call. I think of the school teachers who risk their own health for the sake of our littlest citizens. I think of the chaplains who sit with the spouse and children of the person who has just been taken off a vent. I think of the nurses, the doctors and the frontline staff whose mark at the end of this day will be the bruises of a tightly fitted N-95 mask. They are, along with so many others, the triumph hiding in the dust.

I like so much how Jan Richardson puts it in her poem for Ash Wednesday, Blessing the Dust:

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

Grace and peace,

Ray