February 26, 2020: Ash Wednesday
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
These are the haunting words that are said over us on Ash Wednesday, when a priest looks into our eyes, and makes the sign of the cross in ash upon our foreheads. It is a reminder of our mortality, of our frailty and fragility and finitude. Dust. At the beginning and at the end, dust is what human beings are.
Human beings are remarkable creatures. Sometimes it seems as though the human spirit knows no bounds—that there are no heights to which our genius cannot climb, no depths too deep which our science cannot plumb, no distances too great that our ingenuity will not one day overcome and surpass them all. That is, at least, the myth that we all tell ourselves, and for good reason, because as it happens, human beings are created in the image of God. But on Ash Wednesday, the Church’s response to this myth is
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Even amidst humanity’s greatest accomplishments, even in the face of the most beautiful and breathtaking achievements in human culture, even in the boundless potential of the human imagination—we are but dust, and to dust we shall return. Each one of us is nothing more than wind-swept dust, stirred up and animated to soar for a moment … but only for a moment, before we return, falling back down, to the ground.
Some of the most powerful spiritual experiences that we can have are those in which we stare face-to-face with our own mortality. Sometimes this comes in the form of a near-death experience, though more often than not we experience it in the mundane and the everyday, like when a priest touches our forehead with an ash-laden thumb. I remember one Ash Wednesday, when I was in my mid-20s. I came into the church, and it was evening, and I sat toward the front by myself. When it came time for the imposition, I was one of the first to receive the ashes. The moment passed rather quickly, and didn’t strike me as anything especially powerful or profound. I returned to my seat, and pulled out the kneeler to pray. And it was in those next moments, on my knees, with my eyes closed, that the Spirit started to breathe. I couldn’t really focus on my prayer, because all I could do was listen to the words of the priest, repeated to one person after another after another, as he imposed the ashes. I whispered those words along with him, silently, like a mantra, words that for the next five or six minutes continued to cascade over me like water, enveloping me like a steady wind.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
What do we make of this statement? What do we stand to gain? Shouldn’t such words tempt us toward despair, don’t they only further confirm our quiet suspicion that the only god is ‘nothingness’, that human beings are nothing more than “bags of meat walking around on a tiny speck of dust traveling through infinite space”? The Church says that we are dust, and to dust we shall return. Why on earth would anyone want to say amen to that?
Perhaps the point of Ash Wednesday is to remind us that there is a God, and that God is not us. Ash Wednesday invites us to recalibrate our spiritual compass, so to speak, so that we can find true North again. Because in our lives, over time, this compass becomes damaged and ceases to function properly. That’s one way to think about what sin does to us as it builds up, how we lose the capacity to see ourselves as sinners who have been redeemed by the grace of God alone. Ash Wednesday is the Church’s way of telling the truth that it is the Lord who has made us, and not we ourselves. We are not gods, but mortals; and we accept every day as a gift, until the day we return to the dust. And our Christian hope is that death is not the end, for we believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come.
That’s why we remind one another that we are dust: because it is at the same moment a confession that there is a God who brings dust to life. That each breath we breathe is a gift from the One who first breathed breath into us. Remember it. Remember it.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.