“This is the time of tension between dying and birth,”
writes T.S. Eliot in his poem Ash
Wednesday, and indeed, this is a time of tension for many Christians—a time
of facing the realities of one’s own mortality even as the world around us slowly,
painfully enters the cycle of spring’s resurrection.
I love this quiet, sacred day—not for the burden of
repentance and sinfulness but for the way it encourages us to face our
createdness—the dust of our substance—with grace. I am grateful for the
opportunity to spend the day walking around with a cross of ash on my forehead,
looking at the world through the lens of someone who wears her death as
naturally and as visibly as her own living skin. It reminds me of a section of
Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark
Materials in which the characters Lyra and Will must enter the world of the
dead. There, the people are as alive as they are in any other world, but they
spend every day of their lives with their “deaths,” shadowy people who are
their humans’ best friends, who accompany them with faithfulness through every
single day, and who, at the right moment, will tap their humans on the shoulder,
gently take their hands, and say, It’s
time. In a death-defying culture, Ash Wednesday is an opportunity to face
the mortal reality of our created selves and to accept it as a gift that will
one day become part of a larger whole again. This is death-as-companion, not
death-as-adversary.
On this holy day, the tiny rough texture of ash on my
forehead instead of the slick slide of baptismal water reminds me that I am
wondrously made. The atoms that form the molecules of my body were forged in
the hearts of long-dead stars. One day, they will return to this bright and
terrible universe, full of the breath of God, where they will swirl like dust
motes in sunlight long after the sun has burnt itself out. My life is not my
own: living or dying, I am held in a divine Love greater than I can ever
understand, and I am linked intimately to all of creation.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,”
Christians in my tradition say to one another as they mark each other’s
foreheads with ashes. To some, they are a warning; to others, they are a call
to repentance; to me, they are a comfort that death is not the end of the
journey.
My advisor, the homiletician and hymnologist Thomas Troeger,
wrote this hymn text, which we used in community worship at Yale Divinity
School today. I leave you with it today.
All things of dust to
dust return on earth and in the sky.
The hottest, brightest
suns that burn in time grow dim and die.
The fish that leap,
the birds that soar, the newborn young that play,
the leaves that fill
the forest floor revert to dust and clay.
Lord, mark with dust
and ash my brow so I may comprehend
that every moment here
and now links me to that same end
I share with all that
breathe and burn, that flare and fade and tire
yet by their waning
light discern your own undying fire.
Lord, mark upon my
brow this sign: a stark and barren cross
reminding me that
though divine you know my pain and loss,
and at the touch of
dust and ash awake my heart to view
how death itself is
but a flash that dies away in you.
