And To Dust You Shall Return

Thoughts on the strange beauty of Ash Wednesday.

Photo by Amritanshu Sikdar on Unsplash

While at work today, I was reminded someone was available to administer ashes for Ash Wednesday to anyone who wanted to receive them. I’m not Catholic, but I went anyway. I think most people just assume that ashes are a Catholic thing, but it turns out there’s actually a long history of Protestants celebrating Ash Wednesday and receiving the ashes too. Plus, the older I get, the more I find myself eager to scratch whatever liturgical-confessional itch apparently exists deep in my soul.

As I entered the mostly empty conference room, a priest greeted me and delivered the line so many will hear today: “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return.”

These words have resounded in my head all day, like an ear-worm of a song I can’t get rid of. They feel like words from a world lone gone, a time our present wishes it could banish from reality. They are heavy words, final words, iron words. I cannot outrun their truth any more than I can outrun my own name. One day, their truth will overcome me, and I will be laid to rest, another name etched into the annals of history. My children will be forced to navigate a world without their father, as I will someday have to endure a world without mine. Yet they are strangely beautiful, even if they represent the bleak inevitability of the boundaries of being.

But that is not all they represent.

“By the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread,

till you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

for you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.”

Genesis 3:19, ESV

Today, I am reminded that the ashes point me in three directions. First, they point me backwards, for I came from nothing. “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away" (James 4:14). The ashes also point me forward, for one day I will be no longer; just as I did not make myself, I cannot sustain myself. But the ashes are presented in the shape of a cross for a reason. For though I am dust, I am also His. My life is fleeting, but it has also been redeemed. The ashes may point me both backwards and forwards, but they also point me to the grace of my present. I am no longer my own, and my life henceforth bears the shape of a cross, just like the ashes that adorn my brow.

In this way, Lent serves as a reminder of the surprising inversions of the kingdom of God. Lent is a time where I will relinquish things in order to gain more. I will slow down in order to catch up. I will let go in order to be filled anew. The only way to save my life is to give my life away. The thing I dread most is somehow my only way to freedom: “repent and believe.”

I am reminded of the words of the old Puritan prayer:

Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision.

-“The Valley of Vision,” by Arthur Bennett

Today, I take comfort in the ashes. For even if they interrupt my day with the harsh reality of death, they also bear the mark of my redemption. And in that, I will forever have a reason to rejoice.

Happy Lent, everybody.