Faith Matters 31: For The Gardner News, Saturday February 24
Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust
“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust” No matter how many times I say or hear this ancient formula, spoken while standing at an open grave on the threshold of life and death, the power of the words is never lost on me. They might mark the passing of a parishioner, a family member, a friend or a total stranger. But it doesn’t matter. These moments are always sacred. Our lives come from God and ultimately we all return to God. And the frail bodies we inhabit during our short lives, earthen vessels as they have been called, all return to the earth from which we were made, “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
I can still remember the first time I saw the “ashes” of a loved one. They were not the feathery soft material I had imagined could be gently carried away by the breeze. They were coarse and gritty, mixed with chunks of crushed bone. I was amazed at being able to hold in the crook of my arm all that remained of another’s earthly body. As I sprinkled the ashes into the earth of the churchyard garden, the priest spoke those words: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, and their reality registered in a way they never had before.
Ashes are used to mark the beginning of Lent in a ceremony that traces its Christian origins to the early church, when ashes on the forehead were used to designate a penitent, a person seeking forgiveness for their sins. By the tenth century the imposition of ashes had become a rite of the community expressing its collective penitence as it prepared for Easter. Traditionally the ashes are the remains of the Palms used to celebrate Palm Sunday. Sometimes the imposition of ashes is accompanied by the call to “turn away from sin”. In other traditions the powerful words from Genesis are spoken, “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” And so each Lent, as well as at each funeral or interment, we are reminded that we are fragile creatures with a finite lifespan, whose bodies will all end in the earth as ashes and dust.
But we are also more than that. The late astronomer Carl Sagan reminds us that the very dust of the earth from which we are formed originated in stars spawned in distant galaxies in times barely imaginable. We are, in his words, “star stuff”. The dust and ash from which we come and to which we all return is sacred. And our humble, transient lives exist within the awesome universe of our Creator, under the sheltering umbrella of stars and galaxies and nebulae we see strewn across the night sky.
We are incarnational beings, formed out of the dust of the earth, the very the “stuff” of stars. And into that starry mix of dust and ashes, our Creator has breathed into us the Spirit of life, the same Spirit that moved over the great Void at the creation of the world, bringing light and life and all that is good. Our earthly bodies are merely the containers of that which is eternal. We are dust and ashes, and yet, we are the very stuff of God’s good creation.
Lent is a time of reflection, penitence and prayer. And for me, the place to begin the Lenten journey is with the ashes that mark both the transience of our earthly lives and their transformation into the eternal and timeless. Perhaps there is no more appropriate response than humility and awe and gratitude as we remember who and what we are, and more importantly, whose we are!