When You Remember That You're Dust

Thoughts on ash, dust and hope.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.
 
I didn’t grow up in a church that followed the liturgical calendar, but as I get older I find myself more and more drawn to observing specific times in the year, in particular, Advent and Lent. Both seasons feel like an opportunity to reorient myself towards God, and immerse myself in the bigger story of life, death and resurrection we find in Jesus. I find these church seasons to be like the hand of God underneath my chin, gently tilting my face upward, toward the good, the beautiful and the true again.
 
I also find the cyclical nature of the church year helpful, much like the physical seasons we experience. They provide an anchor point, some certainty and regularity in a world where so much is precarious and liable to change without warning. Of course, as many people have observed, last year’s Lent never seemed to end. This whole year has been a remembering that we are dust and ashes. Death by a deadly, global virus, death by fire or storm, death by the gradual, grinding toll of a life lived in poverty and despair, death by the heavy weight of injustice. We don’t have to look very far to remember our own mortality. We don’t need the physical reminder of an ashen cross on our foreheads this year. We’ve been marked by dust and ash for a long time now.
 
***
 
You always know when spring is returning in England because bunches of daffodils start appearing in the shops. For as little as a pound, you can buy bunch of bright yellow happiness, ‘portable sunshine’ as I’ve heard them called. Cut daffodils don’t last very long. They wither and fade quickly, but they’re an important marker for me – a sign that winter is drawing to a close.
 
It’s interesting that Lent happens in the spring. Just as the church is asking us to lean into the truth of our weakness and vulnerability, the earth begins show signs of life after the dormancy of winter. It’s subversive and freeing to own up to your own mortality in a culture that is obsessed with anti-aging and that does all it can to numb and avoid the inevitable suffering and pain that comes with being a human person in a broken world. The truth is that we will all die, but as spring shows us, death is not the end of the story. This is the great Christian hope.
 
The bible is full of examples of God bringing dust and ashes to life. Right at the very beginning, God breathes life into the ashes and chaos of the cosmos and creates humankind from the dust. The Creator causes deserts to bloom and calls new life out of ashes, over and over again. The great promise and hope of Isaiah 61 is that God will bestow on us a crown of beauty, instead of ashes and the oil of gladness instead of mourning.
 
But what do we do in the meantime? How do we lean into this ashy, dusty, death-riddled season, while keeping our hope intact and our hearts tender? I think the words of  Psalm 103 can show us the way.
 
The same way a loving father feels toward his children—
that’s but a sample of your tender feelings toward us,
your beloved children, who live in awe of you.
You know all about us, inside and out.
You are mindful that we’re made from dust.
Our days are so few, and our momentary beauty
so swiftly fades away!
Then all of a sudden we’re gone,
like grass clippings blown away in a gust of wind,
taken away to our appointment with death,
leaving nothing to show that we were here.
But Lord, your endless love stretches
from one eternity to the other,
unbroken and unrelenting toward those who fear you
and those who bow facedown in awe before you.
Psalm 103:13 -17, The Passion Translation
 
We can be reassured that we’re not the only ones who remember that we are dust: God remembers, too.

He knows our frailty, our weakness and our vulnerability. He doesn’t just understand in theory, but knows it from experience. In Jesus, God became finite, subject to our embodied needs, for food, water, sleep, companionship. He embraced our fragility so fully that he experienced death, as we all will. But the story of Jesus doesn’t end there. It continues in resurrection and the redemption of the whole earth. It continues the everlasting love of God ‘unbroken and unrelenting’ toward us.
 
We are fragile creatures who bloom bright and fade quickly, returning to the dust from which we came. But that dust is the very stuff of life, clay in the hands of the Potter, good soil tended mindfully by the Master Gardener. So it's okay to remember that we're dust. God remembers, too, and promises to make all things new. 
 

Reading Recommendations

Reader, I finished it! The Diary of Isabella M. Sugge, written by my friend, Ruth Leigh, is witty, warm and wise. If you want a light, engaging, yet thoughtful read, this one is for you.

If you loved Tish Harrison Warren's last book, Liturgy of the Ordinary, you'll love her latest book too. Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, is structured around one of the night time prayer of compline. It's a wise, comforting companion that explores the themes of vulnerability, grief and suffering. I really enjoyed it and found solace and hope in these words.

Finally, I've just received a copy A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal, edited by Sarah Bessey. I'm already enjoying exploring the prayers and meditations offered here by some of my favourite spiritual writers, including Barbara Brown Taylor, Lisa Sharon Harper and Nadia Bolz-Weber, among many others. 


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Yours in the dust and the ashes,
Abby