You are Dust

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I don’t really need to hear that reminder. And I sure don’t want to hear it.

I know it’s Ash Wednesday, the day on which many Christians impose a cruciform smudge of incinerated palm leaf on each other’s brow and proclaim, “This is you, buddy!” Truthfully, I am already quite aware of my own mortality, thank you. Every single day imposes its own reminders aplenty.

Within any given 24-hour span I am haunted by my shortcomings and confronted by my failures. I am frustrated by my inability to keep promises or establish commitments or keep up at work or be the sort of husband, dad, or friend that I really want to be. These and their siblings smudge me and mark me as mortal. Every gray hair, lost opportunity, impulsive bad decision, each aching knee, sniffle and cough and broken relationship cry out my dusty origins and dustier destiny in nagging, niggling, sing-songy unison.

No, I really don’t think I need the smudge and the words imposed, as if to hammer home something that I have somehow forgotten or to etch it indelibly like some permanent thumb and finger angled to an “L” on my forehead to proclaim: “LOSER!” I don’t need an unwelcome outward sign of the inward reality that confronts me – and with which I struggle – every single day.

Here’s what I do need, though, what I crave in the dusty depths of my soul, what I’d welcome as I try to lean into Lent and spring and lengthening days: the mark of someone who will embrace my stumbling humanity, won’t hold my mortality against me, will receive it as gift and help me welcome it and steward it better than I do.

Of course, I’m not looking for some sort of “I’m okay, you’re okay” overlook of what I am and do that is destructive or unhealthy or irresponsible or hurtful.

I am looking for some sign of forgiveness, a reminder that it’s okay not to be God, a marked assurance that, as for Adam and Eve before me, divine breath brings dirt to life. I guess, as it turns out, I really yearn to have Jesus etched on my furrowed brow – dead, entombed in dust, standing again in that earth-scented garden. I need, desperately, that cruciform smudge of ash, promise of life from death, hope enveloping despair, new beginnings following mortal mistakes. And I need to hear in the “remember…” the promise, the hope, the new beginning that draw me toward Easter.

Even as we live each day, death our life embraces.
Who is there to bring us help, rich, forgiving graces?
You only, Lord, you only!
Baptized in Christ’s life-giving flood;
Water and his precious blood.
Holy and righteous God, Holy and mighty God,
Holy and all-merciful Savior, Everlasting God,
By grace bring us safely through the flood of bitter death.
Lord, have mercy.

(hymn text: Martin Luther, as found in Lutheran Book of Worship © 1978)