Ash Wednesday hits different in a hospital. “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return” seems painfully obvious in a place where so many people die. I half imagined a doctor or a nurse responding, “Yeah, I’m well aware.” This is a place where it would be hard to forget that we are dust.
I found myself wondering how different this remembrance would be in a church if the imposition of ashes was done not by pastors in robes and suits, but nurses in scrubs, doctors in lab coats, or children in hospital gowns. Would that be too over the top? At the very least it would be more difficult to shake the reality of our finitude and fragility.
For some of us, the fragility of life is not that far from our minds. Every news cycle can seem like another chaos monster careening out of control. And I realize not everyone feels that way. It’s getting a bit harder for me to understand why, but it is the reality whether I know why or not. Yet in the midst of this chaos, I take some solace in the fact that we are all dust.
Because there are no exceptions to our dustiness. All of us will return to the earth from whence we came. It does not matter if you are chainsaw-wielding billionaire or the President of the United States. When all is said and done the wealth, power, and prestige will blow away and we will simply be one with the dirt again. We can strip the earth bare and try to take as much as we want, but the earth always reclaims us in the end.
Ah, but I am getting distracted. Because Ash Wednesday is not about how they are dust. It is to remember that I am dust. I am finite and frail. I have not loved God with my whole heart nor have I loved my neighbor as myself. Yes, it does not make the petulant dust storms of the powerful any less infuriating. Yet I am small and flawed and I need the grace of God to put one step in front of the other and, yes, to try to wring some goodness and justice out of this moment in time.
It is the grace of God that keeps this from being a season of self-flagellation. Believe me, I can do that well. We are preparing our hearts to remember that there is death and there is resurrection. That God loves the dust of the earth so much that the Divine came and lived among us. God loved us. God breathed life into that dirt. We are dust but can also be animated by holy wind.
Remember you are dust and remember you are loved. Take this season to turn in a new direction and believe the good news.