Marked

Yesterday, I found myself decidedly NOT at church, imposing ashes. Instead I was at home, trying to rest myself back from the flu I’ve been battling, and being clung-to by my littlest one, who woke up with it yesterday. Though I never left my house, I spent the holy day keeping a different kind of watch…one that every parent knows too well, and one that bears its own kind of liturgy. So I wrote a thing.

      From dust you were born. To dust you will return.

And we, the keepers of this story,

We dip our fingers into the dark earth

We make the sign, those two thin lines,

That mark the space between birth and death;

Between body and spirit, between this world

And all that moves on.

And we, the keepers of this story,

We wonder… who am I to make this promise?

To draw this line in the celestial sand?

Every year, these marks, right here,

Call up everybody’s darkness.

And everybody’s deepest hope that someday

We all move on.

Cause the body is frail. Some years, in fact,

Too frail to bear the mark. Too weak to stand and receive it,

Or to carve it onto the frame of another.

That story we tell… we know it too well,

That our days are marked, and numbered.

So we rest, and breathe, and cling to the life

That is sacred, and ours for awhile yet longer.

A home-shaped liturgy, for a thin and holy day:

You will take this bitter medicine. You will drink this living water.

You will be made well, if I must nail your form to the earth.

(That story we keep…we know it in our sleep.)

Soothe a fevered forehead, draw a thin line of blessing.

From dust you were born, and to dust, you will return

But not today, love. Not for yet awhile.