Water and Ash

From dust you were born. And to dust, you will return.

Is that a threat, or a promise? On the darkest days, we sense death hovering in our vicinity, like a grey cloud. It feels chilly. It sounds like slow, dirge-y organ music in a minor key. It smells like ash and feels abrasive against our skin—like burlap.

Sack cloth and ashes… That’s what we could be about today.

Or.

We can choose to hear those words as blessing and benediction. From dust you were born. To dust, you will return.

“What happens when people die?” my kids ask. “They go to be with God,” I’ve told them often.

“Where was I before I was born?” they want to know, all the time. “You were with God,” I tell them.

Then the other day, I heard it repeated back to me. I was talking about somewhere I went, a long time ago. “Where was I?” the boy wanted to know. “You weren’t born yet.” I saw little wheels turning. “So, I was still with God,” he said. Like it was the most obvious truth in the world. Like a thing he remembers, a story he tells often.

It wasn’t intentional… But I think I’ve taught my kids is that death and “not born yet” are the same thing.  Like these states of non-being take up the same kind of time and space. And the more they believe that… the more I think it’s probably true.

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

Writer and theologian Marcus Borg passed away recently. Patheos ran a series of reflections from writers who were remembering him and honoring his work. One of the featured pieces was written by Borg himself—just a few months before he died. In it, he talks about the recent and dramatic cultural changes in how developed countries deal with death. As modern medicine has evolved and increased life expectancy, death has quickly moved from the realm of home and church to the domain of the hospital, the funeral home… and other institutions that we assume are more equipped to “Deal with” the end of life; and the physical remains thereafter. We no longer hope for the Victorian ideal of a “good death,” surrounded by family and friends, with spoken liturgy, confession and song. In many ways, we’ve come to view death instead as the ultimate failure, the final punishment. It is to be avoided as long as possible, and grieved for as little time as our loved ones can manage…

In some of the last words he wrote, in an extraordinary life of scholarship—Borg alluded to the spiritual practice of “remembering our death.” He says that our faith calls us to remember our death, often… And that failing to do so keeps us from living as fully and vitally as we might.

Remember your death… He says it just like we might say, ‘remember your baptism,’ or ‘remember what your mother told you.’ Remember your death… In a narrative sense, doesn’t that sound backwards? Like there’s a verb tense out of whack somewhere? How can we possibly remember something that hasn’t happened yet?

But maybe… maybe we think about time all wrong. Maybe our birth and death are not two fixed points on a straight line—with a clear beginning and end point—but parts of our whole being that just ‘are.’ We assume that we have not yet died; and yet, our death is an inevitable truth, as certain in eventuality as our birthday is, in actuality. Death is as much a part of our story as the present moment. And while we assume that we have already been born; doesn’t our faith assure us that new life awaits us when we leave our physical frame?

From dust you arose—and you will become dust again.

During Lent, we journey with Jesus… From the wilderness to Nazareth to Jerusalem. From ministry and miracle to betrayal and suffering death. We will move through that same story this year; but instead of the traditional gospel texts, we’re going to sit with some scriptures that challenge how we think about time. From our daily hurried and worried anxiousness, to our fears about death, to the vast expanse of God’s creative universe—how we think of time affects how we think about life itself.  Shifting our relationship with time will change how we move through the season, and ultimately, how we approach Jesus’ last days.

With the prayers and practices of this season, we echo the Psalmist’s desire for a clean heart. We confess that we do not always live as people who have been called and claimed by a holy God. We look at the expanse of our days, and see that some of them are sorely misspent—in worry; in anger and resentment; in self-absorbtion, short-sightedness, and the fearful myth of scarcity.

In broken bread, and the imposition of ashes, we are invited to tell a different story. We ask God that this wilderness season might bring a new rhythm to our days, and a deeper understanding of how we are called to fill them.  We began tonight with a water blessing, and a remembrance of the Spirit with us at our baptism. We’ll leave with the mark of ashes on our skin—a physical reminder that everything we can taste, touch, see, smell or hear, will pass away. For 40 days, we will try to remember.

Every time we turn the page, it is there. It is all right there. No mistake of syntax, no grammatical oversight: just the good and simple truth of our birth, our death, and the holy time between.  We remember that death is already part of our story, already carved into who we are. But it may not be the end that we think it is.

We make choices every day, to turn toward or turn away from the God of our being. Those choices affect the world around us; to transform or destroy. How we spend our precious time here matters… But what we have been, and what we will be, is the same for all eternity. Before we were born, we were with God; known by God, called and named, shaped and molded for a life journey of joy and heartbreak and service.

And when we die, we will return to the dust.

That is not a threat. After all, every good thing was dust once. Swirling chaos, shapeless void.

But then came light. And water. And us.

From dust you were born. You will be dust again, some day.

It’s a promise. It is breath itself. The highest benediction.

“Ashes to ashes, water and rust,

we are but dust on the sunbeam You hold in Your hand.” ~Andra Moran