Ashes to Ashes?

Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

Ashes to Ashes?

reflections on Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter

by Troy Cady

Many people observed Ash Wednesday two days ago. In the annual custom, the worshipper is marked with the pattern of the cross by the imposition of ashes on their forehead or hand. The ritual is often accompanied with a saying that briefly reminds the worshipper of its significance: “Remember that you are but dust and to dust you shall return.”

It’s a potent expression because it conveys so much in such a dense form.

Dust and Remembrance

First, “Remember.” The expression begins by grounding us in our beginning. It reminds the worshipper of that great origin story in Scripture that has survived the test of time where it is written that God formed human beings from the dust of the earth. In Hebrew, the word for “earth” or “ground” is adamah, so the first human being is named Adam, which means “from the ground” or “of the earth.”

It is a name of contingency: human life is dependent not only on God, but we depend quite literally on the earth itself. We live off the land. As much as we would like to think we are the lords of creation, the earth laughs at such a notion and just carries on with her work of sustaining us, anyway.

And even this life which has been given to us by the earth is limited, like all natural phenomena. Life renews, but it is not immortal. All life dies, even as we hope that, somehow, the finality of death can be cheated, skirted or extended indefinitely.

The hope of immortality runs across the board in our collective human consciousness. No matter what religious background you have, everyone holds some type of idea about how each life even after death will factor into the ongoing cycle of all life.

Even those with no particular religious affiliation exhibit a measure of hope in immortality. After all, I have never met anyone who did not want to “live on” in the memories of loved ones. And many take comfort in the fact that, when we die, we simply become part of the soil, nourishing the very ground of all being.

In any case, the story of our origin in the Bible runs so deeply in us it even suggests to us the very hopes of our destiny. Thus, the custom of receiving ashes every year is more than a remembrance of our past.

The Dust That is Present

The custom is also an acknowledgement of our present condition:

“Remember that you are but dust…”

Truly, there is no time like the present to remember your frailty, no matter how old you are. Ash Wednesday thus kicks off a season of noticing the tremendous gap that exists between our primordial longing for abundant life and the reality that death is a disease which has penetrated humanity to the very core of our being. So, remembering that we are dust in the present is an act of confession. When we remember that death is a present reality, we admit that our hearts provide harbor for the suicide of self-hatred and the homicide of condemnation towards our own neighbors, our own fellow humans.

It is the astounding depth of this reality that causes the person who observes Lent to spend an entire 40-day period in the practice of lament. It is truly a practice of being present to and honoring the innumerable causes of our deep mourning.

Lament is not a popular practice; we prefer to be happy. In a culture where we are quick to tell others to “get over it already” when they have physically lost a loved one, it feels practically impossible to spend an entire forty days (every year!) lamenting the many ways we are killing ourselves and one another. We feel that, if we are going to lament, let’s not wallow in it; let’s get on with the work of fixing it, already. At least, that’s how most of us feel about it. And I freely admit: I’m in that company.

Lent slows us down to really notice the depth of our need. When we are too quick to move beyond noticing the need, we tend to propose solutions that don’t really meet the need. Haste does not provide adequate conditions for meaningful reflection. We have to go slow.

In a world where trending stories turn on a pinhead, we have been trained that if we do not act quickly and decisively, we will be left in the dust. But the fact is: it is our acts of haste that are leaving us in the dust.

I confess that even as I write this morning, I felt prompted to just share with you what I am lamenting of late—but then I hesitated because I didn’t want to come across as a doom and gloom kind of person.

But there is a gift we can give to ourselves and others when we can just face our own frailty without feeling the need to fix it right away. The first step to all personal and interpersonal recovery is to just admit you need help and to conduct a fearless moral inventory. Putting it right can come later (and should come later) but if we do not rightly understand the problem, any solution we devise will miss the mark—and, perhaps, create even bigger problems.

So, before I move on to writing about “dust and the future”, I want to pause to simply share with you my “laments of the present” that I notice from both within and without.

I lament the polarization that’s tearing us apart.

I lament my own lack of faith.

I lament the many ways we devalue life, any life. I lament my part in this.

I lament the way we’ve wounded and exploited the earth. I lament my part in this.

I lament hurry.

I lament pride and greed.

I lament deception.

I lament our inability to be able to trust what we read in the news.

I lament the confusion that seems to grip us.

I lament that there are so many lonely people in this world.

I lament that many people go hungry more often than they are filled and satisfied.

I lament that there are too many people who do not have a safe place to live.

I lament violence and war.

I lament the manufacture of instruments for the sole purpose of destruction.

I lament how we have laid claim to things that do not belong to us.

I lament that we need locks and keys and codes to protect what is dear to us.

I lament that many women and children have been gravely mistreated.

I lament defensiveness.

I lament insularity.

I lament hypocrisy.

I lament arrogance.

I lament manipulation.

I lament stubbornness and harshness.

I lament envy.

I lament profanity and verbal epithets that corrupt the beauty of language.

I lament delighting in the misfortune of my enemies.

I lament the harboring of stereotypes.

I lament unforgiveness and interpersonal division.

I lament shame.

I lament my own feelings of inadequacy.

I lament that I worry more than I trust and pray.

I lament the anger that too often has its way in me.

I lament my own thoughtlessness and selfishness.

I lament infidelity.

I lament injustice.

I lament the way self-protection keeps us from living in freedom.

I lament that children today are being made to work more and play less.

I lament the helpless feelings that cripple us when contemplating a better world.

God, hear my cry.

Receive this lament as my prayer and

Lord, have mercy.

Amen.

The Future of Dust

Just as the Ash Wednesday ritual reminds us of our past and our present, so it points us to our future:

“…to dust you shall return.”

It doesn’t give us much comfort, does it? Nevertheless, it is a reminder of our destiny. And, as such, the saying conceals a deeper hope, I feel. Here’s a story about why I suggest that.

Last Sunday, I had the privilege of teaching a small group of teenagers and the topic was the notion of “resurrection.” So, I took them to a cemetery. Creepy, right? :-)  (It is ever so fun to mess with young minds, isn’t it?! Just kidding…)

Though it was a little strange for some of them, I took them to the cemetery because I wanted them to be able to put the topic of resurrection in a larger context. Before resurrection comes death. It sounds tautological, but it’s true: only that which dies can come back to life.

It’s an important principle partly because it helps us pay proper respect to the inescapable reality of death. So, as we arrived at the cemetery, I formed the group into two teams and gave them tasks to complete. The hope was that, by going about these tasks, they would reflect on life, death and the after-life without being too weirded out about it all.

One of the tasks involved noting the youngest and oldest people they could find. As we went, the youngest person we found was just one year old and the oldest person was ninety-eight. Of course, along the way, we noticed a large variety of ages.

Some people lost their lives in a tragic accident in 1915 known as the Eastman Disaster, where a large ship capsized at port in Lake Michigan. One gravestone memorialized a mother and her three daughters (who were only teenagers when they died).

Another gravestone indicated someone who had died when they were only twenty-six. Others had various ages such as fifty-six, seventy-one, and forty-two.

It was fascinating talking with the students afterwards about this experience because they started thinking about their own lives. I asked one of the students: “How old are you right now?”

They said, “Seventeen.”

We talked about the people who died in the Eastman Disaster and someone noted that one of the three daughters was only eighteen when she died.

So, I asked the group: “If you knew you only had one year left to live, how would you live it?” We discussed that for a while, and then turned to the topic at-hand: resurrection.

Now, by this point in their lives, all of these students were familiar with the story of Jesus dying and rising from the dead because they have been raised as regular church-goers.

But as we came to the topic at-hand I asked them, “Do you think that really happened? I mean…come on: it seems more likely that it was just a myth, right?”

I asked them, “What would you have done if, while we were looking around the cemetery earlier, one of those mausoleum doors opened up and the dead person walked out of it, alive?”

That question elicited some rather…imaginative responses, ahem.

As we talked about the Bible’s claim that the resurrection really happened, I asked what they thought it was like. I asked, “Do you think that what the disciples saw was a ghost, like a spirit…or did he really have a body?”

And we read parts of the text that indicated Jesus did, indeed, have a body. I asked, “I wonder what kind of body it was? Was it the same body as he had before?”

That was a hard one to answer with any degree of confidence because in one part of the story Jesus showed Thomas his wounds but in another part of the story two disciples walk all the way to another town with Jesus and they don’t recognize him until they are sitting down to have a meal together at the end of their journey. He must have somehow been the same, but different, the students concluded.

So, we looked at a text in I Corinthians where the apostle Paul explains that we will have bodies in the future resurrection. But, he notes, our resurrection bodies will be different than the bodies we have now. In any case, they found it fascinating that, in heaven, we won’t just be bodiless entities floating around like ghosts.

"What sort of world could that be?" we wondered.

The Hope of Ashes: What Sort of World Could This Be?

This is why the cycle of Lent and Easter has endured for centuries now. Ultimately, it is a cycle of hope, for whenever we are reminded that we will return to dust, we are also reminded that God has a way of turning our ashes into something beautiful and enduring. It is a testament solely to the goodness of God, ultimately, for there is nothing we can do to make it happen. It is a surprising gift that comes out of the deepest darkness.

            The ashes of Lent, thus, conceal a secret hope. Even as we confess our frailty, we confess the ultimacy of new life. And we remember this life we live now could end at any moment. We don’t know. All we know is “to dust you shall return.” So, in the spirit of hope, we look to the future and make it present for today. It is this future that gives us hope to carry on.

            Admittedly, hope sometimes feels strange to me. It is awareness of this future hope that makes our lament in the present that much deeper. But it is also this future hope that enables us to bear our present lament. Without this hope, the lament I shared earlier would be downright unbearable to me. Without this hope, it would only be a matter of time when I would just want to die.

            That is why I believe the unbelievable story of Jesus dying and rising again, springing from dust, returning to it…but, ultimately, rising above it. It is the one thing that gives me hope to carry on.

So, my prayer for you this season is that you will know the secret hope that comes with knowing we are imperfect and finite. This is a secret hope because whenever we confess as much, our gracious ever-living God is working to renew us daily for an eternity that is so expansive we can already taste it, see it, hear it and touch it…right here and right now.

            Amen.