Please join me for “The Passion: In Arts, Texts, and Music: A Contemplative Retreat for Lent” 9 a.m. –
12 p.m., this Saturday, March 8, 2014 at Columbia Theological Seminary.
“Dust
thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”
Being
Ash Wednesday, today many of us will hear these words while receiving ashes on
our foreheads in the sign of the cross. It reminds us of our mortality, our
finite lives, and thus calls us to appropriate humility in the face of the
infinite.
But
I wonder if there’s another way to observe this day and the season of Lent which
it inaugurates by considering where those ashes come from. I don’t mean their
traditional origin in last year’s Palm Sunday palm fronds that are burned to
ashes and mixed with oil to create an adhesive mix, but a deeper origin.
What
if we think of the ashes as cosmic dust?
We
are made of the stuff of stars generated billions of years ago that evolved
into living things that eventually produced our species, providing a lineage
that goes all the way back to the origins of the universe. And our human
lineage goes back to the first beings that looked and thought and felt like us
as well as future beings we will never know and who will learn and do and think
greater things than we can imagine.
And
within this lineage is our own personal lineage whose flesh we more directly
share, parents and grandparents and ancestors, children and grandchildren and
descendants.
Today’s
ashes, today’s cosmic dust, may remind us not only of being finite creatures,
but of our seemingly infinite relations with the cosmos, with this planet and
our sun and moon, with all of earth’s creatures, with humankind past and
present and future. And so it may remind us of the importance of our lives: to
live them well, to love abundantly, to give extravagantly.
For
those of us who try to follow Jesus, Lent and Holy Week is especially a time to
honor his life well lived, his sacrificial and atoning love, his gracious
generosity. It’s a hard act to follow,
but we are called to do no less.
For
we, too, are cosmic dust.
This
Sunday, catch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.
Each Wednesday of Lent, I will
provide links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a
Lenten resource for reflection.
Thursday:
The Right Word
Friday: Acts of God and Acts of War
Saturday: We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands
Sunday: Shoveling Manure
Monday: Spiritual Freedom
Tuesday: Redeemed from the Pit
Progressive Christian
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Such a wonderful and relevant reflection for this Ash Wednesday. We are dust, and we will return to dust - but as such we are also interwoven into the very fabric of eternal existence. Beautiful. Thank you for this ministry.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Zac! Have a meaningful Ash Wednesday and Lent. Great hearing from you!
ReplyDeleteThis resonates completely with a passage in Sister Miriam Therese Winter's memoir "The Singer and the Song" (Winter is the composer of a whole lot of liturgical music in the folk style that is my favorite - "Joy is Like the Rain", for example). I used that quote when distributing ashes years ago - "Remember, human, that you are stardust, and to stardust you will return!" From my perspective, it completely changes the emphasis!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Trudie!
DeleteThanks so much for these tantalizing thoughts, Chris. Just finished breakfast with Monte Vista Grove friends and am reflecting much on mortality for an upcoming sermon just now. It will be the same week as the anniversary of Mom's death. You have made a helpful contribution to what is already germinating.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Don! Seems like you weren't long ago preparing a homily for a memorial service for a friend. I guess we're at that age!
Deletethanks for reminding me. now. i wonder why it reminded me of this nagging thing that is in my mind all the time---all can have all they want when all have all they need. Or something like that. ??????? don't ask me! It might come from "nothing left to lose"
ReplyDelete