Sacred Dust

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Throughout the world today, Christians will hear these words as ashes are pressed into their foreheads on the first day of the pentitential season of Lent. It has been impossible for me the last few years to hear those words on Ash Wednesday without remembering two events of the recent past that have been clothed in dust and ashes.

The first event is, of course, Sept. 11, 2001. Two images still stand out in my mind from that day. The first is of terrified people running down the street, followed by a huge cloud of dust, the remains of the crumpled World Trade Center towers.

The second is of the old cemetery at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, just blocks away from the explosion. The graves, the grass, the trees are all covered in dust and ashes inches thick — the remains of life finding a final resting place in the old graveyard.

A man I know, Bill Hawfield, was in New York shortly after that fateful day. “I will never forget the dust,” he wrote after his trip.

“The dust was neutral gray. It accepted all contributions to the imploding urn: trucks and planes, fire helmets and boots, robust men and vital women, family photos and telephones, windows and concrete, computers and money, young and old.

“Christians and Muslims and Jews, blacks and whites, browns and yellows. Thousands of people and 200,000 tons of concrete, and all the final prayers caught in the tectonic compression. This gargantuan urn broke as it filled and exploded its contents over New York City and the world.

 “Now sacred dust shifts and piles. It clings to my shoes and stings my eyes and lodges in my lungs. It becomes a part of me even when I want to shrink from it. It sifts into my soul and dusts my heart with mourning.”

The second event in which dust and ashes played a prominent role not too far from here, at a crematory in Noble, Ga., a crossroads near the Tennessee-Georgia state line. The whole world recoiled in horror at the grisly discovery of more than 300 bodies there that had not been cremated, but instead desecrated and left to decompose.

Four of those bodies were of people I had known and cared for, bodies that I had anointed in sickness and at death, bodies which I had trusted had become ashes that I had reverently and respectfully and prayerfully poured into the earth.

The raw pain and grief of those families whose loved ones were found at Noble is something I will always remember. It made me realize in a new and intense way the sacredness of ashes, that even the remains of life are holy.

Today we celebrate Ash Wednesday, the first day of the penitential season of Lent. And we mark this day by tracing a cross of ashes on our foreheads to the sobering words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

This day is a somber reminder of our mortality. The ashes summon us to what the Episcopal prayer book calls “a holy Lent,” — to a time of self-examination and repentance; of prayer, fasting and self-denial; and of reading and meditating on God’s holy word.

But as the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton reminds us, “even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, as the beginning of the Lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.

 “It cannot be otherwise, because it forms part of the great Easter cycle.”

 The cross of ashes on our foreheads is not only a reminder of death, but is also a promise of life, a pledge of resurrection. They remind us that on the other side of repentance is forgiveness, on the other side of grief is joy, on the other side of death is life.

The ashes on our forehead sign our whole being with the merciful blessing of God. The ashes are sacred dust.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes of ashes, “It was God who decided to breathe on them after all, God who chose to bring them to life.

“We are certainly dust and to dust we shall return, but in the meantime our bodies are sources of deep revelation for us. They are how we come to know both great pain and great pleasure. They are how God gets to us, at the most intimate and universal level.

“These ashes pressed into our foreheads are not curses. They are blessings instead, announcing God’s undying love of dust, no matter what kind of shape it is in.”