Dry Cleaning

I’ve been dragging my feet on taking my black suit to the cleaners. It’s been two months since I got mud all over it at my grandpa’s burial service. It had been a rainy December and we all (especially us pall bearers) had shoes that were caked in mud after carrying the casket to it’s final resting place. I thought about taking the suit to the cleaners today, but I decided an afternoon nap might be better since my alarm went off at 4:45 A.M. this morning. It would have made for a nice symbolic Ash Wednesday activity.

From dust we come, and to dust we shall return.

The imposition of ashes on this day is a liturgical slap in the face. As I looked around the church tonight and saw people with crosses on their foreheads, I thought about how we looked like a forest of trees with spray painted X’s on them. In a way we were. We are all scheduled to be cut down. Despite what we like to think, and what our culture constantly tells us, our earthly selves will pass away. No amount of anti-aging cream can change that. As the hymn “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past” puts it so bluntly, “time, like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears us all away. We fly forgotten as a dream dies at the opening day.”

Ash Wednesday puts us in our place and helps us begin that necessary journey through Lent and Holy Week. We beg forgiveness for the wrongs that we do and remember our own mortality. It is only after we have attempted to come to grips with that reality that we can celebrate with reality of ashes and celebrate the filling of the font with the water of salvation.

One thing we all share is that we, along with my grandpa and others who have gone before us, will return to the ground from which we’ve come. Like ashes, though, we will be made pure in death. We live in hope that our earthly selves will pass away, while the divine within each of us will live forever.

This is the hard reality and the great hope of Ash Wednesday: From dust we come, and to dust we shall return.