Remembering that we are dust: An Ash Wednesday Reflection

By The Rev. Chris Wendell, Rector
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Bedford MA

On Wednesday evening of this week, Christians in many parts of the world will mark the beginning of the liturgical season of Lent with the observance of Ash Wednesday.   But it occurred to me this week that for many people of other faiths, those with no spiritual practices, or even, frankly, many Christians, Ash Wednesday might be little more than that day when a few of your friends walk around with a dark smudge on their foreheads.  So I thought I would take a moment to share a bit about my take on Ash Wednesday with the wider community.

Ash Wednesday is one of two “fasting days” in the Episcopal Church calendar (Good Friday is other one).  These two fasts frame the season of Lent, and both of them invite those who observe them to reflect on the nature of mortality.  While Good Friday is our annual remembrance of Jesus’ death, Ash Wednesday is a day to give our attention to our own mortality, our own fragility, and the fragility of all human life.  We live in a culture that so often denies human frailty and shies away from the finite nature of creation.  From our Facebook pages, to the clothes we wear, to how we answer when people ask “How’s it going?” – so often we feel the need to prove that we are thriving, excelling, succeeding.  Ash Wednesday is the church’s invitation to not have to do that; it is our invitation to accept fully what it means to live a human life, in all its goodness, all its ugliness, and all its shortness.  It’s a day to be strikingly real about who we are, and then just sit with that reality for awhile.

As a reminder and an acceptance of the fact that we only live one time, at the Ash Wednesday service we mark our foreheads with ashes in the sign of a cross as we hear the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  The image of dust is not meant to be degrading.  Rather, it is meant to be liberating: reminding us that our time is short, and we need not be pre-occupied with those things which, in the end, don’t much matter.  We are freed to focus on the things that matter most: compassion, generosity, mercy, forgiveness, and hope.  Everyone who attends our service at St. Paul’s tonight at 7:30 p.m. will be invited to receive ashes, though no one must.  And then, as a reminder that death is not the end of life, but rather the transition to eternal life, we will celebrate the Holy Communion together – an act of comfort and an affirmation of our hope in God’s abiding love for all people.

I particularly like it when Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day are close together – because it gets Lent started off with the focus it should always have: Love.   Today we gather together to accept, spend time with, and love our own mortal, fragile, human selves, with all our warts and flaws and growing edges.  And together, we acknowledge God’s abiding love for us in the midst of all that.  We affirm together our sense that God is guiding us always deeper and deeper towards our own redemption.

This is what the whole season of Lent is about, stumbling towards greater intimacy and closeness with God.  It’s a clumsy journey because we are clumsy.  And that’s hardly something to feel embarrassed or ashamed about, no matter how spectacular our stumbles are.  Rather, it is something to embrace, because our humanness is what God embraces most about us.  Deepening that embrace is the best way I can think of to prepare ourselves for Easter, which is the whole purpose of the season of Lent to begin with.

Whether you will attend an Ash Wednesday service today or not, I invite all of us to take a moment some time to day and remember that our lives are short, and what matters most is whether we can use that time to love ourselves and love each other, even amidst all our rough edges.

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (100 Pine Hill Road, Bedford) will observe Ash Wednesday with an evening service tonight at 7:30 p.m. with choir, homily, ashes and Holy Communion.  All are welcome, the service will last about an hour.