I repented in actual dust and ashes this year. All that was missing was the sackcloth.
“Remember that dust you are, and to dust you shall return,” I thought to myself, gazing out my windows. The message seemed viscerally engrained in the saltating specks swirling helplessly in the grip of every vacillating gust howling past. I was not about to bike through that.
I checked the weather compulsively as the hours ticked by, finally reaching out to friends as 5:00 approached with the wind unabated. “Are you going to the Ash Wednesday service?” I texted. Glancing up and out the window, I confirmed the capacious clouds of dust encasing Lubbock in an apocalyptic haze hadn’t cleared in the slightest. “Yes,” came the immediate reply, “would you like a ride?”
So it was by the charity of friends that I walked into church rather less disheveled than I anticipated, still smelling dust, but not quite caked in it. I felt the grit on my teeth and imagined it in my lungs. The lighting was appropriately dimmed for the occasion, but I think the all-pervasive dust had played its part in cutting down visibility as well.
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” the elder whispered solemnly, smudging ash across my forehead in the shape of that ancient execution device. I felt an immediate urge to itch the spot. I considered mortality and morality, and how inextricably linked they are. Already, scarcely five minutes into this service dedicated to repentance, I’d demonstrated to myself my need of it, having senselessly judged the unknown bulletin-writer for omitting an “n” in “Come Ye Siners.”
When the skies are clear and the sun is shining and the roads are blessedly (if temporarily) unoccupied, it can be frightfully easy to forget (until a monstrous city bus comes screaming up from behind); but when scraggly cotton-stalk field dust coats your lungs with every breath and the sky is a uniform beige with no sun in sight, mortality seems much more tangible and believable, much less forgettable.
“It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.” (Bryson, 2003, pp. 1-2)
Dust we are, indeed.
A dustier Ash Wednesday I’ve never seen. Yet this superficial sprinkling of cotton-field atoms is tinier than trifling—a speck of sawdust—to the horrible choking miasma I can’t imagine blanketing Turkey and Syria this month. Our fragility and accompanying mortality are rarely so starkly highlighted as when nature or war is sounding the reminder. Dust we are; to dust we will assuredly return.
“We think of the streets of Warsaw and contrast the deaths there suffered with an abstraction called Life. But there is no question of death or life for any of us, only a question of this death or of that—of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent: 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased…. Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it…. War makes death real to us, and this would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that are centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration.” (Lewis, 1949, p. 61-62)
It is healthy, Lewis suggests, to consider and carry our mortality with us. It is right and good to bring clear-eyed recognition to our plight—and purpose, rising from those ashes. The greater the chasm between God’s eternal life and our fleeting, stumbling, sin-marred life, the more remarkable God’s stooping, the more precious the grace, the more unfathomable the sacrifice. While we were yet sinners,1 he regarded us in our low estate2 and gave his earthly life in an unimaginably brutal fashion to make perfect forever3 we who were, in and of ourselves, nothing of the sort.
Ash Wednesday is not the end of the story. “Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive” (Lewis, 1949, p. 44).
Bryson, B. (2003). A Short History of Nearly Everything. Anchor Canada.
Lewis, C. S. (1949). The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. New York. HarperCollins.
1 Romans 5:8
2 Psalm 136:23
3 Hebrews 10:14
Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.
