Thresholds: Ash Wednesday
"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return'.
Ash Wednesday, one of the major holy days in the Church’s calendar, was held last week on February 18th.
There are holy days which blaze with light. Ash Wednesday is not such a day.
This holy day neither dazzles nor consoles. It offers little comfort. Doesn’t gather us into warmth. It arrives like a northern wind, stripping, bracing, unadorned.
Ash on the forehead.
Dust in the air.
The quiet sentence none of us can escape:
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
As a Priest I’ve spoken those words many times at the Ash Wednesday Liturgy.
For years I prepared the ash myself: burning the Palm Sunday crosses from the previous year, pounding them into the ash with a pestle and mortar: these too shaped from the earth. The palm crosses, once signs of triumph, reduced to fine powder. What had once been waved in celebration becoming a marker both of mortality and of invitation.
There’s something profoundly uncompromising in this act. Triumph is reduced to ash while acclaim becomes dust.
And then I’d stand before each person, marking each one with a smudgy Cross.
Elder. Devout. Doubter. The latecomer. The uncomfortable.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.
If ever we doubted our mortality this sentence provides us with a stark reminder.
The world is burning
It’s impossible to stand in our present time and pretend that the world isn’t on fire.
Imbalance shows itself at every level: ecological, political, relational, spiritual. Systems falter. Trust erodes. The language of and behaviour in public life coarsens. Communities fracture. The earth itself strains.
There’s a kind of collective bomb-blast unfolding.
And when something explodes, it’s not subtle. The edifice falls. What once looked stable lies in rubble. We find ourselves standing at the roadside in rags and tatters, dust rising around us, stunned by the scale of collapse.
Sometimes I use this image with those who are grieving. For grief can feel just like a bomb-blast.
The structure which held life together: relationship, belonging, bonding, marriage, health, certainty, identity, the presence of the beloved. All of this falls inward. The familiar architecture is gone and we’re left exposed.
Ash Wednesday knows this terrain. For Ash relates to the aftermath. It’s what settles when the fire has passed and we begin to see what has been burned and if anything has escaped the burning, the destruction.
The Northern Stripping
Under a Northern sky, nothing ornamental survives for long.
Winter strips trees to their structure. Wind bends what cannot bend. Sea erodes rock without apology. The land teaches humility. The far North is the land of ice, not fire. Snow and ice curtail, contain and shape the life of all creatures for dark months at a time.
Ash Wednesday feels like that landscape.
It’s not sentimental. It’s completely unable to flatter the ego. It identifies, names and brings our limits into stark relief without cushioning them.
To remember that we are dust is not morbidity. It’s clarity.
To remember that we are dust is to remember that we’re not self-made.
To remember that we are dust is to relinquish the illusion of possession: of our bodies, our accomplishments, our security, even of those we love.
To remember that we are dust is to be brought back into creaturely truth.
And from that place of truth, we reorientate not towards annihilation, or despair but towards alignment with ourselves, our loved ones, with our wider communities near and far, and with the natural world.
T S Eliot and the refusal of illusion
My love for the poetry of T. S. Eliot has deepened over the years.
When he wrote his weighty poem “Ash Wednesday”, in 1930, he was writing after personal, marital, and spiritual breakdown. He had already given the world the fractured brilliance of The Waste Land and the hollow desolation of The Hollow Men.
But “Ash Wednesday” is different. It kneels; it doesn’t sparkle. It opens with “Because I do not hope to turn again…”
At first hearing, these words may sound like resignation arising from total spent-ness. Listen again and we may hear something sterner: renunciation.
We may hear the relinquishing of the desire to return to what has already fallen. The acceptance that certain seasons are over. That some structures will not be rebuilt as they were.
Later he prays:
“Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.”
In a world addicted to reaction, this prayer is radical.
“Teach us to sit still”.
Teach us not to clutch at what is burning. Teach us to live with open hands, aware of our creatureliness, and of our connection - our relatedness - with all of creation. Teach us to watch, to observe, rather than rush. In the sitting, let us learn the wisdom which will enable us to live rooted in an upturned world.
Eliot’s poem avoids the ‘cheap grace’ of speedy resurrection. No, it remains solidly in the ash, in the desolation. He tells of the in-between space where the old has fallen and the new is not yet.
Brought to our knees
Grief brings us to our knees. This experience isn’t about punishment, although many ask what they’ve done to deserve this. It’s about emptying, as the life we’ve known spills out, disappears and we’re left scrabbling to rescue oddments and fragments to remind ourselves of it all, perhaps to preserve as artefacts of our personal archaeology.
When the edifice falls, we discover how much of our identity rested upon what could never hold us secure. Titles, roles, control, certainty. Well! They can (and do) vanish overnight.
We stand in dust.
Ash Wednesday makes no attempt to rebuild the façade. It’s devoid of quick reassurance. It marks the forehead with ash. You are not sovereign, it says. You’re not self-sustaining. You are finite. And then comes the turning:
Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.
If the word sin jars, we might hear it instead as misalignment: the ways in and through which we drift from what is life-giving, and from what is true, honourable, and good for all, and not just for ourselves.
The Christ — however one names that presence — may be understood as the pattern of self-giving love, the embodied reminder that life is not possession but gift. Some will say God, some Great Spirit, some Source, some will not dare to utter a name...
Ash Wednesday reminds us of humility, of humus, of earth, of ground, inviting our re-orientation towards loving values and ways of being which endure when edifices collapse and the life we’ve known is no more.
