For those who follow the Christian liturgical calendar, Ash Wednesday comes 40 days before Easter and commemorates the beginning of the Lenten season. It’s a time to honor the reality that we are mortal. We say things like “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” While this may seem morbid and even gross as we literally put ashes on our faces, as a Palliative Care chaplain in the middle of a divorce after a 17 year marriage, it could not be more fitting. I am not living a life right now that can ignore loss and sorrow. It is all over my face.
As seems to happen more often than not since the pandemic, my community’s plans had to change as we received an unexpected deluge of snow today and the city shut down. So I self-administered the ashes I swiped from work before I left for home early to beat the anxious Portlanders to the freeway.
I arrived at my quiet and beautiful home, to the stillness that comes on the days my children are with their father, with the communion cup of ashes clutched in my grip to protect them from the falling snow.
I took a nap. I had an orgasm. I ate pasta in bed. I listened to my favorite women on a podcast. Then I hopped on Zoom to see my people and to hold the tender truth in community that we all are dust and will return to dust one day. And, that somehow, this dust is magic. Magic put here on earth, animated and full of life and love and hopes and dreams. We lit our candles, burned our pages, had our communion, anointed ourselves with oil, and imposed our own ashes. We talked for awhile afterwards, checking in on each other, inquiring about the lives of new folks (there are always new folks), and sharing our community’s joys and concerns.
It is a bittersweet thing to spend so much time with death. So many of my friends from work are dying patients. And, we are the only sentient beings as fully aware of our impermanence. We live in this reality we so often would prefer was not true - that everything we know and love and rely on will eventually end. Our very deepest attachments are all temporary.
We can imagine that dust is so insignificant that it just blows away with a small gust of wind, never to be seen again. It would be so easy to think that the dust, that we, are inconsequential. And yet. That is where the magic comes from. This God who breathed life into us, gave us these deeply feeling, deeply attaching hearts with the full awareness that all will eventually go back into the ground. The meaning is not in spite of the impermanence. I think it is, at least partially, because of it. It is because we know that everything we care about is temporary, that it becomes worthy of our full presence, attention, and being while we have it.
We have it. Right now.
We’ve lost some of it already. What do we need to be present to in this moment? And what do we need to mourn and bury?