Ash Wednesday

At 6:30, it was still light. After what seems like weeks of smudgy grey, the sky was creamy as the inside of a shell, striated with faint pinks. An airplane silently left a perfect contrail, white like a child's chalkmark. Elspeth had been out of sorts all day but now she was quiet and nestled close to me, her hand unfurled on my arm. The snow outside had all but melted completely. The brittle edges of winter had given way to a quiet softness.


I had meant to mull over Ash Wednesday; I had meant to walk into and explore the phrase Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. That phrase and the accompanying smear of ashes has haunted me for years. I first truly encountered its power while teaching at a Jesuit high school. At mass that day I watched students filing past me, shadowed with a cross of ashes, their mortality. They didn't know it. They chatted and whispered behind their hands as they filed back to their seats. But judgement, inevitable death, yelled from their foreheads. The smooth young flesh that covered their cheekbones would one day fall away, and they would return to dust.

Later my first born child was marked with ashes. She too will die someday, as will I and my husband and my second daughter. So will my parents, and my siblings and all my friends. We have been formed out of earth-dust. We walk in young bodies and laugh with quick mouths. We burble with life like rivers. Sometimes when all is most happy, in the silence that follows a burst of laughter, in the quiet when somebody I love leaves, there is an echo, a shadow that never goes away: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Reading the prayer book today I was glad to remember that you, God, who are everlasting, "hates nothing you have made." And indeed as I sat in the rocking chair, holding Elspeth in my arms, a pervading sense of peace filled my hair, my mouth, every particle of my flesh, with warmth. I felt, as I often did as a child, that the evening had been created for me especially.

As an adult I see rationally that believing that an evening, or a storm, or an early morning, has been created specifically for one person is crazy. Thinking of it critically, I feel embarrassed, as when I wave warmly and energetically at someone only to find they were not waving at me but someone behind me. But I can't shake the feeling. And is it so odd to believe in something ludicrous?

Is it not ludicrous that we, who are somehow and mysteriously infinite should also decay into a world that was born and will also die?

I don't know how it all works. I know Ash Wednesday makes me sad, and that is right enough. I know too that time and flesh, body and spirit are much more than we can begin to imagine. Listen to the mysteries in this last breath of Ash Wednesday: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.

Thank God for mystery; for the ashes of cooled fires and the infinite sky. I thank God for the curve of my husband's shoulder, the foreheads of my children, the grasp of my friend's fingers. For wet grass, the cries of birds and the glimmer of water. For voices. Thank you.