Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

This was my first Ash Wednesday as a pastor. It was a long day, as I went to church early this morning to work on the details of a memorial service for tomorrow. It seemed fitting, though, to be pondering death on this day when we are called to be mindful of our own mortality. As I tried to put together words to remember a woman who lived a long, ordinary life, I wondered about the sorts of words people use to remember one another. We remember stories and images, interactions more than accomplishments, yet we work so hard all our lives toward accomplishments, often to the detriment of relationships.

My office overlooks the church's memorial garden, and as I thought about death and ashes today, I remembered a service of scattering ashes there a few months ago. The ashes were a paler shade of gray than I had expected, and they stood out starkly against the dark soil on which they were sprinkled. For days I looked out my office window and could see the scatter pattern of the pale ashes against the dark earth. It reminded me of the erasure patterns that used to show up on the blackboards at school, where chalk dust remained on the slate, just faded and moved around by the felt erasers. But, after a few weeks, some windy days and rain showers, the patterns faded; all that was left of the deceased were the memories stored away in loved ones' minds, while the bits of dust and ash faded into the peat to give life to the next spring's flowers.

That is, I suppose, what will happen to all of us. Whether we are cremated and disappear quickly into the soil, or embalmed and boxed, whereupon our return to the carbon cycle is slowed for decades and centuries by chemicals and material barriers, eventually we end up back where we started: as a-dam, creatures molded of mud. What matters in this rapidly-disappearing life where all that is physical is temporary is what we have done, the legacy we leave behind in relationships with one another and with God.

I'm not much good at theology around resurrection and eternity. The idea of bodily resurrection is a mystery to me. As I see the ashes disappearing in the garden, as I remember that the physical is temporary, I wonder what that means for eternal life. Will we be made new, shaped again from the earth, a-dam once more? Will all of our dust particles, carbon molecules, scattered all over the world, reassembled in plants and animals and soil around the globe, be somehow knit together once more as they originally were? I do not know. I'm not sure I could handle the truth, whatever it is.

From dust we have come, and to dust we shall return. We are just small parts in a much larger picture of life; words, maybe just letters or punctuation marks, in the larger narrative God is writing in the world. The ashes mixed with oil that we placed on people's foreheads this evening reminded me of potting soil in their color and consistency. As I dug my fingertips into the bowl, I felt as though I was digging in the earth, planting something. And perhaps I was. I was planting a reminder, no matter how small, that we are temporary. A reminder that we are tiny specks in an enormous picture of the universe throughout time, that all that we have is a gift, time and love and relationships-not to be taken lightly.