Remember you are dust

Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return; words murmured quietly amidst shuffling feet down the center aisle of the sanctuary, an abrupt reminder at the end of winter's darkness that death is inevitable.  What seems to be the focus of of Ash Wednesday, the "dust you shall return" part.  But try as we might, mortality is a concept we rarely grasp until we find ourselves face to face with it.  While it is an indisputable fact, few of us really are able to live in a way in which we are truly cognizant of our impending end on any sort of a regular basis.  In fact, if one could live in constant conscious awareness of their own mortality, one might say they are paranoid and focusing on the inevitable, but unpredictable instead of living in the moment.

So what about the present?  Because there's a first part to "and to dust you shall return" and it's in present tense.  "Remember you are dust".  Dust not when you're buried in the ground, but dust now.  Remember, you are dust.

Adam: the dust man.
the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.  Gen 2:7

 Because life started with dust too.  God, creating with world with breath, speaking it into existence took dust, seemingly nothingness and breathed life into it.  We are nothing but dust, not only in the future, but today.  Nothing but dust, dust filled with God-breath.  And that breath is what makes all the difference between dust and life.

 So perhaps instead of focusing on death on Ash Wednesday, it is a time to remember that we would have no life, were it not for the breath of God, the only thing that makes us more than dust.  It is because we were breathed into.  It's because of God's spirit blown into us that animates us and creates us into who we are.  So every step, every act, every breath, is only possible because God decided to put a little bit of himself in each of us, and that's what gives us life.  Each breath we take in and let out is only possible because God first opened our lungs and said I create you, and you are good.  So perhaps we need to remember, not so much that we die, but that we live each day with the divine spirit coursing through our bodies.  That the ruach, the spirit of God, the breath of the creator of all is found in each of us.  We would be nothing except that God exhaled and called us his own.

So perhaps our ashen cross should remind us not necessarily of our impending death, but that we are nothing but dust, dust that has had life breathed into it by the grace of the One who created the universe.  Dust that would be nothing save for the exhalation of God-spirit into our bodies.  We are nothing except that God put his own spirit into us and then said we are good.  So we face each day remembering we are vessels, full of the same breath that hovered over the chaos, that formed words and brought light into darkness, that spoke the world into being.  We are merely dust filled with God breath, but that makes all the difference, because it's the one thing that makes us more, that makes us alive; the fact that we have God in us.