Remember That You Are Dust

As is my yearly ritual, I walked into a local Catholic church this morning to begin celebrating Lent. In the Catholic tradition, the palm leaves used on Palm Sunday are burnt to ash. That ash is used for Ash Wednesday of the next year. During the rite, the priest blesses the ashes and sprinkles them with holy water. The priest (or liturgist) then dips his thumb into the bowl of ashes and uses them to make a cross on the forehead of each worshiper. He may say one of two things: "Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel" or "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." More often than not, I hear the former phrase. Today, however, when I stepped forward to receive my ashes in the silence of the sanctuary, the liturgist whispered the latter.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I have heard that phrase so frequently, and yet it has, until lately, meant so little. In fact, I wasn't even sure where those words could be found in the Bible. The source, I discovered, is the story of The Fall in Genesis. Just after Adam and Eve disobeyed God, God spoke to the serpent, then to Eve, and then to his first human creation:

"By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return." (Gen. 3:19)

Bleak; and yet necessary. Humans tend to think about death frequently, whether they consider it seriously or not, but Adam did not know what death was. He had never seen someone die. It was an abstract concept that suddenly became incredibly real. God was explaining his fate to him in terms that Adam, specifically, could understand. He had, after all, been molded from dust. God was telling him in no uncertain terms that he had been, was, and forever would be insignificant. That isn't to say that God didn't infinitely love Adam. But this, God was saying to Adam - and says to us - is what happens when humans forget themselves. When we forget who we are in the big picture: that is, creations of God meant for his joy. Our only purpose, really, is to glorify God. We may ask no questions and make no excuses. For our sins, we should have nothing to look forward to but dust. To dust we shall return.

Of course, because of Jesus, we are so much more than dust. God has breathed life into us, given our meaningless lives purpose, and promised that those who love him may return to dust physically but will be spiritually eternal. How often do we praise Him for this, though? How often are we so proud as to question the Almighty God?

Last night, I began Francis Chan's Crazy Love. The second chapter of the book, aptly entitled, "You Might Not Finish This Chapter," deals with the issue of our perceived invincibility. I realized that, while I think about death quite a lot in general terms (a character in a movie dies; I drive by a funeral home; I see an ambulance speeding toward an emergency), I rarely consider my own death in any meaningful way. Each day, I work through my to-do list - classes, rehearsal, homework, grocery shopping - and schedule in time for God. Wait. What? Schedule time for God? I wonder lately how it is that I don't spend my days praising Him and, if I can, pencil in time for the things that normally clog up my to-do list. In reality, it isn't that easy, of course. Isn't it?

It should be. We have so little time to make our lives meaningful. Every fraction of every second, we are living on borrowed time - God's time, to be exact - and yet we squander it as though we're somehow more important than He.

So, while I tend to think of life as a celebration and the Kingdom of God as a giant party, sobering reminders are important. When Roman generals returned triumphant from war, they would parade around the city in a chariot among thousands of Roman citizens. It was a huge party - they usually got a marble triumphal arch carved in their honor - a celebration that Rome was victorious. But as the war heroes rode around, they always had a slave sharing the chariot with them. Throughout the entirety of the parade, the slave would whisper into the hero's ear, "Memento mori." This is most popularly translated as, "Remember you will die." In George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, the poignant equivalent is "Valar morghulis" : "All men must die."

What a perfect example for Christians. We celebrate Jesus, His goodness, and life eternal, and we are expected to share that celebration with others. Lest we begin to think that our victories are our own, however, God reminds us: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."