Remember That You are Dust…
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the six-and-a-half week season of Lent. The part we all know about Ash Wednesday is that people get ashes smudged on their foreheads and walk around looking somewhat goofy for the rest of the day. The part that is less well known is what the whole ritual of the ashes means. Most simply, it is an approximation of the ancient practice of placing ashes one’s head as a sign of mourning (together with wearing sackcloth). Interestingly enough, as the ashes are applied to the forehead, the priest says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
This phrase gives a significant indicator of meaning that moves beyond an overly introspective obsession with self-abasement and self-hatred stylized as repentance. To say that one is dust often is interpreted as an expression both diminutive and derogatory. It conjures up popular notions of “the depravity of man” [sic] which cooperates effortlessly with the self-deprecation that has gradually become the automatic path of movement for our hearts the way an unremitting drip of water would eventually form a channel in soil. Returning to the Lord with all of the heart is undeniably central to Ash Wednesday and Lent, but there is more to this phrase that can and must inform our repentance.
The invocation of dust language harkens back to the creation and Garden of Eden narratives at the beginning of Genesis. The text tells us that “the Lord God formed the human person of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). The first thing this tells us is that as humans, we are fundamentally people of the earth. We were formed from the dust, showing that our material composition is elemental to who we are as people. It is not a “lesser” component of our being, it is who we are. This is further illustrated by the fact that the word for human (adam), in this passage and the rest of the Old Testament, is etymologically related to the word “ground” (adamah). We are quite literally earth-lings. It also shows us that, as the formation of dust was given life by the breath of God, we constantly live only in dependance upon the gracious gift of God.
Walter Brueggeman develops this idea by saying, “Thus human persons are dependent, vulnerable, and precarious, relying each moment on the gracious gift of breath which makes human life possible. Moreover, this precarious condition is definitional for human existence, marking the human person from the very first moment of existence. That is, human vulnerability is not late, not chosen, not punishment, not an aberration, not related to sin. It belongs to the healthy, original characterization of human personhood in relation to God.”1
Thus the call to “remember that we are dust” is not simply an appeal to repentance. It is an invitation to recall one’s own creaturehood and again become comfortable with one’s own vulnerability. The dominant values of our culture reward efficiency, execution, perfection and predictability. Over the past hundred years, in nearly every sector of society we have repeatedly chosen machines to replace humans and continually place ourselves in a losing battle to compete with them. Thus humanity has become increasingly like machines in a delusional attempt to transcend our frail creaturehood by imitating them. The delusional nature of this cultural neurosis could be explicated at length but is epitomized in the belief and practice that transcendence lies in machination. Like Adam and Eve we desire to reach beyond the limits of human being, to transcend the God-given limits of fragile vulnerability. Like Adam and Eve we must be told that such a pursuit is exceedingly futile. We place unspeakable demands upon ourselves imagining that we have greater power and ability than we ultimately in fact possess. For Adam and Eve, the cure was magical fruit, but remarkably, we imagine our escape will come through modeling our lives after machines. Thus Christian holiness becomes transmogrified into an irrational perfectionism, that through unyielding rigidity aspires to an inaccessible divinity.
We receive ashes on our foreheads and experience the tender yet confrontational beckoning to “remember that we are dust.” We must remember that as humans we are ever and always creatures, earth-lings, ground-lings. If it takes receiving ashes to begin grasping this, so be it. If it takes lying on the ground in the dust, so be it. We must recover this foundational truth. The Lenten recollection then no longer comes to us in collusion with the self-hatred of failure to attain an unreachable, yea, idolatrous goal. Rather, it comes to us in its truly biblical form, as an express not of God’s derision, but of his tender compassion. When God remembers our origin, it does not lead him to despise us. Instead, God’s knowledge of our beginnings in the dust is indeed the source of the heart-rending pity of a Father for his suffering children:
As a father has compassion for his children,
so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him.
For he knows how we were made;
he remembers that we are dust.
Psalm 103:13-14
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1 Walter Brueggeman, “Remember, You are Dust,” Journal for Preachers 14 no. 2 1991, 4.
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