by Madeleine Angelo

Created on: February 15, 2009   Last Updated: February 17, 2009

By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.' Gen 3:19

Our entry into this world and our departing are dramatic scenes that book end this life, begging us to pay attention to what occurs between birth and death. As the author of Genesis 3:19 point out, the very substance of our physical bodies is made up of the very same substance of all that is on earth. We came from dust and will be dust again. And in between we work and we eat. No matter how unconscious or enlightened any one person may be there is no escaping work and death. Ash Wednesday is a blessed reminder of this. It is not a morbid or morose tradition. It speaks of Truth. Perhaps if we carried in our hearts the message of Ash Wednesday on a daily basis, we would regularly recognize the sacredness of life.

To wear the cross of ashes upon our forehead is to be reminded of our fragility. Each moment we are alive is a blessing not to be taken for granted; and yet we do take it for granted time and time again. So we place the ashes and are awakened once more.

The ashes used in Ash Wednesday services are created from the burnt palm fronds from the previous year's Palm Sunday service. Palm Sunday begins with a reenactment of the masses celebrating Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends with the same crowd of people shouting Crucify!' Layered in symbolism, we see again that Christ too, like us, lived life between birth and death. We must pay attention and live our life well.

So, if we are from dust, our particles in common with the particles of Earth, what does the ashen cross teach us about who we are? Dust to dust, yet we are much more.

...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

The Animator of the mud breathed Life into our being and as a result we shelter the Sacred within. The Sacred becomes our very essence, the Emmanuel, God with us. At the core of our being is the breath of God. God was and is and ever will be. The cross of ashes is not solely a reminder of death, but also a reminder that Life continues beyond death.

Our bodies, bound by the properties of their particle nature, continually change. They grow and expand, then wither and fade. Our inner selves continually change as well, constantly growing and learning through knowledge and experience. Yet deep inside the Sacred never changes. Always present, always available, the breath of God within, the Eternal, that which continues on after all else fades away, never changes but remains steadfast.

As all other things of this Earth, the ashen cross will fade away, but let it mark the beginning of Lent, the season of simplicity, when we focus our minds on what is real and strip away the many illusions. Let it offer our soul a constant awareness of that of God in all of us, a most apposite beginning to our journey toward Easter.

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