Sometimes life tears us down and destroys us. It consumes us like a fire.
Today is Ash Wednesday. I’ve been trying to connect more to liturgy out of a sense that spirituality is not mainly accessed through thinking, but more through experiencing.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
This is what is said on Ash Wednesday. I’ve always thought about this as being about death and dying. When we die, we will return to dust. But, it’s also about life isn’t it? Sometimes life tears us down and destroys us. It consumes us like a fire. We are dust. Then life breathes back into us and we are resurrected, only to be burned down again in the fire and return to dust and ashes once more.
Over and over.
I used to rage against this reality. I wanted nothing more than to remain on stable footing. I spent a lot (and I really mean A LOT) of energy trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis in my life. I was angry at the chaos and the fire. I wanted nothing more than simply a life of peace and tranquility.
Ironically, it seemed when I finally accepted that whatever reality is happening in my life at this moment; when I finally decided that reality is not something to be judged, or raged against, but something to experience, and something to drink in; when I opened up to it and welcomed it in, I found the peace I’d been trying so hard to capture all those years.
It is reality, it is the “I Am-ness” of life, that is more God than anything else I know.
Make no mistake, sometimes that reality is like a fire. It burns me down and leaves me choking and crying as my own ashes blow into my face. Then, it breathes life back into me and something new is created.
Over and over.
Jesus said, "I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!"
I read some commentaries on this. Some said this fire was the fire of judgement. Some said it was the fire of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. I didn’t find any that said that this was about the fire that deconstructs and destroys us from within; the continual tearing down and remaking of our egos and our very souls. Religion likes to take spiritual things and make them external rather than internal. But I think that the fire that Jesus came to bring is the fire that immerses us and blazes through us and turns us to dust. And not just us, societies, institutions, principalities and powers. It burns them down too in the hopes that something new will be reborn. That baptism by fire, that death, counter-intuitively is the very thing that brings life.
We are ashes,
grey and cold;
choking and dry,
all that is left.
We are ashes,
all that is left,
after all is lost.
We are dust,
then life’s bellows pour breath back into us,
life dancing around in us.
The next match is struck and burns us down,
or we light the fire ourselves,
or truth kindles a fire in us and burns us to the ground,
destroying everything we thought we knew,
upending our tables.
To dust we return.
We are ashes,
blown by the wind,
becoming one with the soil and the sky,
swimming and floating in the water.
Drunk by the deer and the goat,
taken up by the dandelion,
to become life again.
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