Ashes to Easter- Reflection 1

In two days, we in the church will be marked with ashes and remember our deaths.  We do this every year.  It begins our Lenten time of fasting and prayer, penitence and study.  It's about discipline, but it's also about perspective.  I find over and over that the time of Lent becomes a re-setting of life, a re-establishment of this covenant we have with God.  Thinking about your own death does that to you.  It makes you really want to trust that you'll be okay, that your loved ones will be okay.  I find that I really need God to be God in this time, and for me to be dust, because I'm in control over life and death about as much as you could expect from dust.

But now I am carrying life inside me- a life that is one with me but also differentiated.  I am acutely aware of the dangers of eating food that makes me sick, coming down with the flu (which can become pneumonia), getting into a car accident, sliding off the road in all these ice storms, pre-term labor and other pregnancy complications- and that these dangers no longer just pose a threat to me and my health, but that of my child.  The protective instinct has already kicked in.  Whether I can accept it or not, the death of my child terrifies me.  I don't want my child marked with ashes and told that he is dust.  He is not dust- he is my child, my young one- with so much life left to be lived.  The imposition of ashes this year marks me for death, but also marks my child for death.

But isn't this the point of the marking of ashes?  I'm not God.  I am dust.  I am from the adamah.  I cannot control life and death for myself or anyone else more than we might expect from dust.  My child is dust too.  My husband is dust.  My whole family and friends and community- dust.  "You are dust, and to dust you shall return."  And yet as children of God, how much does God delight in telling us we are dust?  Does God have the protective instinct of a mother?

We are mortal- we will die.  My child one day, whether I like it or not, will die.  We will rejoin the adamah.  We will wait for our resurrecting God.

The words of the Heidelberg Catechism take on new meaning this year:

Q.1 What is your only comfort, in life and in death?

A. That I belong- body and soul, in life and in death- not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ...