Remember that thou art dust

Wednesday this week marked the beginning of Lent with our Ash Wednesday service.

About 30 people turned up for this moving, mainly wordless, beginning to the Lenten journey.

The core of this moment is a prayerful walking of a labyrinth, marked out in masking tape on the varnished boards of the church floor.

At the centre of the labyrinth, each walker is invited to ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return’ - as the sign of the cross is smeared on his or her forehead with the black ash.

This service defies definition. For some of us, perhaps, who prefer to deal in overt meanings, this can be frustrating. What if I walk the labyrinth and discover… nothing?

Yet, at the same time, it is this silent immersion in such a powerful symbol which makes the experience so poignant for many.

At the centre of the labyrinth, of course, there are words. Words which remind us, curiously, of our mortality. It is an odd greeting, in a way: “You’re going to die. Get used to it,” the words seem to say.

Is this really what we want - need - to hear at the start of Lent?

This is one of those occasions where the liturgy preserves a kind of obscure wisdom. I would never have chosen those words to say at the core of this service. But somehow it works.

We live in a death-denying culture; a culture which does not want to remember that each person, every civilization, will eventually crumble back into the earth from whence he, she, it came.

I found Ash Wednesday sobering, but strangely reassuring. Death, provided it comes not too soon, not too sudden, has a kind of rightness to it. Our lives carry a trajectory. We do not own our lives outright, just the leasehold. By being mindful of the end, I feel I can live better in the present. My walk with Christ to the Cross and beyond can proceed more realistically, cast in more modest proportions.

The Ash Wednesday liturgy says it about right: You’re going to die. Get used to it.

Duncan