This year, as I ponder Ash Wednesday, I remember the words of Dostoevsky, “The world will be saved by beauty.” Yes, there are ashes and there is mortality. There is a need for confession, contrition, and reparation. There is also the need for beauty that saves and transforms.
A member of the Medicare generation for several years, I realize with each day that life is beautiful, but often too short. I read obituaries each day of persons my age, or a few years older, and wonder how many years I have left. I am only too aware of the Ash Wednesday statement, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” I also recall a Jewish saying counsels that each person should have a note in each pocket. In one pocket, the note should announce “for you the universe was created.” In the other, “you are dust.”
WE ARE DUST, AND WE ARE COSMIC. These days I am daily aware of the dustiness of life in my own body and in the lives of dear friends. In the wake of the pandemic, I don’t need anyone to remind me of the fragility and uncertainty of life.
Traditional Ash Wednesday liturgies focus on the brevity of life and remind worshippers that they came from dust and will soon enough return back to the earth, dust once more. For our parents in the faith, Lent was a morose and somber season in which they gave up something in order to prepare themselves for eternal life. The salvation promised and hoped for required turning our backs on the joys of embodiment and the beauties of the earth. It involved, the giving up of sensual pleasures as somehow impediments to experiencing God. Faithful Christians trained their eyes on heaven, forsaking time for eternity. Yes, life is serious and risky business, and no one gets out alive. But, is salvation just an escape from this world of perpetual perishing or is it seeing everlasting beauty in each passing moment? Can we be “ citizens of heaven” while we are joyfully living here on earth? Can we simplify our lives in the Lenten spirit without abandoning the joy of life?
Life is fragile, and we hope for spiritual wholeness, perhaps, everlasting life evolving in companionship with God and our loved ones. For years, I struggled with Ash Wednesday Services precisely because of their otherworldliness and asceticism. My self-denial in Lent was typically half-hearted and short-lived. Perhaps, I realized that the problem in life is ecstasy deficiency, and the unhealthy ways we seek joy, and not the experience of joy and beauty. We are creatures of the moment, but we are also star dust and beauty. Brief though our lifespan may seem, we are also descendants of the Big Bang and carry the cosmos within ourselves. We may discover with Plato that “time is the moving image of eternity” and with a tombstone epitaph at a Virginia cemetery, “ashes to ashes and dust to dust were never said of the soul.”
LET THE LIGHT IN. A number of years ago, I asked a Maryland farmer why he pruned his apple trees. His response was, “to let the light in.” During Lent, we prune and simplify our lives so God’s light can come in. These days, I am reconsidering the meaning of Ash Wednesday. The brevity and uncertainty of life now invites me to praise, wonder, and beauty, and to seize the moment – for this is the day God has made and I will rejoice in it! All that I love and care for is mortal and transitory, but mortality is the inspiration to celebration and love. Plato once described time as the moving image of eternity. We are constantly dying, but we are also constantly living as we reflect God’s vision in the world of the flesh. This day, this moment, is a “thin place” for God is with us, revealed in flesh, blood, and healing touch. A faithful Lent can be a joyful and beautiful Lent, a time to treasure each moment and encounter as an opportunity to embrace Holiness in the midst of time.
This Ash Wednesday, I’m letting go of everything that keeps me from rejoicing in the passing beauty of the earth. I will remember to celebrate the temporary as a window into God’s moment by moment grace. Each year, as summer begins, I train my eyes for the first fireflies. Their season is brief, and given humanity’s destruction of the natural world, I fear that each summer will be the last. But, when I see the first firefly in late May, my heart leaps with joy and all summer long, I rejoice in the fragile flashing beauty they display.
Yes, we are dust, but we are earthly dust, springing forth from a multi-billion-year holy adventure. But, dust is good, after all; it is the place of fecundity, of moist dark soil, and perhaps we are star dust, emerging from God’s intergalactic creativity. We are frail, but we are also part of a holy adventure reflecting God’s love over billions of years and in billions of galaxies.
How can we not rejoice in the color purple or pause in wonder at a baby’s birth? How can we be oblivious to the “dearest freshness deep down things?” as Gerard Manley Hopkins notes? Like Jacob, Ash Wednesday causes us to pause, notice, wake up, and discover that “God is in this place” and now we know it! With author Patricia Adams Farmer, Ash Wednesday invites us to take a “beauty break,” open to the awe-filled, precarious world in which we live.
So, this Ash Wednesday, I plan on considering the lilies and the birds the air. I will enjoy the beauty of the quiet beauty of my morning walk. I will take time for my grandsons and love my wife deeply.
In some liturgies, the imposition of ashes is accompanied by the words, “repent and believe the gospel.” And, that is my plan for Lent: I plan to repent and believe – to “repent,” turn around, live more in moment, appreciating God’s grandeur, and believing the good news – the embodied, yet ever-lasting, gospel of beauty, wonder, and grace – the good news of simply walking with beauty all around me and doing something beautiful for God each day during Lent.
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Bruce Epperly is a pastor, professor, spiritual guide, and author of over seventy books, including THE ELEPHANT IS RUNNING: PROCESS AND OPEN AND RELATIONAL THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM; PROPHETIC HEALING: HOWARD THURMAN’S VISION OF CONTEMPLATIVE ACTIVISM; MYSTIC’S IN ACTION: TWELVE SAINTS FOR TODAY; WALKING WITH SAINT FRANCIS: FROM PRIVILEGE TO ACTIVISM; MESSY INCARNATION: MEDITATIONS ON PROCESS CHRISTOLOGY, FROM COSMOS TO CRADLE: MEDITATIONS ON THE INCARNATION, and THE PROPHET AMOS SPEAKS TO AMERICA. His most recent book is TAKING A WALK WITH WHITEHEAD: MEDITATIONS WITH PROCESS-RELATIONAL THEOLOGY. He can be reached at drbruceepperly@gmail.com
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