Meditation for Ash Wednesday

admin | 2 March 2022

“Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord,
I who am but dust and ashes”

“I, who am but dust and ashes”, Abraham says in a remarkable passage that follows upon the promise of the promised son, a scene in which Abraham engages God in direct back and forth dialogue about righteousness and mercy. ‘How many righteous persons, God,’ Abraham is saying, ‘do there have to be within the city before you spare it?’ ‘Fifty? Forty? Thirty? Ten?’ The exchange is priceless and serves to highlight the idea of the infinite mercy of God which cannot be quantified, a point which reinforces that there is no wisdom in techne and technology since it defaults to a quantitative logic. Here is the first time that the phrase “dust and ashes” appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. It is in the context of a dialogue of question and answer between Abraham and God.

“Lord, I who am but dust and ashes”, dare to question you, God, Abraham is saying (Gen. 18.27). But that opens us out to the great insight of our engagement with God and one another, a question about our participation in God’s own life. “Now we see in a glass darkly but then face to face; now I know in part, but then shall I know even as I am known,” as Paul puts it in Sunday’s Epistle reading from 1st Corinthians 13. Such is the project of Lent, to know even as we are known. The phrase will reappear with Job in the context of his wrestling with God. “God,” he says, “has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes” (Job 30.19) but the phrase reaches its greatest poignancy of meaning in Job’s repentance in response to the wonder of God answering Job out of the whirlwind to recall him to the majesty and the power of creation: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38.4). “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now I see thee;” Job says, “therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

We are called to account about who we are. The epigraph to Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter of Things is from Plotinus. “But we … who are we?”, also quoted by the great physicist Schrödinger (1951). To know even as we are known.

Dust and ashes signify humility and repentance; the humility that contrasts with our pride and presumption; the repentance that seeks our being turned back to God. The dust of death and the ashes of repentance point us to the death and resurrection of Christ, to our life through his death for us in the flesh of our humanity. The haunting phrase of our liturgy, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” recalls the story of Creation and the Fall in Genesis and reiterated in the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: “all are from the dust, and all turn to the dust again” (Eccl. 3.20). Such is humility as the counter to pride and pretension.

Yet we are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit, to be sure, but dust nonetheless and “unto dust shall [we] return” in the death of our bodies. But ashes? They remind us of something more, namely the ways of being returned to God through repentance. We begin with ashes but not so as to end in ashes. As Donne puts it in The Good-night, “fire ever doth aspire, and makes all like itself, turns all to fire, but ends in ashes, which these cannot do”. Lent is about “love’s strong arts” which seek to make us new. “Make me a clean heart, O God,/ and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps. 51.10) as the great penitential psalm puts it.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” is a familiar phrase (or at least it used to be) found in the Prayer Book Service of the Burial of the Dead. It is not actually a biblical phrase; rather a compilation of biblical images arranged in an arresting and memorable way. Such words belong to the hope of the Resurrection proclaimed so beautifully in the Burial Office.

Penitential adoration lies at the heart of the spirituality of the classical Book(s) of Common Prayer. Ash Wednesday is a striking illustration of that theme within the broader context of the traditions of doctrine and devotion which properly define Christian witness.

Ash Wednesday concentrates the mind wonderfully, we might say. How? Because we cannot see ourselves as dust and ashes without looking to the hope of human redemption as signalled in the witness of the Scriptures; in short, in Christ in his going up to Jerusalem. To be reminded that we are but dust is only part of the greater reminder that we are the dust into which God has breathed his spirit. That provides the ground but only through the ashes of repentance of our return to God as made in his image. The ashes are the ashes of repentance, a kind of metanoia, a thinking upon the things of God made known to us even in our confusion and folly.

Lent returns us to who we are in the sight of God. Ash Wednesday marks the symbolic beginning of the journey of our souls to the realization of who we are in God’s sight, knowing ourselves even as we are known. Nothing captures better the reciprocity between God and Man, between the knower and the known. Lent is entirely about our participation in God’s great work of restoring our broken and wounded humanity to himself, to the truth which ever is. The paradox is that this happens through our awareness of our faults and failings which is the moment of our awakening to the mercy and truth of God. Penitential adoration in nutsche.