Care for the Dying [Ash Wednesday]
The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson
Ash Wednesday
2-26-20
Care for the Dying
Who is that floating through the air? Dust. Backlit
visible by the sun that peeks through the window glass. A final descent before landing on my mortal flesh
like a blanket of the finest silk. And
it cannot seem to be removed. Even in
life we are in death.
What is this day even about?
Is it dust? Is it death? Is it about the mark – the black smudge
pressed into the pores of your brow? The
one you wear like a temporary tattoo, that ash cross that clings to your face
more stubbornly than dust ever should?
But also sometimes snowing down and living in your eyelashes or marking
your nose with a sooty residue. A sign
of decay and it is, of course, falling apart. It’s a prominently featured mess and yet you
don’t wash it off. You wear it to work,
paired with business casual.
What is this day about if not letting dust live? About how once a year you just let it be, let
it dwell in your space, on your face, in your soul, refuse to wipe it
away. Refuse in a way that is
honest. In a way that acknowledges that
the dust that covers you once lived and breathed and suffered. That acknowledges that dust will one day be
your fate. And you will float through
the air and be backlit by the sun and be scattered on the wind. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: a life story.
I have a friend who says, “Every act of care is an act of
care for the dying.”[1] Because “on a long enough time line the
survival rate of everyone drops to zero.”[2] Because everything is dying. And it does us no good to pretend that the
truth is not true.
Death’s whisper speaks into our lives the frigid crisis of pain
and sorrow and absence, of grief that threatens to suffocate our very essence;
it haunts our days with both its inevitability and the unpredictability of its
arrival. And yet it is not fair to say
that death is bad news. It is not; in
fact, it is not news at all. We are
given this destination long before we embark on the journey.
The ashes that you will wear out the door today are a not a
sign of your holiness; they are a sign of your mortality. Just as the cross that Jesus bore signified not
the religion he inspired but the mortality he bore, so do these ashes symbolize
your fate, not your faith. It is a fate
that we each bear; your ashes are not your own; they are mirrored in every
other ash cross, in every eye that holds your reflection; your dust is their
dust. One day you will float through the
air and will descend to settle on a surface; and there, in the dust, you will
find a solidarity for which you were created.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It is a universal truth.
I have a friend who says, “Every act of care is an act of
care for the dying.” And I think that
makes every act of care a tender and fragile thing, a beautiful expression
rebellion – to hold a mandala in your hands and your heart against the waves
and the wind, to love something that will not last even though it will not last,
to value life even though it does not last, to value life perhaps because it
does not last.
Do not despise your ashes; your ashes are a gift. They teach you that life is precious, that
life matters – yours and those with whom you blanket this planet.
My friend writes, “[Consider] the account of the women who
bring spices to Jesus’ tomb to anoint him following his crucifixion and
entombment. This is an act of care for
one who has died, which…has a certain unique purity in that it is precisely an
act that cannot be reciprocated. This
kind of care is given in the depths of the effects of mortality, where
resurrection occurs – not as a cheap evasion of death or mortality’s gravity,
but as a divine act of rebellion against death’s reality. The women’s care for the dead Jesus creates a
space in which resurrection becomes…a salvific act of overcoming on God’s
part. Such spaces cannot be summoned, or
manipulated, or even reproduced at will.
But they can occur. They are not
cheap consolations of the afterlife that somehow flatten the pain of death in
the here and now – they are gestures from dying hands that trace the arc of resurrection’s
possibility.”[3]
Our hope lives in dust – the dust of an empty tomb, the dust
of these decaying bodies, the dust of this dirty planet in which the hands of
God dug deep to bring forth life. Life
that will not last but is worth loving nonetheless.
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