On late Tuesday afternoon we walked our dog along the shore of Lake Superior. So many people were out on the lake walk. In the warm breeze and changing light, folks were running, walking and even out skating on the big lake. The ice had come in clear and smooth along the shoreline. And so for at least this brief moment people were stepping out on it. It was our own little Duluth Mardi Gras, a party on the ice. It made you feel good to be outside in the beauty of this late Tuesday.
We will walk by the lake again tomorrow at sunrise which will be Ash Wednesday. I’ve always been drawn to Ash Wednesday which we mark with ashes, dust and the words “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” It is a good reminder that we have only this present moment to live and love.
In Chaim Potok’s book My Name is Asher Lev, Asher asks his father,
“Why does everything that lives have to die?”
“So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.”
For over 25 years I went to the local county jail to lead a Bible study on Thursday afternoons with any of the women there who wanted to attend. Several years ago on the Thursday after Ash Wednesday I took the church’s left over ashes with me. I wasn’t sure the woman would want this ritual, but it seemed worth asking them. First, they wrote on small slips of paper something they needed to lose or let go of. They knew I would burn what they wrote. Some of them shared what they had written —loneliness, addiction, anger. After this I went around our circle with ashes making the sign of the cross on their foreheads. As I touched each of them I would say, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, but the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.”
I stopped half way around our circle. Three of the women who were Native American wanted the ashes on their feet. For these women the ashes were symbols of the ancestors. The ashes represented all those who had gone before, those who share their wisdom in the wisdom of the earth. They wanted the ashes on tops of their feet because everywhere we walk is holy ground.
It is so important to remember we walk, run and skate on holy ground, holy ice. Yes, life is precious because it doesn’t last forever. I close with part of a poem by Jan Richardson called “Blessing the Dust”,
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.
So let us be marked not for sorrow.
And let us be marked not for shame.
Let us be marked not for false humility
or for thinking we are less than we are
but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff
of which the world is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge we bear.
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