Our daughter was born on Fat Tuesday, which meant I spent Ash Wednesday 2006 in a hospital room, recovering from a C-section and trying to figure out how to breastfeed. After experiencing the joy and fear of giving birth, I really did not need to remember that I was dust and to dust I would return. At the time, I felt more like I was made of blood and colostrum and placenta, which are very much things of birth.

That was the last time I was not marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday. This year I repeat that, for reasons that seem a bit inconsequential and maybe a little lazy. Last September I left the congregation I happily served for thirteen years, and I have not yet found a new worship home. To be honest, I haven’t looked for one yet. After serving congregations for thirty-one years, I need a break. I need to let go of all my expectations of how worship should happen, what fills me in worship. I need to empty myself of all of that, and then start fresh.

I imagine for many folks there is no need to be reminded that they are dust and to dust they will return. The world tells them that all the time. The White House tells them that in cruel tweets. Rude customers, impatient drivers, racists, misogynists – there is a message of death and hate that pervades so much of every day life. Why add ashes as another reminder?

I dare not speak for anyone , but I will say that there was something honorable and profound and horrific about making the sign of the cross on people’s foreheads. Honorable because they trusted me, their pastor, to say these true words with love. Profound, because death is so wrapped up in the mysteries of creation and incarnation and resurrection that mere words cannot begin to convey all that is meant by the ashy cross. And horrific, because the woman who has lost all her hair from her chemo treatments doesn’t need to be reminded that she will die, because the precious child, conceived by IVF after years of miscarriages, needs to live a full, long life, and not think about death for a long, long time.

Receiving the ashes is another thing. Sometimes a fellow pastor would mark me, and sometimes my fellow pastor/husband made the sign of the cross on my forehead. Sometimes a parishioner would make the sign. It didn’t matter who did it, though I always knew the person. Someone who loved me, or who worked to love me in that Christ-way, was telling me the truth that I would die some day, that all of us will die some day. On Ash Wednesday, that’s as far as we get in the story.

And so Lent has begun, and for me, without ashes. My daughter sent me a picture today of her and her friend who made it a point to go to chapel and get marked today. I’m a bit filled by that. A stranger told her that she is dust. While I clung to her in that hospital bed at the beginning of Lent nineteen years ago, now I let her go into the world, full of dust and life, to make her own way. For a long, long time, I hope.

So given the state of the world, perhaps this year I would offer these words:
“Remember you are made of love, and to Love you will return.”