Ash Wednesday kicks off Lent tomorrow. I didn’t grow up with any awareness of Lent, the 40-day season preceding Easter observed by many Way-farers for nearly two millennia. In my ‘low church’ Baptist, Pentecostal, and Presbyterian upbringings, it just wasn’t a thing we did.
But several years back, I was positively hungry for this season of letting go and preparation. It had been 27 days since my mom died, and even less time since something (improbably enough) equally disruptive occurred, the pair of devastating events shaking me to my core.
I was driving through the densely-foliaged, sloping road to drop something off (I forget what) at 15 Overbrook Place, the community hub shared between Land of the Sky UCC, Circle of Mercy, BeLoved Villages, and the Asheville ManKind Project, among other rugged and riotous testimonies to our city’s more action-oriented spirituality and practice. Land of the Sky’s pastor, my friend Sara Wilcox, happened to be on her way back to this hub from one of her legendary runs.
“You want some ashes?” she asked me, mid-run, when I called her about the key code to the building. There had been a drive-by ‘imposition of ashes’ earlier that day, pandemic-style, between the two congregations. I had missed that, but Sara — who knew of the troubles I recently endured — really wanted to smudge me.
And so I waited, lying on the floor of the church library, contemplating the hell of the previous month.
Remember, O Mortal, that thou art dust…
LENT IS A TIME OF ACKNOWLEDGING that we come open-handed to life, preparing ourselves by subtraction to be embraced by the energies of Christ’s resurrection:
In time and eternity, in the ordinary and the numinous, in us and as us, through us and around us.
As I laid on that church library floor, I found strange phrases lighting up my sorrow, and deepening my joy…
“Tempus Edax Rerum,” the t-shirt I wore ‘happened’ to read.
“Time, devourer of all things.”
At first blush, this seems a succinct echo of what is traditionally said as the ashes are imposed by stained hands across the planet:
“Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” — “Remember, human, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
But in the former, from the first-century Latin poet Ovid, I hear unforgiving entropy, sweetened perhaps by the great equalizer of annihilation and little else.
In the latter, a Latin liturgy of somewhat-more recent vintage (echoing ancient Hebrew poetry), I hear an equal affirmation of finitude, but with something added:
A greater sense of being rooted in the earth, being creatures of the soil. I hear cosmic belonging, even within what my dear, departed friend Michael Dowd calls ‘grace limits.’
This truth of our shared mortality—this blessing that we all seek so fervently—can break through our isolation in unexpected ways. As journalist, minister, and rabble-rouser Sara Miles writes about her experience of imposing ashes on requesting strangers in the streets:
“In each moment of encounter—brief, intense, unpredictable—God’s presence flared out, as if my hand and a stranger’s face became, together, the tent of meeting.”
The grace that’s possible in Ash Wednesday pitches her tent, secured not only by the stakes of our personal death (profound as this can be), but the recognition of our collective demise. The neighbors we’ve avoided, the strangers we’ve ignored—we’re all going down to the dust together. There’s something oddly comforting in this communal reckoning, something that can draw us out of ourselves and into the awareness of nowhere God is not — the Psalmist’s minor-chord cry:
“Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from Your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, You are there;
if I make my bed in the depths of hell, you are there.”
(Psalm 139:7-8)
When we’re open to Divinity showing up as our life — and death — we begin being able to deeply reverence all that is.
As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins visioned,
The just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
And another poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, offers that if we but take our shoes off “Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.”
This grace of transformed seeing feels especially poignant to me in a vision dimmed by civilization seemingly in its death throes. I wince at each new headline, throughline, and faultline in our world, laying bare fresh strata of political, social, cultural, and ecological devastation.
How does Lent’s grace of embracing my death and that of everyone I’ll ever love or loathe actually operate on a planetary scale? How might this collision of Thanatos with Ruah-Shekinah-Sophia help me come to peace (rooted in right action, the just justice-ing) with a planet increasingly described by tender hearts and cool minds as entering a time of collapse?
This question points me to the final strange utterance we’ll consider here — ‘Trogoautoegocrat.’
It’s a term from the enigmatic teacher Gurdjieff, approximately meaning:
”I eat myself to maintain myself.”
What in the Ouroboros is this all about? Here we see a cosmic principle suggested: the Law of Reciprocal Feeding.
Whether observed in what we aptly call ‘the food chain‘ in nature or in how a glance from someone we care about can either radiate us to beaming or suck all the oxygen from a room, this Law of Reciprocal Feeding reveals an essential truth: everything feeds on everything else; everything is food.
Either consciously or unconsciously, mutual nourishment is how the entire Universe, the Great Chain of Being, is maintained — and indeed, how we (individually and collectively) gain energy or lose it.
Jesus speaks, in several contexts, of what it means to participate in this reciprocal feeding:
“The same measure with which you mete to others will be measured back to you…” a principle Jesus himself consciously embraces, upending entropy and amplifying the stream of grace available by intentionally releasing his life and taking it up again: “This is my body, given for you; eat this in remembrance of me…Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in them.” (Matthew 7:2; John 10:18, Luke 22:19; John 6:56.)
As Jesus is, so are we. We too are faced with a choice:
‘Tempus edax rerum’ or ‘Memento mori’?
Will we let time devour us, passively, or will we endeavor to remember ourselves and the Mystery that entangles us all, with great intentionality?
The choice we make with how we spend each day is between unconsciousness and energetic heart-burn, or remorse of conscience, gratitude, and truly digesting our lives, knowing more of ourselves with more of ourselves.
To quote one more poet, Red Hawk observes the ‘Law of Maintenance’:
“What goes unfed weakens; what gets fed grows stronger.
Either the intellectual-emotional complex feeds on the attention and grows stronger, while the attention grows weaker, is caught by every easy breeze, easily distracted and taken by every stray thought // emotion;
Or the attention feeds on the intellectual-emotional complex and grows stronger, more stable, able to hold steady for longer periods of time, able to avoid distraction, able to remain free and stable in the midst of the fiercest intellectual // emotional storms.
The aim for the mature soul is a free and stable attention even in the moment of the body’s death.
The soul is attention; It does not pay attention, it is attention (consciousness).
I am attention.”
(Red Hawk, Self Observation: The Awakening of Conscience)
Across my life, I have suffered much.
(Maybe you can relate.)
And I’m increasingly aware of how I’ve brought suffering to myself, and to others’ doors — often with the ‘best of intentions.’
Often by tossing my pearls before swine — my precious attention fed to every passing fancy.
Sara arrived to our church building right on time, glowing from her mountain jaunt. I stood before her, masked, as she crossed me, compassion twinkling in her tough, kind, Enneagram-8 eyes.
She recited to the original Lenten language over me — with a cosmic-lens twist:
“Remember that you are stardust, and to stardust you return.”
With nothing left to ‘do’ in the grief over my mom’s death and other torments, when so many others around me were perishing from a global pandemic, I received this inscription of finitude and limitlessness on my forehead.
In the days that followed, what had I been doing to ‘observe Lent’? Ha!
From that year on, I feel like Lent is observing me.
And so as we approach yet another Ash Wednesday, I wish to allow this season its magic:
Remembering that I’m dust, after all, and celestial, too: feeling my own great return, connected with Christ and cosmos, sweetness and strife, peace and pain.
In echoes of the great second-century Hymn of Jesus:
I would be wounded; and I would wound. (Amen!)
I would be consumed for love; and I would consume. (Amen!)
I would be begotten; and I would beget. (Amen!)
I would eat; and I would be eaten. (Amen!)
Brought low.
Lifted high.
With the help of Divine assistance, I seek to remember.
Will you?
Mercy to us all.
Further Resources for a Fruitful Lent:
O Breath of Our Oneness – a Lenten prayer by my dear friend Alexander John Shaia. Consider renting The Great 100 Days on-demand.
Lent Resources – curated by The Many.
City of God: Faith in the Streets – a perennial favorite by Sara Miles.
Spiritual Gifts from the Imaginal Realm – a Lenten eCourse based on Cynthia Bourgeault‘s The Eye of the Heart.
Want to Digest Fresh Ideas this Lent? This course might be for you!
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Versions of this reflection was originally published on February 25, 2021 and February 27, 2022.
Over the last year and a half a group of us have been meeting on line reflecting and sifting through the Divine Dance. This past week we finished up. I noted about a week ago this very thought you reflected on . . . “Whether observed in what we aptly call ‘the food chain‘ in nature or noticed in how a glance from someone we care about can either fill us up or seemingly suck all the oxygen from a room, everything feeds on everything else; everything is food for everything else. Either consciously or unconsciously, mutual nourishment is how the entire Universe, the Great Chain of Being, is maintained — and indeed, how we (individually and collectively) gain energy or lose it.” Sometimes it’s uncanny how our thoughts (consciousness) intersect is it not? Along with that I am reminded of Jesus’ own words, “eat my flesh and drink my blood.” He, obviously, recognized our deep connection to each other, as we draw energy from those connections, or are suffocated by those same connection gone amuck.
Peace
This was wonderful, thank you. Jesus as “upending entropy”
There’s no mention or references of believers being dust of the earth in the NT, only children of light.
On the journey, particularly in the second half of life when the risk and frequency of personal health issues increase, and when parents, relatives, and contemporaries disappear in greater number, we’re reminded of being dust over and over again, until we have our fill it, and then some. Those who have been in the military, law enforcement, work as firemen, or in healthcare and hospices, or as EMT’s know only too well what most of us know secondhand, or only remotely — that infirmity and death never take a holiday.
In my late 70’s, and having worked in healthcare over a half-century prompts me to conclude that getting a “bellyful” of same is by design. Or at least it should be. As if having “dust though art” perspectives by repetitive experiences isn’t enough, well over 100 biblical references to same in the OT alone are reminders of the corporeal and transient part of our existence. They collaborate not only to drive that point home, but conspire to persuade us that such is not our primary identity, instead directing our attention (and primary attachment) to the light, giving all but cursory attention to the necessary demands and sensate delights of our outer being.
Lent, which ushers in the climax of the redemption drama only via death, seasonally brings us in remembrance of same, if for no other reason that the NT never mentions dust as the essential constituency of our being, only spirit and soul, or as some prefer to annex their coupling by hyphen, spirit-soul. It is the latter that in-coheres the body, and later de-coheres (separates) upon physical death, or upon being “divided asunder from the joints and marrow” via the Word, and/or via their detachment from the body in deep meditative states. Such doctrinal truths must bring a visceral feel with them, the actual experience and power of same made manifest, or they remain boxed and stale in the intellect alone.
How else would a body-focused existence, and Botoxed culture otherwise be weaned from glorifying in cosmetic preoccupations?
But darkness and light, death and life have a peculiar relationship. One cannot truly know light and life until first overcome by their opposite, the ontological shock of darkness and despair. Only upon rising from the ashes of despair can one be fully convinced of same, and can at last utter in concert with the divine, without equivocation, “Thou art light, and unto light shall thou return.”
It’s the radiation of our being, not the materiality of it that ultimately forms, sustains, keeps, and ultimately delivers us from being totally overcome by doldrums and the evils of the latter. The rest is to be put in storage along with hair shirts.