Photograph by Annika Gordon via Unsplash

Every so often around this time of year you’ll read a story of a news anchor commenting that a politician or celebrity has a smudge on their forehead. The person is often quick to say that it is not a black smudge that is smeared across their forehead like a Rorschach test, but rather it is the sign of the cross that is imposed upon a believer on Ash Wednesday. This year Ash Wednesday is in the first week of March, but the date varies from year to year as it portends the coming Lenten observance and eventual Easter celebration. Many congregants will find that their sanctuaries are now draped in purple and burlap, and things seem bleaker than they once did just a few days prior on Sunday.

The ashes that are used on Ash Wednesday are most often made of palm branches – and in some cases the churches save those palms from the prior year’s Palm Sunday Service to be used to make the ash. As someone who has been at this a while, I would remind those first-time Ash Wednesday service planners to use oil in their ashes for the imposition. Be sure not to use water as that creates lye – a substance that should never go on anyone’s foreheads as it can cause quite a rash or burn.

As important as the planning for the service is the significance of it. We are Christians who live on this side of the resurrection and know how this narrative ends in Scripture. We can skip through these not-so-fun reminders and find ourselves with our Easter bonnets and eggs and jellybeans. No wonder we’d rather skip ahead to Easter than to sit with the idea of our mortality as the pastor imposes ashes on our heads and says, “From dust you were created and to dust you shall return.”

This is true for me too. A few years back after we had adopted our daughters I had to impose upon them the ashes at our Ash Wednesday service. I had to remind them that we were dust… and that they would one day return to dust. I wished I could have skipped over those lines for them. My entire existence as a parent is to ensure that happens as far off in the future as possible. Yet here the Church comes and says, “Your carefully laid plans are like you, they are dust… Trust in the one who can bring life from the dust of earth.”

You’ve seen me use the word “impose” a few times when speaking of the ashes. For this liturgical occasion, that is the correct terminology. We humans are so fickle that sometimes even our own mortality has to be imposed upon us. We cannot escape death, yet we’ll do everything to avoid its specter hanging over us and reminding us as the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “Because I could not stop for death–/He kindly stopped for me.” Death is imposing, and Ash Wednesday imposes upon us that we are not going to make it out of this life alive.

Yet death does not entirely rob us of our agency. Vestment-maker and folk artist Mollie Donihe has a piece that says, “We are dust here together, practicing love in the nooks and crannies of our dust-laden world.” We work so hard to rid our homes and places we frequent of any dust we can find. But here in a countercultural moment of clarity, the Church seeks to remind us that we are the thing we wish to remove from our lives. We are made of dust.

More to the point, dust is so common in our homes and lives. Why can’t we aspire this Lenten season for grace to be just as common? You are a child of the Most High God and you were created from dust, and indeed to dust you shall return. What you do in between is up to you and God. You had best make it count.