Momento Mori - Ash Wednesday 2021
Today begins the 40 Days of the Lenten Season. As someone who is daily stepping out of legalism, I find that stepping into the liturgical seasons is much like unwrapping beautiful gifts of holiness - each package filled with abundant, soul-nourishing, richness of color & flavor.
Ash Wednesday reminds us of our mortality, of course.
The latin expression, Momento Mori – “Remember that you will die” is helpful to live life well. To keep death daily before our eyes is to continually keep before us the gift and preciousness of this one life we have been gifted. (The Rule of St. Benedict as it says in Ecclesiastes 7:2, “I’d rather spend a day in the house of mourning than feasting” in order to remember what’s truly important.
When we remember the gift that life is, we can also be reminded that God had made beauty, one-of-a-kind artistry, from dust. In Janet Richardson's Blessing for Ash Wednesday, she writes:
"did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?"
(see full poem below)
In this season of Lent, may I walk, may we walk, in holy, expectant hope of resurrection life - even as we mourn loss. May we remember on the road to death, the gift of our ransomed, one precious life.
Blessing the Dust
For Ash Wednesday
All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—
did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?
This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.
This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
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.
—Jan Richardson
