Dust to Dust

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. The bright green fronds from Palm Sunday 2012, dried and brittle with age, were burned and at Mass, instead of the usual confession of sins, the faithful came forward to have their foreheads marked with the ashes. “Remember,” the priests told everyone as his blackened thumb drew a smudgy cross, “you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

The message of Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, isn’t complicated. You’ve heard it from your financial advisor: Make sure you have enough life insurance to care for your family when you’re gone. You’ve heard it from your lawyer: Keep you will or living trust up to date to avoid problems for those left behind. (N.B.: If you don’t have a will, what in the wide, wide world of sports are you waiting for? Call a lawyer today.) Funeral parlors remind us to plan ahead, buy a burial plot, prepay the expenses.

On Ash Wednesday we hear it in church: “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” “Memento mori,” “Remember, you are going to die.”

Depressing? Well, I suppose on some level it is, but pretending you’re not going to die is, from my point of view, far more depressing. As Dean Wormer said to Flounder, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” Besides, you’re not fooling anyone, least of all yourself. That we will die is one of those things we can’t not know.

So we prepare. We buy life insurance, draft a will, prepay the funeral expenses. And we observe Lent. Lent is a forty-day season of stepping away from the ordinary routine (hence, “giving something up for Lent”) to read, pray, and reflect on life—physical life and spiritual life.

I’m convinced that the older I get, the more I need Lent. Memento mori brings me up short. My time is limited. So who am I really? What matters most? What doesn't matter at all? What should stay the same? What needs to change? Knowing I won’t live forever and will one day give an account of my life, how do I move forward with greater resolve, clearer vision, and greater love?

These are Lenten questions. The answer to all of them is, of course, found in Easter, but that will have to wait another forty days.