Dust

What does it mean that we are from dust? And in what ways will we return to dust, or have we already?

I have never gone to a church that brushed ashes across my forehead, death in my face. 

Some years, I give up something for Lent to try and be a better person, because I think I should. And sometimes, I move somewhere I know I am being beckoned. With small daily steps, towards or away from something. 

What does it mean, I wonder, to wander in wilderness through a season that never seems to end? That marches towards the cross, closer to death. 

What, then, does it mean that resurrection lingers in the wings? Waiting. 

“I imagine Lent for you and for me as a great departure from the greedy, anxious antineighborliness of our economy, a great departure from our exclusionary politics that fears the other, a great departure from self-indulgent consumerism that devours creation. And then an arrival in a new neighborhood, because it is a gift to be simple, it is a gift to be free; it is a gift to come down where we ought to be.”

― Walter Brueggemann, A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent