Dust thou Art: Death, Dearth, and Discernment

The priest smudged ashes on my forehead, in the shape of a cross, saying, "Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return."  It sounds a little heavy to tell this to a seven year old.  But he told all the congregation, before and after me, the same, so I didn't take it personally.  It was Ash Wednesday in the 1980's at my Episcopal church.  Instead of lining up to receive the "body of Christ, the cup of salvation", as we did every Sunday, we had gotten out of school and lined up to hear a poetic equivalent of the child's rhyme

The worms crawl in

The worms crawl out

The worms play pinocle

On your snout.

I don't remember how my younger sister felt about it, but, being melancholic children, my older sister and I ate up the misery of Lent the way we ate communion.   It was food for our souls.  On Wednesday afternoons, we walked the two blocks from our downtown school to our downtown church for choir practice.  The wind blew old leaves from Autumn around.  Spring seemed a world away.  The cold grey weather knew no season.  In the choir house, we slouched in folding chairs, and practiced Lenten anthems:

O come and mourn with me awhile

While soldiers scoff and foes deride

Upon the cross he feels the pain

The Lord of life is crucified   

Last night I went to a Mardi Gras party with my fellow West Philly Quakers.  Tonight we'll celebrate Ash Wednesday too.  I've been blessed to find a group of seekers who, like me, look to the seasons for ways to God.  Most Quakers couldn't be bothered to notice these things.  They are too busy helping African children and creating world peace, and more power to them, I say.  (Of course, the other day, when a bunch of us stood protesting outside Colosimo's gun store in 18 degrees below zero weather [slight exaggeration], the season was pretty hard to ignore.)  But I and my companions find meaning in marking our journeys by the annual journeys that nature (God's world) takes.  Noticing the subtle changes in the earth brings me down to earth.  The seasons articulate a path for us, show us we are going somewhere, at nature's pace; slow and steady.

The primitive people we once were relied directly on nature for their sustenance.  The time of Lent, for subsistence farmers, was a time of scraping the barrel.  Last year's crops were gone or needed to be eaten before they spoiled in the warming weather.  This year's crops were not yet ready.   Eggs needed to be left alone to become hens for next year.  Without an awareness that this period was temporary, it would have felt like the end of the world; a little like our current recession, but happening every year.  It was important, in order to keep going, to think of the Easter to come.  It was a good time to strip life down to the basics, to think about what really matters.  If we remove the heavy-handed "Christian" imprint on the season, about guilt, punishment and sin, we find instead a healthy catharsis.  A fallow field.

As a modern child in Louisville, Ky, I found this season bleak.  Christmas was over (although our Christmas tree sometimes remained up well into February!).  Spring Break was a dream, Summer another planet.  We seldom got snow, so it was just grey, brown, and cold for weeks.  Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays offered short, secular reprieves from school.  Without lent, without an acknowledgement of that bleakness, it would have felt like the end of the world to me.  Children are indeed our connection to our primitive, subsistence past.  They show us how much we need ritual.

 Students of Rudolf Steiner work with a biographical map he gave.  In the context of this essay, we could say that a person's whole life is a macrocosm of a year.  We are born in summer, out of cosmic light and love and oneness.  We "fall" through Fall, growing colder and more awake, until we reach Winter, the low point of midlife.  Around my age, in the 30's, we stand at rock bottom.  We feel alone, stripped bare like the leafless trees.  Unlike the Spring nature gives us, we must, in our lives, create that upward swing to resurrection and new life, in our maturity.  Then we may live in the abundant warmth and wealth that is spirit, once more.  I have just been rereading The Human Life by George and Gisela O'Neill.  It seems that I am only at the beginning of this lenten period of life.  At times, it feels bleak.  I can no longer rest on my laurels.  For various reasons I must stand apart from all the communities to which I feel an affinity.  I hope that this isolation is temporary.  On the other hand, it's only in the absence of a community that I would ever find the focus to write a novel.  And that one thing, that I am doing (mostly) alone, is the one thing which seems to be working.  Perhaps out of this individual work, connection to community may one day grow.  

In the same way, I think our current economic crisis is what it took for us to wise up and elect a good man for president.  Unless we were uncomfortable, we would never have been shaken out of our complacency.

I'm glad that every year, Spring shows me what flowering looks like.  Without this constant reminder that the "winters of our discontent" are temporary. I would probably go jump off a bridge.  Even in February, buds appear at the tips of bare trees.  If you look at them once a week, you'll see that they are swelling.  

They will open, by and by.  And so will I.

So I will offer a mirror picture to the Episcopal priest's words.  Yes, we are dust.  Stardust.  In the words of Joni Mitchell

We are stardust 

We are golden

We are caught in the devil's bargain

And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.