Ash Wednesday

Next week, Christians belonging to churches with a liturgical emphasis (Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, a few others) will mark the beginning of Lent. On Ash Wednesday, ashes will be marked on their foreheads as they are reminded:

Remember, man, that you are dust,
and unto dust you shall return.

Ash Wednesday usually occurs in the depths of winter, a time when all seems hopeless, when the sprouting and flowering of spring is still a distant hope. This year, however, Ash Wednesday arrives on March 9, a time when flowers have been out for weeks. Ash Wednesday hasn't fallen this late in the year since 1943, when it occurred on March 10 -- the latest date possible.

Ash Wednesday's early spring arrival this year detracts a bit from the Lenten symbolism -- from ashes and dust on Ash Wednesday to the beauty of rebirth on Easter -- a symbolism with which we in the northern latitudes have grown accustomed. But, symbolic scenery aside, Ash Wednesday offers the same unsettling warning whether it falls in the darkness of mid-winter or, as it does for Australians, in the heat of mid-summer.

And Ash Wednesday's warning is a universal message, one that goes beyond its Christian origins. Unlike Easter, which assures Christians that life in heaven will be eternal, Ash Wednesday reminds us all -- regardless of religious belief -- that our life on Earth, as we now live it, is short. Very short.

Reading about the Persians and Greeks, as I've been doing recently, reminds me of the hundreds of generations of men and women who lived before I was born, and -- beyond that -- of the eons that passed before humans evolved, eons during which the stars developed, the galaxies formed, the planets including Earth were spun off. Which, in turn, reminds me of the uncountable generations, centuries, eons that will go on flowing past, long after I take my leave of Earth.

We spend our days, months and years keeping ourselves busy, trying to forget that each of our lives is but a tiny burst of consciousness, squeezed in between timeless infinities of darkness. In fact, most adults -- especially in America -- spend much of their energy denying their own mortality. We work hard and play hard -- not just to earn a living and enjoy our spare time, but to keep what looms ahead out of sight and out of mind.

Ash Wednesday tells us to do otherwise. Ash Wednesday asks us to remember -- not forget --that we are dust, and that dust lies ahead in our not so distant future. If life is short, how do we occupy ourselves during its short duration? What is important? What's a waste of our limited time?

The answers will differ from person to person, depending on his religious beliefs, his personality, his interests, his relationships with other people. It's impossible for one person to judge the value of another person's life, except by arbitrarily applying his own criteria to others. But all of us, in the end, will ask ourselves the same questions, and answer them by our own lights: How wisely did we spend our small number of years, and how valuable -- to ourselves and others -- were our lives?

Some may have climbed mountains with highly focused zeal. Some may have lived among the poor, serving their needs. Some may have spent a life in a library, researching and writing. Some may have been noisy politicians, selling their ideas to the public. Some may have spent their adult lives in silence -- in a Trappist monastery or as a Hindu mystic. Some may have devoted their time and love to raising families. Each of these lives may well seem worthwhile and satisfying, when looked back upon from its conclusion.

Others, however, may reach the end of life and look back with disappointment -- they never really thought about what they wanted, or they abandoned for unsatisfying reasons the goals that they had once held dear. Maybe they'll realize at the end that their lives did more harm than good. Or they may have done so little with their time that they wonder whether their lives were ever actually lived. These are the folks who perhaps would have profited most from having spent an occcasional Ash Wednesday, back when they still had the chance, thinking about life and death.

For me, Ash Wednesday is a religious observance. But even if it weren't, its annual occurrence might still cause me to examine my own life, hoping that when my final days arrived I'd feel able to adopt as my own a poem I was forced to memorize as a 10th grader:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
"Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill. "¹

And to hope that perhaps, by then, I'd be able to contemplate with some equanimity the humorous but somewhat disturbing epigram: "Life is principally multiple choice, but at the end there's a tough essay question."

---------------------------

¹Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem