Beloved Dust (Ash Wednesday)

Who are you beneath the mask?

The person whom nobody else knows.

                        Perhaps not even your spouse.

Who are you beneath the mask?

            That person whom only God has seen.

                        In that Secret Place.

In that place where the thoughts of our hearts are laid bare before the Living God of all Creation.

In Culturally Christian (and particularly Catholic) countries throughout the World, the season between the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6^th) and Shrove Tuesday (the last day before Lent) was historically a festival period of Carnivale - time of celebration and, for many, of wild abandon.

Normal social conventions were often overturned.

           

People indulged their appetites, for they saw the fasting season of Lent approaching.  

But perhaps the most potent symbol of the festival - best known in the Carnival celebrations of Venice, and known to many of us through the Mardis Gras (or Fat Tuesday) Traditions of New Orleans - is the ever-present Mask.

The Mask of Carnival – the Mask of Mardi Gras.

No one knows exactly were the tradition began, but masks have existed in human culture from time immemorial, usually for the same general purpose.

To hide someone’s identity.

Or, perhaps more specifically, to give someone a new identity.

A new Persona – a new Face.

During carnivale and other festive celebrations, a mask could allow someone to take on a New Identity. An Identity free of the constraints of their class and life situation.

When everyone is wearing a mask, nobody can be entirely sure who anybody else is. You might have a hunch, but you may never know for certain. A duchess could end up kissing the butcher’s boy – the butcher’s boy could end up kissing the baker’s boy – Who knows?! It’s Carnivale!

But at a certain point in the evening before Ash Wednesday, as the festival season drew finally to a close, the masks were taken off. Everyone was finally revealed for who they were - and everyone was expected to return to acting accordingly.

There was no hiding anymore.

All of the masks had been taken off.

And the True faces beneath had been revealed.

Who are you beneath the mask?

            The person whom nobody else knows.

Who are you beneath the mask?

            That face which only God has seen.

In the darkness of the night.

In that Secret Place.

On this day, on Ash Wednesday (the First Day of the Season of Lent), we acknowledge that beneath all of our masks - beneath all of our personas and the identities which we construct for ourselves…

Beneath all of that…. as mortal beings made up of the same stuff as the world around us 
 … we are… ultimately….

                                         Dust.

Cleverly arranged dust, to be sure, but elemental dust all the same.

Though fear not, my friends.

Do not let that existential dread sink in too deeply (just yet).

For yes we are but dust; but what a miraculous thing has been done with this dust - with the raw elements of this world!

In the beginning there was nothing. There wasn’t even dust!

And from nothing, God called the Cosmos into being.

That first flash of light.

                        Those first fiery stars.

And the raw, elemental dust of the cosmos was strewn throughout the virgin universe. Indeed, that vast sea of swirling dust was the Universe.

But the Word of God, which had spoken the Cosmos into being, was not done acting yet - the beginning had only just begun.

The Eternal Word of God never ceases to be spoken in Creation. It never ceases to continue doing Creation - The Work of God – bringing forth Being from non-being. Taking that which now has being (that which now already exists) and giving to it even more being – making it more than what it is.

Always transforming.

Always calling forward to Renewed Creation.

           

From that swirling dust of the early Cosmos, the Word of God called forth Stars and galaxies and worlds…

And our world   --- This World.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (a Jesuit priest and a paleontologist who lived in the early 1900’s) had a certain love for the processes of nature and for the Hand of God which he saw constantly at work within the Cosmos (acting behind and within that which we call “nature”). In one of his works, Teilhard paints a picture of the primeval Earth - of a world before life has emerged and covered the earth with its multitude of forms.

No plants.

            No animals of any kind.

                       
 Just a vast, barren, rocky and dusty earth.

               punctuated by volcanoes…

And vast expanses of primordial ocean….

He says, imagine if we could time-lapse that scene (imagine if we could speed it up). You would see a vast world without a speck of life to be found - simply barren rock and dust on the land and layers of mud lying inert at the bottom of the seas.

But suddenly, within the mud of those primeval seas, something happens.

            The Dust begins to quiver.

By the Grace of God, the “ordinary matter” of this universe has been brought to life!

And if one could speed up the footage of this scene when life first emerged, one would soon see thereafter an ocean filled with countless forms of life - all growing and diversifying, and filling the oceans with living matter where previously there had only been mud.

And then Life moved to the land.

In the Genesis Creation Narrative (in the Story of “Beginnings”) we read that “the Lord God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and so Adam became a living being.”

A  Living Being,

Created from the Dust of the earth…

Made to embody the Living Image of            God in this world....

Meant to share in God’s Eternal Life here - in this created world.

But, being made in the Image of God - being made rational creatures - we also had the capability of choice.

The free choice to accept the Eternal Life that God offers to poor creatures of dust, or the (sometimes much easier) choice to simply consign ourselves to the dust.

Or, perhaps put another way:

Just as we came from non-being – from nothing - so too do we have a choice to return ourselves to non-being…

OR

We can Trust in the God who has brought us this far and turn to receive the Eternal Life that is being offered to us.

In the Case of our Fabled First Ancestors, that Choice was given to them in the Form of Two Trees

One was the Tree of Life – the Destiny to which God was calling the newly formed human race (a share in God’s own Life).

The Other Tree was that of the Knowledge of both Good and Evil.

And we were warned that nothing good would come from the fruit of that Tree.

But rather, our path forward with God and with each-other would become distorted.

And rather than reaching towards the Life being offered, we would in fact be reaching back towards chaos…

                                                                                                … back to the dust…

And, as the Story goes, our First Parents, following their own appetites and the whispers of a Serpent, made their choice.

And we’ve been very good at cultivating behavior which degrades and dehumanizes ever since (for that is what sin is - missing the mark; the mark we were meant for).

And it now almost seems to be encoded in who we are.

We desire to reach towards life, but then become distracted and then tend back to the dust.

But Beloved, remember….

The Eternal Word of God never ceases to be spoken in Creation…

            It never ceases to continue doing The              Work of God.

Bringing Being from non-being.

…and taking that which already exists (even as it begin to decay)

            and calling it forth to more being.

                        Always transforming.

                                    Always calling forward                                       to Renewed Creation.

And so, as we continued to tend back towards the dust of which we are made, the Divine Word of God - which has always been acting through Creation, guiding and shaping us along the way - took upon itself the Dust of this World.

The Perfect Expression of God became a part of this world of passing dust....

            Became one of us.   
            (Cleverly arranged particles that                     we are).

The Word became Flesh and Dwelt among us.

For God so loved the World (every atom, molecule, and grain of who we are) that He sent His only begotten Son to take on our nature (our dust), to live and die as one of us.

And having entered into, and become a part of this world of passing and swirling dust, Christ has brought with him the Spirit of the Living God.

From Christ, that Spirit ripples out across the dust of this world, entering the nostrils of mortal human beings once more.

And having received his spirit, our bodies of passing dust become united to his Body. We become a part of the Eternal Image of the Living God crafted from the dust of this earth.

We bind ourselves to Christ (to the Perfect Image of God in Human form),

            And even as we return to the dust

We enter that Long-Rest knowing
       that as Christ rose again,

so shall we.

Our dust shall quiver again.

We shall be made New 
as Christ was made New.

For the Project of God in Creation

 is always new and joyous re-Creation.

You are dust.

And to dust you shall return.

           

But every atom (every tiny grain) of who you are

is also Beloved of God.

and will be forevermore.