February 10, 2016
This area for temporary and important messaging. COVID RESOURCES
This area for temporary and important messaging. COVID RESOURCES
If you secretly (or not so secretly) enjoy Ash Wednesday as much as I do, you’re probably very familiar with its central chorus: Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. But have you ever given the logic of this line any thought? If so, you may have realized that it makes no sense at all—which is exactly what makes it so compelling.
For starters, check out the verb tenses: You are dust, and to dust you shall return. This admixture of present and future tense confounds our understanding of both time and identity. If we are something—dust, Girl Scouts, conspiracy theorists, vegetarians—how can we “return” to being that thing? We already are it. We don’t need to circle back to it in the future.
The Rev. David Peters is currently studying in the Master of the Arts of Religion program at Seminary of the Southwest. David comes to Seminary of the Southwest from the Armed Forces and Federal Ministries of The Episcopal Church.
Snapshot #1
The teenaged boy dove into the ditch as the bombers came into sight and started releasing their payload on the German town next to the concentration camp. He crouched there with the other prisoners and pressed his body against the side of the ditch closest to the sound of the bombs. Sometimes, in the ditch, he imagined they were riding the subway in New York City, like he had done with his parents and sister four years before the war. Just like the subway riders, the prisoners didn’t look at each other in the ditch.
The boy dug the ditch with the other prisoners during their first weeks in the camp. It used to be deeper, but in the last weeks they had been filling it in with wheelbarrows full of ashes.
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