In these weeks of so much destruction, the themes of Ash Wednesday have stayed present to me as Lent has unfolded: the finitude and potential present in ash. There have also been, as there so often are, a lot of emails, and so I hadn’t caught up on Kate Bowler’s lovely Lent series until today. The very first one spoke to me the most, and so I thought I’d share it. I hope you are finding grace and hope in the midst of this strange and beautiful and terrible experience of being human, created by and marked as God’s beloved.
Blessing for Ash Wednesday
These days of dust.
These days of despair.
Reality speaks to us clearly.
So we approach—carefully, hesitantly,
barely ready to hear the hard truths
we long to be told
about the beauty and terror of mortality.
How strange it feels,
so right and so good,
to move forward together,
wearing our finitude like a badge—
a mess of ash,
a reminder:
you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.
How strange it feels,
so right and so good,
to stand at the edge of awareness—
the balance point
between being and nonbeing.
I catch my breath as I look
and see shining faces.
I see it all in an instant:
how precious,
how holy,
how fleeting and infinite
each imperfect life.
How beautiful,
how stubborn,
how unfinishable
each single existence.
We wear this truth,
moving forward together,
our dust shining like radiant hope
Kate Bowler. “A Blessing for Ash Wednesday” in Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, and In-Betweens (New York: Convergent Books, 2024), p99. (Her whole Lenten series can be found here: https://katebowler.com/seasonal_devotional/the-hardest-part/.)
— Rev. Anne