Ashes, Ashes

Holy Trinity/La Santisima Trinidad, 2/22/12, Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; 2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10; Mt 6:1-6, 16-21
The Rev. Este Gardner Cantor

Our readings for Ash Wednesday leave no doubt as to the seriousness of our situation. We have a fatal diagnosis. We are all going to die.

The great dramatic effect of our Old testament reading gives us shivers with it’s assurance of doom:

“…a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.”

I suppose you could see death like that. An army whose like has never been seen, a fact that no amount of fighting or wishing or praying will defeat. How can we live with this fact? We are all going to die.

In the Tebetan Buddhist tradition, it is seen as a very important practice to contemplate your own death. It is thought that it is only by truly realizing that we will indeed die will we realize how precious and short life is. And it is to be hoped that, knowing this, we will do what we can to live life fully- to make it meaningful.

And by understanding the death process and familiarizing ourselves with it, we can potentially remove fear at the time of death. This, in the Tibetan tradition, ensures a good rebirth. For us it might enable us to have a good death and passage into the afterlife. Traditionally, in Buddhist countries, one is actually encouraged to go to a cemetery or burial ground to contemplate death and become familiar with this inevitable event.

Our Old Testament readings mean to thunder at us until we rush to repentance before our own personal day of the Lord will come. We are urged to repent, both in our Psalm and in our reading from Corinthians. We all hope that may do this before the hour of our death, but better late than never.
Jesus words, however seem to speak to the way we should live our lives now. It even warns against over-piety in our prayers and fasts. The advice is put simply and so beautifully:

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal;

6:20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.

6:21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Jesus leaves it up to us to figure out how we are to “store up for ourselves” treasures in heaven.” From everything else he has said it is a good bet that he too is speaking about repentance, but repentance perhaps without the baggage. The Greek word for it is metanoia- transformation. Transforming from our almost irresistible tendency to store up stuff that rots, to learning habits which transmit love. Or, as the Buddhists would have it, loving-kindness.

There is a beautiful side to all this. We are dust and to dust we will return, but we are also the stuff that stars are made of- the stuff of our great Mother Earth, materials infinite and eternal.

My father was cremated last week, and I had to think about how much he, the geologist and soil scientist would have enjoyed the fact that his body is surely returning to the earth. I listened to a tape my brother recorded 5 weeks before my father died, and much of it was all about the earth, soil science, hiking in nature, his brother’s example going before him into the field of soil science, how much he loved the science of the earth.

I remember when I was in 4th grade my father gave me a whole tray of soil samples in little glass vials to bring to my classroom. Some kid made fun of me, saying, “Esther’s father is a dirt scientist.” Even then, I know that was not an accurate way of looking at things. I loved those little samples: sand, loam, humus, clay. Not bad company for the body to return to. These of course are the elements that make things grow- that make things resurrect, and that is the hope of repentance, of metanoia. We have to let old things, old habits, old shackles die and fall away to live the kind of life we might be proud of on that great day.

I recently heard a song, at a birthday party of all places:

When you were born you cried, and the world rejoiced.
Live your life so that when you die
The world will cry, and you will rejoice.

Amen.