Dust And Ashes

We read in the Book of Genesis, chapter 3, that God said to Adam, after he and Eve had eaten of the forbidden fruit (the Bible doesn't say 'apple'!): "In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."   We are reminded of this on Ash Wednesday  when we have ashes put on our foreheads and hear  the words: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return."    The branches we waved on Palm Sunday last year, as we called out exultantly, 'Blessings on the King who comes in the name of the Lord!', are burnt to provide this year's ashes, a continuity symbolising the sad journey from exultation to sinful self-centredness and need of repentance.

There is continuity too, with the cosmic development from Big Bang to big picture,  from the exploding stars to you and me: an evolutionary story summed up by John Polkinghorne in the graphic and poetic words: "We are all made from the ashes of dead stars."  

Dust and ashes - nothing to get excited about, you might say.   But it is not the end of the story.   The end of the story is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  In his homily on the Vigil of Easter, 15 April 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said the resurrection of Christ "is - if we can use the language of the theory of evolution - the greatest 'mutation', the absolutely decisive leap into a totally new dimension never before achieved in the long history of life and its developments: a leap of a totally new order, which concerns us and which concerns the whole of history. ... The resurrection was like an explosion of light, an explosion of love ... it has inaugurated a new dimension of being, of life, in which matter too has been integrated, in a manner transformed, and through which a new world has arisen."

Having been reminded on Ash Wednesday where we came from, we began a journey of repentance, a turning away from self to those others who are made, as we are, from the ashes of dead stars.   We are all kin and our relationship to the whole of creation has to be not domination, not even stewardship, but kinship.