Remember You Are Dust

Ash Wednesday: A Calling to an Environmental Ethic

Along with Christian clergy throughout the world, I will offer the imposition of ashes today, the start of the Lenten season. The words recited on Ash Wednesday always strike a somber note: "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." We are called to reflect on the frailties of life, the uncertain duration of our time on this earth, and the inevitability of our mortality. Death is the great equalizer, the enemy of the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the foolish and the wise.

But I want to focus my meditation today on this "dust" from which we emerge and to which we will return. The fact that we are created from the very raw material of this earth, and that we will one day return to that material, should compel us to treat the spaces upon which we tread with great care, love, and respect. Our existence is deeply intertwined with this earth on which we live, and move, and have our being. How we treat the soil matters. How we treat the air and water matter. How we treat our mountains and our rivers matter. We can be faithful caretakers and stewards of the very dust from which we emerge, or we can be destroyers of this environment which sustains our lives.

The somber notes of Ash Wednesday call our attention not just to death, but to life: how do we live, fully and with integrity, between our beginning and our certain end? How are we called to spend the time between the dust of birth and the dust of death? How will we treat all the components of a world entrusted to us? And what spiritual and material inheritance will we leave for our children and their children? Part of the answer to these questions must necessarily speak to personal and corporate responsibility for our environment. God so lovingly cared for this world, that God gave breath to human beings created from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2). May we, in our actions, prayers, thoughts, and giving, emulate this divine model by breathing life into dusty, neglected, abandoned, and abused spaces.


© Yolanda Pierce