Ashes and Dust

Submitted by Sara Miles on February 23, 2007 - 3:38am.

This is the sermon preached on Ash Wednesday 2007 at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco by Sara Miles.

What does it mean to set off on this journey through Lent—this pilgrimage through the desert that leads to betrayal, the cross, death and the tomb before we awaken in the blazing impossible light of Easter?

What does it mean to understand our own deaths, and the death of everyone we love? What does it mean to say that our individual lives are but a breath, and our beloved bodies are mere dust?

On Ash Wednesday, we follow Jesus’ journey to resurrection—which is to say we walk, as a people, along Jesus’ path. A path that leads straight to the place of the skull, to betrayal, and to ashes.

Of course, I think everyone else will die—not me, really. Not my precious daughter, my wife, my mom, my best friend. I can’t really accept that I will suffer and that, like Jesus, my own body will be laid by itself in the earth.

But Ash Wednesday helps us to understand that there is no way out—no way around the cross—except the way of love, which allows us to understand ourselves as part of a whole. Which allows us to forgive and transcend our own sins, our own willingness to betray others in the hope of saving ourselves.

Ash Wednesday is penitential, but it’s not simply about saying you’re sorry as an individual. Ash Wednesday reminds us that sin is, at bottom, the failure to understand yourself as part of one body. The point is to grasp that your own suffering has meaning only inasmuch as it makes you connected to others’ suffering, part of a people on pilgrimage. As if you were church—which is to say a body—walking on the path, through pain, to resurrection.

More than ten years ago my best friend in San Francisco died, during a period of time when it seemed that all the men I knew were dying. Bo, a novelist, a hilarious, surprisingly tender guy, asked me to help him end his life, when he was blind and incontinent and throwing up every half hour. I cooked for him until he couldn’t eat anymore, then gave him sips of ginger ale until he couldn’t drink, then watched as his pulse slowed and eyes closed and the breath went out of his wasted body.

I didn’t mourn alone. With his lover and his mother and four other friends, I carried Bo’s ashes to Land’s End, where sweet alyssum was blooming on the cliffside and the blue waters crashed and broke far below our weeping group. I reached into the container and tossed him into the sky, and the ashes blew back into my open mouth. They tasted slightly of salt, and of dust. They made me hungry.
From this, and from the deaths of so many beloved friends, of my father, of strangers, I learned that hunger for life is what we share, even in the face of death. That love and desire continue, even as we taste the ashes.

I learn what Lent shows us when, as a people, we walk this forty-day path, deliberately, beginning this morning. My questions, my doubts, my failures: Everything I live has been lived by others—it’s not a private experience. It also has been lived by God. Our God, as Christians, is a God who lived on Earth, who knew what it was like to have arms and legs, get hungry, fear suffering, weep over the death of his friends, break his mother’s heart. “We walk the road, Lord Jesus that you trod,” goes the hymn. We aren’t alone.

In Lent, if we’re lucky, we die to our fantasies of magical power and immortality, just as Jesus died to them in the desert when, during his forty days, he refused to sell himself to Satan by separating himself from human suffering.

So this morning, taking these ashes, I look at my own death, the death of my dearest friends, even the death of my child. I taste it as true: and as transient. Death only has power over me if it separates me from others.

The truth is, I cannot save myself from the cup of pain. I can’t control my life; my body is mortal flesh. My best moments, and my worst, are intimately bound up with others.

Yet very close to me-- in my mouth, as Moses says in scripture, and as we enact in Communion-- is a force drawing us closer and closer to the presence we yearn for. “Far off yet here” says our hymn, “far off yet here, the goal of all desire.”

Ash Wednesday means that we are dying to our individual selves, and becoming a body. It has sore places, and unhealed scars. It isn’t perfect, but it is beautiful. It is Christ’s body, or, as we say in church, a church.

Let us walk the pilgrim way of Lent, together.

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