Covid-19, and other reminders that you are dust

Lenten Meditation 3/17/20

Psalm 103:13-16

On Ash Wednesday, Christians draw the sign of the cross on each other’s foreheads and say, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return” — an admonition scripturally redolent and foreboding as any imaginable. So begins the pilgrimage of Lent: with the jarring fact that we will soon be dead. Fourteen hundred years ago, St. Benedict wrote in his Rule, “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.” Since then, Benedictine monastic communities have concluded their daily circuit of prayer with the blessing, “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” The human propensity to ignore our mortality and, therefore, our need to be reminded of it is nothing new. Yet, we contemporary American Christians probably need such reminders a great deal more than our ancient forebears. We citizens of advanced capitalist nation-states have achieved a practiced ignorance of our deaths unrivaled in history. That people die is an embarrassment verging on taboo in our society. Observe, for example, the nearly ubiquitous use of the euphemism “passed away”: “my grandfather passed away over Christmas break.” In a time when it is increasingly acceptable to speak openly and even explicitly about our sexual appetites and exploits, we have grown increasingly prudish about the subject of death. We can say things to one another about all the different things we do with our genitals. What we apparently cannot bring ourselves to say is that soon and very soon the worms will have us…genitals and all. 

On its surface the Lenten practice of remembering that we are dust evokes the paradigmatic grammar of human fallenness. The Ash Wednesday admonition is firstly God’s pronouncement of the curse of death: “by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But there are further, subtler depths to the Lenten pilgrimage of dust. Prior to and even more basic than its connotations of death, “dust” points to life — to the elemental substance of creation writ large and especially to the specific shape of human creaturehood: “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” These two basic scriptural registers of the admonition “remember that you are dust” — death and creaturehood — are taken up together in vv. 8-16 of Psalm 103:

The Lord is merciful and gracious,    

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always accuse,    

nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins,   

 nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as the heavens are high above the earth,    

so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west,    

so far he removes our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion for his children,    

so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.

For he knows how we were made;    

he remembers that we are dust.

As for mortals, their days are like grass;    

they flourish like a flower of the field;

for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,   

 and its place knows it no more.

The Lord knows how we are made. He remembers that we are dust. These claims are striking, first of all, for the contrast they imply; whereas God’s knowledge and memory of us conform to the reality of our creaturehood, we are all too liable to live in denial of it. God imagines human life unfolding within time demarcated by day and night, waking and sleeping. He imagines human work bounded and hallowed by sabbath rest, but we, knowing better, insist that every day and hour must be justified by some productive outcome. Our frailty and fecklessness, our need for rest and replenishment, our bent toward disintegration and disorder — all of these are known and remembered by the Lord, and his disposition toward it all is compassion. As such, “remember you are dust” is not just an ominous warning; it is an invitation to participate in God’s gracious affection for us and so learn to welcome our creaturehood. 

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC CAN BE WELCOMED BY CHRISTIANS AS A LITURGICALLY TIMELY REMINDER THAT WE ARE DUST.

Ash Wednesday notwithstanding, it is easy most days to assume that modern medical technologies provide a reasonably secure distance between us and the grave. “You have died of dysentery” is meme- and t-shirt-worthy because dying of the squirts is, in fact, comically absurd in a society that has all but vanquished the lethality of garden-variety pathogens. But during what Ephraim Radner has termed “the time of the virus” — a time when people are dying of the common cold — the dust and ashes of Lent might be imbued with renewed plausibility. The past several days have unfolded as a cascade of closures, cancelations, and quarantine. As the toilet paper and bread disappeared from the shelves, the rumor of horrors in Chinese and Italian hospitals seemed to draw nearer. The plagues and pestilences of yore came clean off the crusty pages of history, ambled into the 21st century, and started killing folks. All of this confronts us (even those of us who are college students) with the frailty of human flesh, and perhaps more shockingly with the fragility of our society. Likewise, exiled by quarantine and social distancing from all our familiar arenas of performance, the whole array of our ambitions is revealed for the grotesque conceit that it is.

This season of Lent, may we receive the odd fruitfulness of knowing that we will die. May we admit that we are tired and need saving from the frenetic drivenness of our pride. May we even be grateful for the hints of sabbath rest given to us (however strangely) in the disruption of a global pandemic. May we turn away from the ragged weariness of the lie that we must be something more than what we are and return to the given limits and rhythms of our humanity. May we find ourselves welcomed into the compassion of the Lord. For he knows how we are made. He remembers that we are dust. 

Rev. W. Ryan Ford is an alumnus of LA Tech and The Wesley. After completing his studies at Duke Divinity School, Ryan came back to his roots and is serving the students of Wesley as Director. Ryan is a prophet, with a passion for The Word of God, for trout fishing, and wood working. He and his wife, Holly, have two children, Elias and Margot.