Ash Wednesday: We Are (Star) Dust

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Those somber words are at the heart of our Ash Wednesday service, a sobering reminder of our mortality. No matter how rich or powerful or beloved we may be, our end is the same. We all return to dust.

I’ve been reading about dust and dirt lately, and the sacred nature of something that we usually take for granted.

In the second creation story from the Book of Genesis, God, like a divine potter, creates man from the dirt.

“The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,” scripture says, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

Theologian Norman Wirzba says this of the creation story: “God fashions the first human being by taking the dust of the ground into his hands, holding it so close that it can share in the divine breath, and inspiring it with the freshness of life. 

“It is only as the ground is suffused with God’s intimate, breathing presence that human life – along with the life of trees and animals and birds – is possible at all. God draws near to the earth and then animates it from within.”

In other words, as writer Diana Butler Bass says, “We are animated dirt, soil and life joined together. From living ground we were made; to living ground we will return.”

The dust of the earth is sacred ground, inhabited by God.

Every Ash Wednesday as I hear and say those words, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” I am also reminded of the words of song writer Joni Mitchell, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

It turns out that Joni Mitchell was right. Human life actually was created not just from the dust of the earth, but from stardust. 

Scientists explain that out of the Big Bang everything that exists was created.

That scientific theory has profound theological implications.

“Out of the big bang, the stars; out of the stardust, the Earth, out of the earth, life,” theologian Elizabeth Johnson writes. 

“Every atom of iron in our blood would not be there, had it not been produced in some galactic explosion billions of years ago and eventually condensed to form the iron in the crust of the Earth from which we emerged. Quite literally, human beings are made of stardust.”

And scientists tell us that every day more than 60 tons of cosmic dust fall to the earth, where it mixes with our soil and enters the food chain. We eat and breathe stardust every day.

And so this reminder of our mortality, as sobering and at times terrifying as it might be, is also a blessing. 

Poet Jan Richardson expresses it beautifully:

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind 
and be scattered to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial –

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.
This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within 
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world 
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

Amen.