Of Dust and Ash

I walked out the front door this morning, Ash Wednesday, to last night's flotsam: strings of broken beads, a half eaten funnel cake just there in the middle of the street, cast off paper products everywhere, tottering in the morning breeze; an askew port-o-let down on a dead corner, that just last night was painted in neon. The trumpet blasts fallen silent. Artifacts of the lifeless."I hadn't thought death had undone so many," the protagonist laments to Virgil upon his entrance into the Infierno. Finally, it is all ash and dust, broken pieces of life lived and cast aside. A carbon chain and water we, the stuff of stars, who live for a day, and strain against the wind, and then are gone in a moment.

What word is to be found when the curtain is pulled aside and there is the truth of the matter before us? What word will suffice to shore up our ruin? What word will stand amid a world that passes away? Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return... What shall we say; what shall we ever say. O mortal what does our God require of us but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. Love begets beauty. I'm sure of it. Living for the other engenders life there amid the ashes...Among the broken pieces of reality life stirs anew...the dead rising to new life in every act of sacrifice for the good of the whole. In every act of sacrifice the beauty of being made in the image of God is engendered. Life bearers we, sent among the dust and ash bearing the universe towards her perfection in every act of sacrifice, raising the dead into a profound renewal.

Sacrifice is the word we live, the word that orders all creation and we made in it. A beauty that will be all in all, and will be all the difference.

Of Parades and Paradise

From my front porch I can see the gaudy lights of the food kiosk on Broad street...hawking funnel cakes....jumbo corn dogs...chicken on a stick..Do people really eat that stuff, and live to tell about it? Somewhere out in the night the drum corps is marking an ancient rhythm reminding us of some urgency at hand. The night is the time for a parade....the westward traveling stars above in rhythm ...The lights and music, and sounds of ardent voices, the laughter of children... bracing against the night...mocking the dark as it were...crying alleluia at the grave.

Now the first float rocks tenuously into view...the drums now louder...hands are raised in the moment...a moment that will soon pass...a moment of exultation...a garish apparition moving ghostlike among us...outward and visible warrant of the transience of life, of things and ways, mutable...of beauty and loss...of life and death...we are dust; and to dust we shall return....the rhythmic truth of the matter...the parade vanishes into the night as if it never were...Mardi Gras ends in ashes swept away by brooms and brushes.

Wallace Stevens says death is the mother of beauty. Indeed in these lengthening days we see new life germinating undeniably in the dead landscape....new life come again passing among us....we travelers passing along the way as well...It is in the journey, in the passing moment that beauty, the promised paradise lies. Raise your hands in honor of that which passes among us. Oh, don't ask what it is....you'll know it when you see it....and it comes with all urgency.