“Remember you are dust and unto dust you will return”.  This is one of the phrases that is used when people are sprinkled with ashes on Ash Wednesday. 

Much of our liturgy picks up images and words from the scriptures and applies them to us in the present.  Going back to those scripture passages helps us to appreciate their meaning of the liturgy.  This is the case with these particular words.

They go back to the figurative account of the creation of human beings in the book of Genesis.  We read there that the Lord God made human beings from the dust of the ground and then breathed into this creature of the earth (that is what Adam means) the breath of life (Gen 2:7).

Ash Wednesday picks up on all of this.  We acknowledge that we are indeed made from the dust of the earth by being sprinkled with ashes but this is only the beginning.  It is leading towards the celebration of the new breath of life received in the resurrection.  What Jesus does to his disciples in his appearance on Easter morning is to breathe on them, saying “Receive the Holy Spirit…” (John 20:22).  And the very word we use for the Spirit means breath.  And then we go on to conclude the Easter season with the feast of Pentecost in which we celebrate the gift of God’s Breath within us.

Ash Wednesday is beginning something which reaches its climax at Easter and is concluded at Pentecost.  The whole season of Lent/Easter is about God making a new creation of us; he is taking us earthenware creatures and breathing his Spirit into us anew.  As earthenware creatures we are subject to the recurring cycle of life and ending in death but having the breath of the Spirit in us takes us beyond that death-dealing cycle and takes us into the life of the resurrection.

We need to see the words of Ash Wednesday as the beginning of that time when we open ourselves up further to the Breath of God and seek to discover those things in our lives which are obstacles to that Spirit working within us.  For that reason, it is a time of prayer and penance.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin