We Are Dust – 27″ x 41″, photographs in frame. Lent 2011
We are over halfway through the season of Lent, which starts 46 days before Easter. This season has a serious and reflective tone to it unlike any other part of the year, as we are particularly focusing our own need for redemption. It begins on Ash Wednesday, and during the service on that day, the celebrant marks the forehead of each person, with the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The effect is striking, as it is repeated over and over.
And what does this mean to us; this reminder that we are dust and to dust we shall return? Well for one thing, it is the great leveler. No matter who we are and what we might or might not have accomplished in our life, we are all made up of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and smaller amounts of some various minerals. We are earth. But we are earth into which God has breathed the breath of life.
Each one of us is here for a limited amount of time, and not by our own doing, so perhaps we should look to both a source and a purpose beyond ourselves to give meaning to our time here.
I wanted to put some of us dust-people together in this family frame. The pictures include the famous and the obscure, people who are still alive and people who aren’t, some we would consider good or virtuous, and some with whom we wouldn’t want to think we had anything in common. There are some family photos, a couple of presidents, and some trees and animals to remind us of our kinship with other creatures made of dust with life breathed into them. There’s a picture of Dresden after it was destroyed by Allied bombing in WWII, and Tintern Abbey, which was destroyed during the reformation, and the little pickup truck that got wrapped around a telephone pole with me in it last year. There’s Fred Rogers, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, and C.S. Lewis. Harriet Tubman, Marilyn Monroe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, and my cat. Each photo has part or all of the phrase written across it on the glass: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”