Sunday
The season of Lent began this past Wednesday with Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance in which Christian worshippers are often marked on their foreheads with an ashen cross as the priest says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
In 2015, perhaps thinking of the climate change that is causing out-of-control wildfires and of the deliberate burning of large sections of the Amazonian rain forests, Malcolm Guite composed the following sonnet. As he explained at the time,
As I set about the traditional task of burning the remnants of last Palm Sunday’s palm crosses in order to make the ash which would bless and sign our repentance on Ash Wednesday, I was suddenly struck by the way both the fire and the ash were signs not only of our personal mortality and our need for repentance and renewal but also signs of the wider destruction our sinfulness inflicts upon God’s world and on our fellow creatures, on the whole web of life into which God has woven us and for which He also cares.
Here’s his poem:
Ash Wednesday
By Malcolm Guite
Receive this cross of ash upon your brow,
Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross.
The forests of the world are burning now
And you make late repentance for the loss.
But all the trees of God would clap their hands
The very stones themselves would shout and sing
If you could covenant to love these lands
And recognize in Christ their Lord and king.He sees the slow destruction of those trees,
He weeps to see the ancient places burn,
And still you make what purchases you please,
And still to dust and ashes you return.
But Hope could rise from ashes even now
Beginning with this sign upon your brow.
Guite moves from trees to stones, the latter referred to in the account of Palm Sunday. When Jesus was rebuked for his followers singing his praises as he entered Jerusalem, he replied, “I tell you, if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”
The image of trees rejoicing also appears in a moving poem written by Julia Bates, my wife. After the ashes were applied and the words spoken in this past Wednesday service, Julia said she suddenly found herself—in an “instantaneous gestalt”–identifying with the dust motes that danced in the air around her–which in turn prompted her to wonder at the miracle of creation. How, she asks, did this dust
Learn to speak
To have a heartbeat
To think a verse of a
Song?
The thinking process continued on, Julia reports. Did dust then create a god in order
To teach us how to
Gather ourselves
To stand close enough
To touch
After reflecting whether this dust also creates a god to regulate its destructive urges, the poem asks again what it takes to keep us, like dust motes, from simply blowing away. Are we bound together by heavenly chords/ “cords of love.” And from there she wonders whether we follow the example of trees, which learned the anchor of roots long before us.
Whether trees or humans, the sap rises within. Does the wind come at their bidding, she asks, as they/we “pound out the heartbeat of bird song”?
Daughter of Ashes
By Julia Bates
Daughter, you come from dust
And to dust you shall return
The priest, a woman in white
With black stole
Thumbs a circle on my forehead
And then a cross
Suddenly I am a column of dust
And around me all are transformed
Into dervishes of sparkling motes
Fragile, whimsical, barely separate
One from another
And how, I ask in wonder,
Did this dust
Learn to speak
To have a heartbeat
To think a verse of a
SongDid we create a god
To teach us how to
Gather ourselves
To stand close enough
To touch
And the fear that if we
Mistake the law
Murder one another
The wrath will descend
Perhaps that anger is
Our anger
That destruction
The might in our own
Right hand
Can we go back to harmony
Can we listen for chords
To make cords of love
To hold us here
Floating
When we might just
Blow away
The option
To hug
To put down roots
Like the trees who
Learned that anchor long before
Us
Do trees pray
How do they learn the rules
Of mutual survival
As the spring sun
Launches urges of sap
Ever upwards
How can those trunks
Keep from dancing
Or is that how the wind comes
At their bidding
To toss their branches
Like the long hair
Of young women
And young men
As they pound
Out the heartbeat
Of bird song
