Dust to Dust

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Beloved in Christ, 

I recently came across this article about the role of chocolate in both ancient and contemporary Mayan culture. Food and beverages made from the fruit of the cacao tree were regularly left as offerings at the tombs of loved ones as a way of offering something sweet to those who lie in death. It was also a symbol of new life. One famous sarcophagus of a ruler in Palenque, Mexico contains the image of his mother being reborn as a cacao tree. Today, chocolate is regularly given to women during childbirth, and is once again playing an important connective role for Mayans across post-colonial fragmentation and borders. For Mayans, chocolate is a powerful symbol of the deep interconnections between death and life. 

Ash Wednesday is a day when, as followers of Jesus, we are invited to contemplate our own mortality. This is a counter cultural invitation, and easy to quickly pass over. Just about everything in modern American culture conspires to deny, or at least anesthetize us against, the reality of death. We worship the idea of youth, we often devalue and marginalize our elders, anti-aging products are a major commercial industry, and we tend to speak in hushed euphemisms about death and dying. 

But the heart of the gospel is that, in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, death has been defeated, fully and finally, by the power of God’s life and love. We confront our own mortality, not without hope, but held in the powerful grip of God’s promise of resurrection, of God’s ultimate aim of creating new heavens, and new earth. 

Remembering that we were made from dust and will return to dust is not some grim and depressive exercise, it is an invitation to fully savor and invest the life we have. It’s an opportunity to turn ourselves over once again, mind, body, and soul, to the God who alone can sustain, save, and finally satisfy the hunger deep inside us. 

So this Lent, I’m taking a cue from the Mayans, and I’m going to eat or drink something made from cacao every day, not as an act of self-indulgence, or an escape from what troubles me, but as a way of remembering that, just as the pleasure of dark chocolate is derived from the interplay of bitter and sweet flavors, so too a sober reckoning with our own fragile and mortal nature allows us to taste fully the sweetness of God’s love, the joy Easter hope, and the liberation of the Spirit’s mighty power to save. 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return, to rest in hope for God’s renewal of the whole creation as an everlasting reign of perfect love. 

Grace and peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop