“It is helpful, I think, to be reminded that we are dust.

It seems crucial to take this reminder with us as we move through life–through successes, disappointments, surprises, distractions, tragedy.

For Christians, it is also a truth to help us with the vast and terrible events of Holy Week.  The season begins with ashes of Ash Wednesday.  On this day, foreheads are marked with a bold and ashen cross of dust, recalling both our history and our future, invoking repentance, inciting stares.  Marked with the Cross, we are Christ’s own: pilgrims on a journey that proclaims death and resurrection all at once.

The journey through Lent into the light and darkness of Holy Week is for those made in dust who will return to dust, those willing to trace the breath that began all of life to the place where Christ breathed his last.  It is a journey that expends everything within us.”

-Jill Carattini

“I can think about Advent, about expectancy.  It holds some concerns, but to be impregnated with new life is a rather hopeful subject.  During Advent we rejoice as we open ourselves to the mysteries of the marriage of heaven to earth.

But in Lent we come to know that the only way to our own healing and wholeness comes paradoxically through dismembering–an appallingly painful process which life offers us, ready or not, and which Lent gives us the form and meaning for.  “They have pierced my hands and my feet, they have numbered all my bones,”  We engage dismemberment and atonement so that we maybe transformed through the Easter mysteries and arrive at “at-one-ment.”

-Gertrud Mueller Nelson, “To Dance with God”