DUST

A personal reflection by Cherie Greene

On Ash Wednesday, I had to work an afternoon-evening shift in Bedford. I wasn’t sure whether the 12:10 Eucharist would let me out in time to get to work, so I decided to try one of these “Ashes to Go” stations. I had run an errand up Loudon Road and was returning down Main Street with an eye out for roadside priests. Sure enough, there on the corner of Main and Capitol I spied a man in a cope. By what seemed a miracle, I found a parking spot in the next block.

As I approached him along the sidewalk, I made sure to make eye contact. I didn’t recognize him. Since I didn’t know of any parishes doing this besides St. Paul’s and Grace, I thought maybe they had a new guy over there on the east side. Three other people walked past him without looking, trying to ignore the presence of such overt piety. I would be different. I would show him I appreciated him being there.

Then I got close enough to read his name tag. Beneath a name I instantly forgot, I saw “St. Luke’s Anglican Church.”

Oh, I thought. He’s not ours. He’s from one of THOSE parishes.

If you haven’t kept up on the internal politics of the Anglican Communion in the past few decades, let me explain. The word “Anglican” on an American parish means that they broke away from the Episcopal Church, placing themselves in the jurisdiction of a more conservative foreign bishop—one who would never do anything as divisive as, for instance, ordain a homosexual.

I expected that, if he knew I was from St. Paul’s, he would view me as a (possibly heretical) left-wing radical. I saw him as a right-wing stick-in-the-mud. But I had already given him a friendly smile, and he was smiling back, so I couldn’t wiggle out of it now. I approached and presented my forehead.

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

I said, “Amen,” and that was that. I now sported a rather large, ostentatious black cross on my face, planted there by someone I disagree with.

My first instinct was regret, even revulsion. I spent the drive from Capitol to Pleasant kicking myself for my haste. I should have kept looking until I found a more ideologically friendly cleric. Our own people were out here somewhere. The cross felt dirty, the ashes polluted with the wrong-headedness of “those people” and their backward ideas.

Wait, I thought. You’re doing the same thing you fault them for, rejecting a fellow member of Christ’s body to maintain your own ideological and ritual purity. And so I spent the drive from Pleasant Street to my place kicking myself for being such a Pharisee.

Only when I was looking in the bathroom mirror, debating whether to remove the ashes before going to work, did the point of the whole exercise finally start to sink in. I’m dust. He’s dust. My bishop and his bishop, both dust. In the end, all our rituals and titles and family feuds will crumble and blow away. If Ash Wednesday is about anything besides making nonbelievers wonder what’s up with our foreheads, it’s about getting over ourselves. We’re all dust.

I washed my face and hit the road.