Thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return

Beautifully illustrated. Thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return uttered by the priest on Ash Wednesday. When he marks your forehead with a cross of ash. This sentence has for some reason reverberated through my writer's mind from a very young age. The finality and the fragility of our human bodies cannot be more succinctly extrapolated than by this sentence. We would kneel to have the ash emblazoned on our foreheads, with some of it falling into our eyes and distracting us as children. But looking into the mirror later one sees beyond the ritual. The ash signified the end of life. The beauty of the original Latin, “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,” was brought home to me by my Uncle priest - Father Simon Furtado, a Jesuit, during one of our many conversations about the finality of death after my Dad’s passing. And if literally translated in traditional English it is, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” (Genesis 3:19 )

On our foreheads This is pretty humbling information for us who think we humans are infallible. And humility also comes from the word humus or, ‘down to earth’. In the Gospel reading for the day, Jesus reminds us that all that we have here has been created from ‘dust’ and can return to ‘dust’. He reminds us that we should instead be placing our heart on the eternal and spiritual things that last forever in heaven. “. . . To dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). Although in creating mankind, God has lifted us up from our lowly origin, we are cautioned against pride. All our earthly goods are destined to be lost. Everything we have, all our worldly possessions, will one day turn to dust, just as the great ancient empires of Egypt and Babylon, Greece and Rome have crumbled. Even before then, time, age, illness and “doctor’s orders” can take away our taste for chocolate, an Indian sweet, or our ability to enjoy a fast car. Let us ruminate on the point, that one day our bodies will fail and die and naturally revert into the dust they originated from.

We all turn into dust Guess with my mother’s passing and my helping to ‘dress’ her before she was laid out, I realised all she ‘went’ with on that final journey, was her favourite blue lace blouse and a pair of black trousers, that I had chosen earlier with my second sister and kept aside in the cupboard. A cupboard FULL of clothes and scarves and shoes and shawls and coats. Other cupboards with Linen and crockery and the kitchen with utensils and white goods. She took NOTHING of any of it. The enormity of that thought hit me square in the face - SHE - TOOK - NOTHING. And as I carefully sort and give away all she treasured through her life. I watch sick to my gut as the servants squabble for her clothes. They demand her things as they had ‘worked’ for her, forgetting that they had been paid wages and nothing was for free. Humankind is basically greedy I thought, as they grabbed and wrapped up her things, to spirit away a lifetime of collection. The frailty and the fragility of our existence comes to haunt me and I suddenly want to register my own will. I have written several over the years, but seeing the overpowering greed all around me for Mum's finances, I call my lawyer with a draft and want to sort whatever I have right down to the last detail, to prevent any one sibling taking advantage of the others. These are siblings that we thought we knew and trusted-- but sadly there is no trust left.

“Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” --There is something about the finality of the sentence that touches us on a fundamental level. We are invited to see ourselves as dust again, to detach ourselves from the things of this world and empty ourselves so that we might be filled instead with God’s “breath of life,” that is, with his eternal Spirit. We need to pray, --“A clean heart create for me, O God, and a steadfast spirit renew within me” (Psalm 51:12), and engage in penitential practices like abstaining from food and charitable giving of our material goods. It feels good to just give away a lot of her possessions to a poor school, through a priest friend. And then my mind moves to search for another reading that I remember hearing in church which is like a corollary to turning into dust -- ‘Lay not up to yourselves treasures on earth: where the rust and moth consume, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up to yourselves treasures in heaven: where neither the rust nor moth doth consume, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.’ Matt. 6:20-21. And I begin to give away my own things and spend rather than save and hoard --- for whom?

And unto dust we shall return One generation passes away, and another generation comes..." [Ecclesiasticus 1].In a sense, there is both joy and sadness in the passing of a parent - sadness at death but joy at life, the life to come.In today’s world where the children do not live with us, making our final passing easier for them with finite time, its good if we gift away and turn minimalists. Strangely my boys are already minimalists and do not allow hoarding. Infact the older one says if we do not use something for a year give it away, we don't need it. Death doesn't frighten me and I happen to love the idea of mortality. Don't get me wrong: I'm no middle-aged spiritualist yearning to be with God, brooding on the morbid and the morose. I'm certainly not welcoming my demise, but I'm not resisting it either. I trust that it will come in its perfect time. Until then, I want to live, but shunning the need to hoard and keep.

What we are finally reduced to -- dust. The crisp awareness that this too shall pass brings life into focus. The finite gives life its contour. Limitations of time, energy, resources and awareness shape our choices. Choices shape our life journey. In the end, these outlines form the boundaries of our lives. Within those boundaries, lie our accomplishments, our contributions, our creations, our joys, our love received and expressed and the markers for continued evolution into our next life. These boundaries beget the magic and the measure of our lives. I want to believe that I had a life well-lived. When I shuffle off this sweet mortality, my body will indeed return to dust. I hope that a beloved someone will take that burnt ash and spread it on the winds over my little village of Pilerne in Goa. Let my dust return to dust, replenishing Mother nature and the finality of the words that breathe --“Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” rings across the universe. And my spirit will fly.