So at the same time that I was receiving ashes and remembering my sinfulness and my ultimate mortality, I was planning for my daughter to be embraced by the church officially. Amid my daughter's second birth in the span of a year (this time into her spiritual family) I was contemplating my own death.
Her birth, my death. Her life, my moving on. Her growing, me fading.
Bear in mind I am only 35 so--God willing--I have a lot time left to raise my daughter, have a relationship with her and be an important and beneficial influence in her life, but that assumes that she survives and thrives despite the many dangers in this world. Do I worry? Sometimes. Do I do what I can to protect her? Sure.
In the end the hard, revelatory and unexpected thing is how, as her father and parent, I experience Lent on her behalf. As I contemplate my own dust-essence I contemplate her dust-essence. It is easy for me to contemplate my dust-essence as I fill out in my midsection, battle against years of bad posture and observe my youth fading. Immunities that helped me through adventure, physical exertion and passion are disappearing so that those same activities leave scars on my mind and body.
But how can this new thing, this child who is growing and learning and in constant renewal, who is so far from "peaking," have a dust-essence that matters and should be forefront in my mind? Culture tells me to push this thought away and lobby and child-proof and resist/embrace vaccines and avoid triggers but don't cause affluenza, build up self-esteem, and-on-and-on...but the reality is there is so little I have control over.
In one sense I think of the infamous "Christmas" passage of the slaughter of the innocents. And I think of the picture of the child who was found on a beach having drowned trying to cross from Turkey to Greece fleeing instability in the Middle East. These examples, one biblical, one all-too-current, both suggest the dust-essence of a child. Any child. My child.
This child. That we have spent so much time preparing for. Hoping for. For whom we have spent countless hours and dollars on already gearing up both literally and emotionally. In an instant she could be taken from us. It feels so much more acute with something as needy and fragile as a child.
Until Jesus returns this dust-essence defines us as much as our spiritual essence. It is within the dust-essence that our spiritual essence is formed. One of the great things about baptism is that one joins a community in which the dust-essence is acknowledged and accepted... at least one hopes that is the case. Baptism is a symbol in which we acknowledge that we are more than dust-essence and yet can never escape our dust-essence and that this dust-essence is so important to the overall scheme that Jesus joined us in it. Rather than trivialize it Jesus elevated it and over the years one of the great battles of orthodoxy is to keep hold of it. To hold it in tension and resist the urge to resolve that tension.
So in my melodramatic way I hold onto my deterioration and remind myself of the ways I can and ultimately will be renewed. And in my sentimental way I hold onto my daughter's overwhelming march through constant renewal as I also hold onto her common fate of eventual returning to dust.
Sporting ashes and a Russian Orthodox beard in that back of the church.
