“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
I stood on my tip-toes and stretched from my shoulders to my fingertips to reach my student’s forehead. My right thumb pressed firmly upon his face, swiping up-down, then left-right, drawing, as best I could, a cross just above the gap between his eyebrows. His lanky frame loomed a full foot above my 5’3” self; he bent only slightly to accommodate the difference in our height.
Distributing ashes on Ash Wednesday through my work in college campus ministry offers an unusual intimacy with my students. I spend all sorts of time with students, through conversations, programming and encounters on campus, and I have become well acquainted with the small details of their lives and the stuff of their souls. And yet there’s a depth to our encounter on this day, even though our interaction is prescribed and rote, that strikes me deeply at the start of each Lent. To acknowledge the mortality of a young adult feels like holding a fun house mirror up to reality: So many of my students are at the dawn of their lives. They spend their college years training and learning for the decades ahead, mapping the terrain of themselves. They navigate through relationships and opportunities that offer both blessings and challenges during these short years and are gifts to rediscover and deepen in the long life that follows graduation. So much of college is formation for life; to pause and prayerfully acknowledge death is a disruption to our regular rhythms at a university.
I first distributed ashes during the pandemic in 2021. I was working in campus ministry at Boston College at the time, and the university sought to offer as many opportunities as possible for students to receive ashes safely. Most people know Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation, and yet, something about this day—more likely the wearable souvenir than the macabre but holy acknowledgment of the reality of death—attracts droves of students and administrators for whom Mass is not a regular part of their practice. On this day, they happily join our daily communicants and those students who are fixtures at Sunday liturgy. To maximize the number of people able to take advantage of safe, socially distanced opportunities to worship and receive ashes, B.C. had several services on Ash Wednesday 2021 all across campus at all different times of the day and evening.
I hadn’t thought much of the request to assist with distributing ashes at the services until our evening Mass at St. Ignatius Church. Masked and shivering, I stood outside on the church steps and distributed ashes to hundreds of students that night. The line unfurled down the steps, wove around the corner, and stretched down the side of the building as students lined up, six feet of space between them, ambling forward to begin their Lenten season and receive this reminder of their mortality. Three years later, I recall returning home that night and running my thumb under warm water to bring feeling back to my hand after standing in the New England cold for so long.
It’s remarkable too, perhaps, that this first opportunity to distribute ashes, and the profound memory of the line of students extending out of the church and deep into campus, came during a time when, collectively, so many of us were faced with the reality of death as we reckoned with pandemic life. Masking, distancing, sanitizing, isolating, knowing which phase your city was in and what restrictions we were navigating left us exposed constantly to our human frailty, our inevitable mortality and our fragility as a species. And still, we gathered and were reminded that our life here is temporal and fleeting.
Each year since, I have had the opportunity to distribute ashes among my students on Ash Wednesday. Reverently, I’ll also suggest that the ritual offers a bit of levity, especially when working with young folks: Students who know me well have critiqued my “cross technique.” Who hasn’t looked out across the congregation post-ashing and noticed who has a clear cross, and who has an indistinguishable smudge? Whose dark grey cross stretches across the expanse of their forehead, and who has little more than a thumbprint-sized stain atop their face? Who might have had their cross created from a fresh, full bowl of ashes, and whose line needed a refill?
To look someone in the eyes and affirm that indeed, someday, our bodies will be reduced to dust is at once morbid and sacred and striking and true.
On the other side, as a distributor, I ponder such trivialities too: a slight twitch in my thumb or not dipping deeply enough into the ashes leaves my faithful recipient with a sort of Rorschach blot across their face that may or may not resemble the cross I attempted. I struggle to set my hand in a light fist with only my thumb exposed, but I’ll admit that in moments of unsteadiness, I have used my other four fingers to stabilize myself against the face of my recipient. It’s awkward for both of us.
I have served as a eucharistic minister since high school, so I’m familiar with a queue forming before me, a brief, holy encounter with strangers and friends alike, but there’s something distinctive about the physical and spiritual intimacy of imposing ashes. To touch another, skin to skin, my thumb gently swiping across their forehead—oily or dry, across a scar, atop makeup. I become attuned as I wasn’t before to the shape of the face of someone I know well, the warmth of the expanse between their eyebrows and their hairline—while reminding them of their death. To look someone in the eyes, pausing prayerfully in the midst of bustling life, and affirm that indeed, someday, our bodies will be reduced to dust is at once morbid and sacred and striking and true.
My understanding of mortality headed into this Lent is invigorated anew. I’ll be four months pregnant this Ash Wednesday, and will welcome my son into this world sometime around the feast of St. Ignatius at the end of July. I don’t feel him moving within me yet, but I feel my waistline expanding and I crumble beneath the bone-aching fatigue of pregnancy at the end of my full days now. My body’s liminal holding of a life that is both “now” and “not yet” feels far removed from the reality of death. So much of how I spend my days is aimed toward preserving and nurturing the life growing within me.
But Ash Wednesday offers a unique reminder to me that someday my son will die, too. As will I, as we all will. I have yet to smell his skin or feel the velvet swirl of his hair, and yet, his tiny body is knit with the truth of his death. I know this, and my faith reminds me of it: not in a tragic, macabre way, but in a way that reminds me that my son’s life is not my own, that my life, his life, our lives, will return to God someday, and that return should shape how we live now.
This intentional recalling of our mortality, this lived embrace of death, is known in some spiritual circles as the practice of memento mori, “Remember your death.” Perhaps gothic at first blush, the phrase sometimes is expanded to, memento mori, memento vivere: “Remember dying; remember living.” A well-embraced awareness of death should invite us to deeper, more thoughtful living.
A well-embraced awareness of death should invite us to deeper, more thoughtful living.
In 2021, the New York Times profiled Sister Theresa Aletheia, then a sister of the Daughters of Saint Paul, who worked to revive this practice among American Catholics through media and merchandise. Her message reminds me that it is worthwhile to invite folks of all faiths or no faith to plumb deeper than the superficial tendency to escape or avoid the reality of death. Facing our inherent and inevitable mortality allows for a life of richer, more nuanced joy. Memento mori might seem to better suit the memorial of All Souls Day, but in Lent, as we recall Jesus’ temptation in the desert by recognizing the demons and deserts in our own lives and sanctifying ourselves to embrace the joy of Easter more deeply, we can acknowledge anew that this sanctification is lifelong and nudges us toward the eternal joy that awaits after our death.
I don’t know what demons or deserts my students find themselves navigating as I bring my thumb to their faces each Ash Wednesday and remind them that their full and beautiful lives will end. I hope they have the courage and support to face their challenges with faith, and with a deep knowing of their belovedness. I hope they live lives that know joy. My own life has felt both death and life intimately since last Easter. “We shake with joy. We shake with grief,” writes Mary Oliver, “What a time they have, these two, housed as they are in the same body.” That both death and life, grief and joy, coexist within and around me always is a mystery I’ll surely never understand on this side of the eschaton.
This Ash Wednesday, whether death seems close or far from you, whether grief or hope is more present in your Lent, may a lived, loving embrace of our shared mortality stretch our souls toward fuller, deeper relationship with God, ourselves and one another.
