A Quick Word On Ashes

Having spent the day failing to get them placed on my head, I spent a quick moment meditating on them instead.

How you don't wash the smudge of ashes on your forehead away, leaving it to fall in tiny pieces from you as you go about your day. The reminder of death, plastered for the world to see upon you, a mark of sin and death put on our foreheads in order for us to take control of our lives, death being the final part of our lives. In bits and flakes, it falls around the familiar haunts of our daily lives, to be unknowingly picked up again in the days to come when we won't recognize it. Our Lord God has made death something so little to be feared that the pieces of it all around us cause us no alarm. A reminder can be proudly displayed. In that way, any Memento Mori and any morbidity, is really an act of triumph over death. Because God so loved us that He made death something no longer to be feared. It's something we can display to the world proudly, it's something that we can let leave a trail behind us wherever we go, it's something that we can touch unknowingly day after day, and it has no power over us anymore.

The great gift of ashes.