The Healing Journey

February 14, 2024

“By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
— Genesis 3:19

For many years on Ash Wednesday, a cadre of seminarians gathered outside the entrance to the Church of St. Agnes on 43rd Street in Manhattan and administered ashes to passersby — commuters, students, business people, workers — with the familiar words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

The words come from the Book of Genesis after Adam and Eve had been cast out of the Garden of Eden. It’s an annual reminder of our mortality at the start of the Lenten season, six weeks of penitence and prayer leading to Easter. The ashes symbolize the dust from which God created us. During Lent, we mourn our sins — the sins that Christ died for to redeem us. Ash Wednesday is a day of prayer and fasting.

Ashes also symbolize grief — grief because we have sinned and separated ourselves from God, our Creator. In an Ash Wednesday Homily from 1996, St. Pope John Paul II said:

“‘Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return.’ The Church speaks these words in today’s liturgy, while ashes are placed on the foreheads of the faithful. These words come from the Book of Genesis: Our first parents heard them after they had sinned. Original sin and original sentence. By the act of the first Adam, death entered the world and every descendant of Adam bears the sign of death within him. All generations of humanity share in this inheritance.’”

“I once witnessed the opening of a royal sarcophagus in the cathedral of Krakow. It was the tomb of a great monarch who had ruled when my country was at the height of its splendor and power. I saw clearly with my own eyes how his body had turned to dust. In his case, death had fulfilled its relentless law. This will happen to each one of us: ‘To dust you will return.’”

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For many, this realization is a wake-up call that grieving people understand all too well.