Delighting in the Dust

A few weeks ago was Ash Wednesday. If you are not familiar with that particular Christian Holy Day, it marks the beginning of Lent and reminds us of our mortality. As a priest, I smear a little cross-shaped ash onto people’s foreheads as I say, “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return." An echo of the Genesis creation story and a reminder that from cradle to the grave, we belong to God.

I don’t think this is anyone’s favorite holiday. Putting ashes on a baby’s head is particularly unsettling. This year, I had the strange experience of helping lead an Ash Wednesday chapel service for about 130 kids. I don’t know what I expected, but I don’t think I imagined the children giggling as our chaplain administered the ashes. But that’s exactly what happened.

One thing I think is beautiful about this group of kids is that they are not all “churched” or religious. So they bring their own interpretation to these moments. And religious or not, this is what children often do. There is one picture from that morning of a little girl squealing with delight that made me think of a child simply playing in the dirt like children often do, tickled by the feeling of mud on her skin.

I’m always mulling over the story of Jesus with the children in Mark 10, where he says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” For many of us growing up under Evangelical or fundamentalist teaching, this passage has had only one interpretation: In order to “go to Heaven” you must be like a child, which is to be compliant, innocent, pure, trusting, and naive. But this interpretation makes me wonder if the people who hold this view have ever beheld a child. The theologian Rachel Held Evans once said, “Those who say that having childlike faith means not asking questions haven't met too many children.”* In over twenty years of working with children and as a parent myself, I have never met a child who didn't ask questions or have strong opinions.

Years ago, I was digging in the garden with my young daughter, and we were talking about how plants grow. In addition to delivering an elementary explanation of photosynthesis, I also said something offhand about God helping the plants grow. This turned into a conversation with my child asking, “How do we know that the Bible is true? How do we know that Jesus was real? Where is God if we can’t see God? How do we know that any of it’s true at all?”** It caught me so off guard at the time, and in the moment, I thought it might be helpful to say something like, “Well, people have been believing this for a really long time, and they told their kids and their kids told their kids, and here we are.” To which my daughter responded, “Well, what if all of those people are wrong? What if we’re wrong, too?” I was both impressed and terrified by her theological and existential curiosity. Children question everything.

What else do children do? Sometimes, to their parents' chagrin, they take things apart and put them back together to see how they work. They get bored and move on to something new when it no longer serves them. They are very messy–especially when paint, mud, glitter, or slime is involved. They wonder, and they delight. They play together. They feel their emotions. They cry when they're hungry, and they live in their bodies. They reach up for a hug because they know they need it. They do not separate the world into categories like holy and mundane, heaven and earth, the sacred or the secular; their whole world is right in front of them, and it is all that matters. Children are simply human.

Given the naturally curious state of childhood, what does it mean for us adults to become like children? I wonder if it is just an invitation to remember our own humanness—to embrace our humanity. I wonder if this is what it means to be born again?

On Ash Wednesday, I felt a lightness I had never felt before during that particular service. As I delivered the benediction, I remembered the giggling children receiving the ashes. They had changed the energy just by being themselves. And that doesn’t take away from the shadow of death that follows us all. But perhaps time is more of a circle than a line. Maybe remembering our mortality means returning to our child-selves.‍ ‍

Ashes to ashes, childhood to childhood.

Remember, that “From dust you came, and to dust you shall return."

I wonder what questions you might find in the dirt?

I wonder what you might need to recover your humanness?

I wonder what it looks like for you to delight in the dust?

*Rachel Held Evans, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions (Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 2010), 225.

**These would be the same questions I asked when I was a 40+ year-old entering divinity school. And I definitely still don’t have the answers.

***The feature photo is 3-year-old Flo turning kiddie pool time into a mud bath.