Blessing the Dust

The Alliance of Baptists regularly send out newsletters with information about their churches and members as well as scraps of prayers and bits of liturgy to those on their e-mail list.  Last week they sent out this “Blessing the Dust” on Ash Wednesday.  Some you may know that I supervise Chaplaincy Services in federal prisons in Atlantic Canada.  So I sent this blessing to my chaplaincy colleagues at Dorchester Penitentiary who were planning Ash Wednesday services there and they used it in the services they conducted at the Medium and Minimum Sectors of the prison.  It was very meaningful to the men incarcerated there and to the Chaplains as well, especially in these Lenten COVID days.  May we all,  like the men in Dorchester, recognize “what God can do within the dust, within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made” and may we see in each other “the stars that blaze in our bones and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge (of dust) we bear” on Ash Wednesday and carry with us through this journey of Lent.

BLESSING THE DUST

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons