I walked out the front door this morning, Ash Wednesday, to last night’s flotsam: strings of broken beads, a half eaten funnel cake just there in the middle of the street, cast off paper products everywhere, tottering in the morning breeze; an askew port-o-let down on a dead corner, that just last night was painted in neon. The trumpet blasts fallen silent. Artifacts of the lifeless.”I hadn’t thought death had undone so many,” the protagonist laments to Virgil upon his entrance into the Infierno. Finally, it is all ash and dust, broken pieces of life lived and cast aside. A carbon chain and water we, the stuff of stars, who live for a day, and strain against the wind, and then are gone in a moment.
What word is to be found when the curtain is pulled aside and there is the truth of the matter before us? What word will suffice to shore up our ruin? What word will stand amid a world that passes away? Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return… What shall we say; what shall we ever say. O mortal what does our God require of us but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God. Love begets beauty. I’m sure of it. Living for the other engenders life there amid the ashes…Among the broken pieces of reality life stirs anew…the dead rising to new life in every act of sacrifice for the good of the whole. In every act of sacrifice the beauty of being made in the image of God is engendered. Life bearers we, sent among the dust and ash bearing the universe towards her perfection in every act of sacrifice, raising the dead into a profound renewal.
Sacrifice is the word we live, the word that orders all creation and we made in it. A beauty that will be all in all, and will be all the difference.
