The Great Equalizer: You are dust and to dust you shall return

Ash Wednesday was just two days ago and at every service there was the haunting phrase hanging in the background: You are dust and to dust you shall return, as ashes were smudged on the foreheads of the faithful.

The words were oddly out of place when the recipient was a child, even more so for a baby. The words were poignant when the recipient was mature in years. Yet no matter the age, the words are the great equalizer. And no matter the station in life, the wealth or poverty, gender, gender expression/identity, sexual orientation or other characteristic, we all return to the dust.

The words used when ashes are imposed are from Genesis 3:19, based on the words spoken to Adam and Eve after their sin and eviction from the Garden of Eden: you are dust and to dust you shall return. No one escapes this fate. All of us eventually return to the dust. Obviously as “Easter people” we look to the resurrection, however and whenever that occurs. But that is on the “other end” of Lent.

I wonder how often (or even if) those in power, political power or otherwise, ever ponder those words that spell out their ultimate fate. I wonder the same of those who treat others so callously or badly. The great equalizer will be the fate of those who try to remove the safety nets from the poor - however meager those safety nets might be. The great equalizer will inflict itself on those who practice racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and yes even on those who perpetrate sexual assault - no matter how long or how hard they try to hide what they have done. The great equalizer will prevail.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned us that we must learn to live together as siblings or we would surely perish together as fools.

A former bishop of Alabama, whose name long ago escaped from my memory, was also brutally direct when he said: If we believe what we profess, we had better learn to get along because we will be with each other for eternity. Ponder that for a moment, both from your perspective and then from that of those who would treat us as second class members of the church and society. Eternity. Together.

The great equalizer: We are all subject to its declaration that we are dust and to dust we shall return.

If you have taken on my challenge to make your Lenten discipline contacting all who represent you in secular government and those who have been charged to be your pastor(s), you might, perhaps as an ice breaker, remind them that they, just like you, are from dust and they, like you, will return to dust.

Yes my kindred, there is indeed a great equalizer and all are subject to it.

Amid the somberness of Ash Wednesday, we endured yet another poignant example of our inhumanity to each other with the Parkland High School (Florida) mass shooting. Pray for the all the victims of that senseless tragedy: the dead, the wounded and even the perpetrator. And pray that we will come to our senses and stop allowing perversions of the intent of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution to cloud our judgement about controlling guns whose only purpose is to kill the children of God. I don’t think this was the time intended for the work of the great equalizer… it was far too soon, at least in my mind.

I wish each of you a blessed, holy and productive Lent.

Bruce Garner, President

Integrity USA ... The Episcopal Rainbow