Tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, Christian churches will be full of people waiting in line to hear the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
A downer, yes.
But a gift as well. Just as the Buddha's admonition to his disciple is a gift to those who thirst for deliverance: "Everything that arises is subject to dissolution."
Not because it's helpful to wallow in anxiety and denial of life. But because the only way to embrace life fully is to recognize that it's fleeting.
"Is there no change of death in Paradise?/ Does ripe fruit never fall?" Wallace Stevens asks, at the beginning of Section 6 of one of my favourite poems ever, "Sunday Morning." His rhetorical questions point to the impossibility of life without change. And a few lines later, he reaches his unavoidable conclusion, "Death is the mother of beauty." For change is nothing other than our dying to one moment so that the next moment of our lives may come into being. As we walk, as we breathe, as we eat, as we make love.
We are finite creatures in time, and as much as we'd like to conquer death by denying that, we only succeed in refusing the life we have. (Christians call that denial sin. Buddhists call it illusion.) To deny it is to undermine the very conditions of our life. It's only by embracing our mortality that we can fully embrace what Mary Oliver gloriously named our "one wild and precious life."
In the next section of "Sunday Morning," Stevens gives us a spectacular, celebratory image for the joy of our embodied life: "Supple and turbulent, a ring of men/ Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn..." But here too, we're brought back to the fundamental conditions of our existence: "And whence they came and whither they shall go/ The dew upon their feet shall manifest."
No mud, no lotus.
Everything that arises is subject to dissolution.
Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
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