Like dust

I shared in a contemplative evening with friends at Open House for Ash Wednesday. In that space I sat with the dirt and dust if my life, faced the taunts that wound my sense of self, whose source truly is a lifetime of masks and learned behaviour.
In that space I also held the challenges and failures of another day and felt again sense of my own lacking and failure.
In the sitting with and staying with and sharing with ... a blessing ..,. It is true that I am not sufficient to everything but that I am a source of life and strength in some things and rooted deep down in a Presence that is sufficient for all things needed.

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