Ash Wednesday is such a complex ritual. One can interpret the dust in many ways.

We trace the ashen cross on our foreheads to remember our mortality. At grave side after grave side we have remembered: We are dust and to dust we shall return.

Or perhaps we think not of mortality, but morality, not in the narrow sense but with a profound sense that we know we have not lived as God would have us live. Ashes are a sign of repentance.

Or we notice that the word for dust in Genesis 2 is adamah and humanity, adam, is created out of dust. Ashes in this case is about connection to the earth; they are ecological.

Recently I found myself reading a book called Burnout. The women who wrote the book expressly for other women say in the preface: “When we told women we were writing a book called Burnout, nobody ever asked, “What’s burnout?”

So widespread is the experience that no one needs to have explained that burnout is that feeling of exhaustion that comes as feel stuck in a place that wears people down with its continuous demands, with endless cycles of almost keeping up, hoping to get somewhere that is ever out of reach.

While women may bear the form they speak of more acutely than others do, during the pandemic, burnout seems a fairly widespread reality. We wonder how much longer …

And this adds to other sources of burnout:

Overwork or, conversely, Inactive and Isolation

Grief

Loved ones in peril

Overwhelmedness

Anxiety

Unreasonable demands whether from others or our own selves.

BURNout sounds like something that leaves us in ashes.

So this Ash Wednesday ashes are worn in honesty: God, we do not have the resources we need within ourselves. HELP US!

Fingers dipped in dust, we take our soiled hands and retrace the cross made on our brows at our baptism.

We recall the gracious one who holds us, even as we confess we cannot hold it together.

Lenten ash and baptismal oil cross each other’s paths.

The way out of our burnout begins by leaning into the mercy we know in Jesus.

Jesus leads us on right paths toward true wholeness and restores our weary, soiled souls.

Jesus teaches us sometimes we should simply lean on him and that is enough.

We bear this smudge on our brow, an act of honesty about where we find ourselves, an act of trust about where we will find hope.

Broken in our hearts, we turn to the one who has broken into this world as Mercy itself.

Created of dust we look to the Creator that we might walk the earth well.

Diminished to dust by all that we “just cannot”, we entrust ourselves to the spirit who brings life out of chaos.

About Philip Ruge-Jones

After I served for eighteen years as a professor of theology at Texas Lutheran University, my family decided to return to the Midwest where my wife and I grew up, attended college and seminary. Read more...