On Ash Wednesday, a cross is drawn on our foreheads with ashes and we hear the words God said to Adam and Eve after the Fall: “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return.” With their sin, they brought death into the world. And that “death” was not merely the end of this human life. Adam and Eve were always meant for a more profound union and communion with God after their earthly life. What they brought was the darkness of death as the negation of life.
Sin brings with it alienation from God, from others, and from ourselves. When we sin, we fail to become the just, loving, generous persons we set out to be. And in death, it seems as though this dissolution of the self and our alienation from God and others has reached its natural culmination. With its destruction now complete, sin’s grasp on us seems to have won its final victory.
Man’s days are like those of grass;
like a flower of the field he blooms;
The wind sweeps over him and he is gone,
and his place knows him no more. (Psalm 105) …..
