Remember that you are dust
And to dust you shall return.
Today has been a day of juxtapositions. Of celebration and mourning. Of love and death. Of remembering the joy of life and being reminded of the violence within us.
We shouldn’t have to call our loved ones to make sure they are safe from the latest mass shooting. We shouldn’t have to fear for our family’s safety at a city-wide celebration. We shouldn’t have to be thankful that we chose not to go.
Yet here we are. Another day. A now-familiar swirl of emotions, from anger to fear to weeping to thankfulness to joy to anger. And the knowledge that tomorrow I will wake up and the world will have moved on, except for those twenty-two people and their families. For the rest of us, tomorrow will bring a return to routine, to our busy schedule of meetings and deadlines and chores because the world will go on because it must go on.
But the world is what we make it.
If the celebrations of today taught me anything, it’s that we can change tomorrow. That the way we are today doesn’t have to be the way we are tomorrow. That a series of bad days don’t have to define our lives.
We are dust, and God creates beautiful things out of dust.
We begin by recognizing who we are. The violence today was committed by two or three or four people, and while it would be easy to say they don’t represent us, in truth we all harbor that same capacity for violence. And we all contribute to the systems that both allow and perpetuate it. We are violent. I am dust.
But we need not remain that way. There is hope. There is redemption. There is peace and love and joy, if not before us today then on the horizon.
Change takes courage. It takes work. It takes heart. It takes commitment, day in and day out, when the whole world is watching and when we are alone. Change is possible. Change is coming.
Maybe change is already here, within us.
Although we are dust, dust does not have the final word. To dust we shall return, yet we live on, long after dust is gone. Because we are love, and love moves us, transforms us. And we know, deep in our soul, where who we are resides, that in the end love wins.