A Mystagogia, 2010 The most terrifying words ever spoken are these: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. You are going to die. Perhaps not tomorrow, perhaps not next year, but as sure as you were born, so too will you die. We all enter the wasteland, the place where death shows us fear in a handful of dust. And the astonishing thing is that we take that handful of dust, mix it with oil, and mark upon our foreheads the symbol of an appalling murder. Like the woman who anointed Christ in Bethany, we are preparing ourselves for our own burial. We are walking with eyes open to Golgotha, the place of skulls, to be crucified. We return from the dark place in the ground from which we sprang. God crafted the human from the mire and the muck of the earth, fingers deep in soil, shaping it like a clay putty doll. This manikin the Creator called ha-Adam—not a name, but a moniker meaning creature of the dust, mudman, dirtclod, ash heap. The ...