Sacred Signs
by Romano Guardini

ASHES

ON the edge of the woods grows a larkspur. Its glorious blue

blossom rising on its bending stalk from among the dark green

curiously-shaped leaves fills the air with color. A passerby

picks the flower, loses interest in it and throws it into the

fire, and in a short moment all that is left of that splendid

show is a thin streak of grey ash.

What fire does in an instant, time is always doing to everything

that lives. The delicate fern, the stout mullein, the rooted oak,

butterflies, darting swallows, nimble squirrels, heavy oxen, all

of them, equally, sooner or later, by accident, disease, hunger,

cold,--all these clear-cut forms, all this flourishing life,

turns to a little ash, a handful of dry dust, which every breeze

scatters this way and that. All this brilliant color, all this

sensitive, breathing life, falls into pale, feeble, dead earth,

and less than earth, into ashes. It is the same with ourselves.

We look into an opened grave and shiver: a few bones, a handful

of ash-grey dust.

Remember man

that dust thou art

and unto dost shalt thou return.

Ashes signify man's overthrow by time. Our own swift passage,

ours and not someone else's, ours, mine. When at the beginning of

Lent the priest takes the burnt residue of the green branches of

the last Palm Sunday and inscribes with it on my forehead the

sign of the cross, it is to remind me of my death.

Memento homo

quia pulvis

est et in pulverem reverteris.

Everything turns to ashes, everything whatever. This house I live

in, these clothes I am wearing, my household stuff, my money, my

fields, meadows, woods, the dog that follows me, my horse in his

stall, this hand I am writing with, these eyes that read what I

write, all the rest of my body, people I have loved, people I

have hated, or been afraid of, whatever was great in my eyes upon

earth, whatever small and contemptible, all without exception

will fall back into dust.