Ash Wednesday challenges us to see the depth of our delusions of grandeur: our enslavement to our own egos.

---

Lent is a corrective season. It is the time we adopt the things we all know we should be doing already. But this doesn’t simply apply to us individually or behaviorally.

The reminder we get on Ash Wednesday: to remember that we are merely dust and will one day return to the dust: is all about perspective.

About reestablishing perspective when our egos get so inflated that we think and act and believe that we are superhuman, permanent, and eternal entities.

Or that the rules of creation don’t really apply to us. Like when we pollute the world for profit – as if we don’t all live here.

This reminder: that we are the same stuff as all of creation: is the emergency break for our out-of-control egos. That we can take what we want and do what we want, without consequence.

The ashes remind us of our place as part of the cosmos.

That we aren’t gods.