First show, doneburger. 🍔
Huge THANK YOU to everybody who tuned in to our first Sunday Sanctuary show on Today FM last Sunday!
If you missed it, we’ve now got the full show uploaded to the site here, plus a few highlights on Insta & Facebook, like this absolute gem from Matt Renata:
“Remember You are Dust”
I think we’re kind of allergic to death and the idea of our own ‘dust-ness’…
When I say ‘we’ I really mean some of us white well-resourced westerners - so many indigenous peoples the world over seem entirely at ease with talking about and then expressively mourning their dead.
This incredible opinion piece from Tish Harrison Warren published last year in The New York Times paused/stopped me in my tracks when a friend shared it recently.
Here’s a snippet:
Covid’s specter of mass death challenged any flimsy hope that we can control our lives and be rescued from mortality, loss and pain. For many of us, facing the immovable fact of death quite naturally raises questions about God. With nearly a million lives lost to Covid in the United States alone, more people find themselves longing for religious rituals that acknowledge mystery, meaning, horror and hope in death.
Oftentimes, by avoiding the truth of death, we end up stifling questions about the meaning of life, about God, about eternity and about who we are, what we are for, where we are headed and why anything matters at all.
There’s a moving old custom in my faith tradition where someone actually rubs ash on your forehead and says something to the effect of “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
I find something strangely freeing, rather than depressing, in that acknowledgement. There’s plenty of dust in my home and most of it is made up of our skin, so I’ve been told, which means there is an odd familiarity and closeness with it - in life and in death I’m turning into dust and that is the natural order, it is as it ought to be.
I don’t need to run and hide or fight it, in fact pausing and holding this idea makes it feel less foreign and frightening.
This coming Sunday we’ll be exploring a ‘Celebration of Doubt’, and you may have doubts about death, dust and much more so I’m keen to dig into more of this on the show.
So join me this Sunday 7-9am on Today FM! 🕯️