We wait many long, cold, dark days until we can finally fall on our knees and dig deep into the ancient, fertile soil of the earth with our bare hands. There is deep memory there.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lord, have mercy.”

Coming from farming roots on both sides of my family, I recall sweet scents from my maternal grandmother’s garden, scents that made their way into her kitchen, filling the house with alluring aroma and welcoming my grandfather as he came in from the barn or the fields.

I remember planting 500 strawberry seedlings with my grandmother that hot summer many years ago, sweating, on my knees, yet cheerful because I was with my grandmother who loved me, and whom I loved. For many years afterward, we picked plump, ripe fruit from those plants, filling our freezer back in the city where my family lived.

As a newly ordained second career pastor with three children, I remember how I trembled on that first Ash Wednesday as I marked each of them with a cross of ashes on their foreheads: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lord, have mercy.”

Our firstborn loved to work with me in our modest garden in Eau Claire. Now he is married, and he and his wife live on 47 acres that include an organic farm plot. Their two sons work alongside them in the fields, and the aromas coming from their kitchen take me back to my grandparents’ farm.

In the second Creation story in Genesis, God creates “man” from the earth:

“. . . then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:7-9, NRSV).

Humanity is created from the dust of the earth, and to dust we shall return. We belong in our garden, for which we long.

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lord, have mercy.”

The French writer Voltaire closes his satirical novel, Candide, in a garden. Written as a rebuke of the philosophical optimism of the time, the novel puts its characters through calamity after calamity, sexual violence, war and pestilence, profanity and moral depravity. Near the ending, Candide, the protagonist, encounters a “worthy old man” who says, “I have but twenty acres . . . I cultivate them with my children; our work keeps at bay the three great evils: boredom, vice, and necessity.” Moved by the experience, Candide exclaims to his companions, “That worthy old man seems to have created for himself an existence far preferable to that of the six kings with whom we had the honor of dining.” Seemingly as an antidote to all the heartache and strife that has gone before, Candide then establishes a garden with his remaining friends, speaking the last words of the novel, “. . . but we must cultivate our garden.”

Recently I was in my garden, on my knees, when I received a phone call. “Can you come to the hospice center to pray with us?” Their beloved Mary was dying of ALS. After sharing scripture and prayer, I laid my hands on Mary’s forehead, “Rest eternal grant you, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon you.”  Returning home, I went back to my garden. The next morning, the news came while I was again in my garden, “Mary died in the night.” I fell to my knees, thrust my hands in the soil, and prayed, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Lord, have mercy.”

Link to our son and daughter-in-law’s farm, Middle Fork Farm, Oronoco, Minnesota: https://middlefork.farm/