What's so important about Ash Wednesday?  As billions of people around the world come together today to commemorate the beginning of what the Christian church calls Lent, all of us, whether we are religious or not, can learn something from their devotion.  Ash Wednesday is a call to humility.  It is a call to recognize that we are, indeed, ultimately no more than collections of chemicals which, one day, will be dust.  Ash Wednesday is a sign to all of us that life is not so much about getting what we want, for we did not cause ourselves to come into this existence, but about learning what we should from this life that we have been given.  It is a reminder that we are not to take from life as much as we are to give to it.  In Ash Wednesday and the forty day period of Lent that it initiates, we see that humility and circumspection and repentance are the foundation of what is most important in being human.  In contrast to the vapid frivolity of the Oscars a few days ago, Ash Wednesday underscores what many philosophers have labeled as humanity's central concerns:  guilt and death.  It is guilt because we live a life that we did not manufacture or make, a life that owes everything about it to forces infinitely beyond our control, a life that is lived in the grip of a morality we did not devise, and it is death because as we all know, regardless of how long we manage to postpone it, one day we all will die.  We cannot escape our mortality.
     Even if you do not celebrate Ash Wednesday, savor what it means.  Savor the goodness of humility, taste the joy of circumspection.  Bask in repentance and forgiveness, human and divine, and revel in resolving to admit humility, to know your place, to let go and move on.  And delight in Ash Wednesday's journey, its journey to the joy waiting for us at the end:  the remembrance and celebration of the reality of resurrection.
     God will yet win.