Yesterday, we remembered Michelangelo, the famous artist of the Italian Renaissance.  We talked about how by fusing his belief in God with his immense creative ability, Michelangelo produced art that, from a number of standpoints, affirms the near limitless possibilities of the human imagination.  
     In contrast, today, we remember our limits.  As we think about Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, we are reminded that whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, returned to the earth from which it has come.  Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.

     Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  Yet Michelangelo's vision remains with us still.  True, as Ash Wednesday reminds us, we are thoroughly material beings.  But we are spiritual beings, too, physical creatures with spiritual form and transcendent vision, created by a present and always God.
     Our life is ending, yet our possibilities are endless:  death is only the beginning.