Dust

Dust is our beginning.

            It is also, most certainly, our end. "You are dust," said God to Adam, before tossing him out of the Garden of Eden, "and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19).

            Dust is a blessing and a curse.

Now, scientists tell us, dust is also a dramatic part of daily living. With every breath we take, we suck in tens of thousands of particles. Although we cannot see it, each of us walks the earth in a cloud of dust, shedding fragments of skin and bits of lint torn from our clothes through friction. One can measure it in microns, which is the type of measurement you can count on the head of a pin.

Some of it is harmless, but some of it is deadly. Dust has swept away whole civilizations, burying dinosaurs so fast that they never got off their nests and suffocating all those folks you see in Pompeii, caught forever with a cry on their lips.

            Science journalist for the Discovery Channel Hannah Holmes suggests that by age 6, our children have consumed at least a cup and a half of pollen, pesticides, lead, dander, and fibers.

            In her book The Secret Life of Dust, Holmes promises an exploration of the various lives of dust, or more exactly, particulates. Those who watch the popular television series Bones will remember that “the king of the lab” often refers to particulates. 

Some dusts menace the planet and its living residents. Some are beneficial to people, plants, and animals. Many are merely fascinating. All are going under the microscope. And the secret lives of dust are being revealed. 

She tracks the enormous dust streams that pour across from Saharan Africa, fertilizing South American rain forests, and that carry the Gobi, particle by particle, across the Pacific Northwest. She also reports that our every human action produces tons of the stuff, from tire dust to the invisible clouds that arise from cooking, vacuuming, gardening and powdering baby. A whole dust food chain lives off it, fungi to mites to cockroaches, and their decomposing bodies and droppings add to the mess.

In essence, dust is everywhere and unstoppable. Every breath you take brings 150,000 to 1 million specks—depending on the grubbiness of your environment—into circulation in your lungs. Many will wash out on the tide of exhalation, but not a lot of those industrial dusts, or asbestos dust, or quartz dust—all of which stay to kill you. Then again, Holmes is quick to admit, do not discount those dust bunnies skulking under the sofa that “contain everything from space diamonds to Saharan dust to the bones of dinosaurs and bits of modern tire rubber.” Then again still, dust fires the hydraulic cycle and gives birth to the stars and the heavenly bodies; every patch of the Earth is made of melted dust.

Did dust start the Ice Age? Did it end it? Does dust help suppress asthma? Does space dust form noctilucent clouds, which were first identified in 1885 after a volcanic eruption?

Dust might be vital to life on our planet (and may, in fact, even be responsible for it). Yet, she also refers to it as this "heartless little brute" that could also be responsible for the deaths of millions. She is not talking about dinosaurs. (Or at least not just yet.)

We are swimming in it. It covers us. We might very well have come from it, and--surely, eventually--we will become it.

Fascinating facts from the book:"...you breathe about 700,000 of your own skin flakes each day" "...a cup of flour... isn't legally filthy until it contains about 150 insect fragments and a couple of rodent hairs" "...the average child eats 15 or 20 milligrams of dust a day, and superslurpers eat 30 to 50 milligrams."

Dust. It is downright disgusting.

We live in a dusty, musty, and rusty world. The dust is here. It will not go away.

Allow me for a moment to take this natural reality and apply it to spiritual life.

Some dust is harmless. We do not need to have any concern about that.

Some dust will actually help us with some forms of disease. We need to pay attention to that and learn what we can.

Some dust is deadly. We need to learn to protect ourselves from it.

The prayer of Jesus in John 17:1-11 includes the prayer the holy Father would protect his disciples from contamination by the world. We part of a culture, rather than isolated from it. We have to take the risk of what involvement means. As long as we are creatures of the earth, we will not live in a dust free environment. The point is that the intimacy of the relationship between the Father and the Son moves us toward such an intimate relationship with Father and Son that we can discern what is contaminating in the world from what is not.

I guess that means we need to maintain that type of intimacy with God.