Out Of The Ashes

We've had a touch of spring here in New York today. After the ice and snow and sleet of the last couple weeks...suddenly, a thaw. It's bracing and beautiful. And it's a happy reminder that spring is coming. It may be a while, but it will get here eventually.

Another reminder is the Christian calendar. Today is Ash Wednesday -- for Christians around the world, the beginning of the pentitential season of Lent (the 40 days leading up to Easter). So here's a little T.S. Eliot for you, from his epic poem Ash-Wednesday:

Pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

The poem, we're told, is a long and elegantly crafted meditation on Eliot's conversion to the Anglican Church in the 1920s.

These days, Ash Wednesday is notable as the one day in the year when churches are absolutely packed. It's a phenomenon no one can quite explain. But for some reason, Christians of all stripes, from the passive to the pious, just have to get ashes.

Here at CBS, your humble editor continued that tradition; I set up shop in one of the offices upstairs and invited those interested to come up and get smudged. (Frankly, I felt like a barber, waiting for customers...) About a dozen people wandered in -- including the President of CBS News and CBS Sports, Sean McManus -- and all walked away with the burnt marking on their brows.

It's a gesture that is being repeated around the world this day, in chapels and schoolrooms and basilicas and thatched huts, as countless millions come forward to present themselves to be marked -- and, perhaps, transformed. After the glitter of Mardi Gras comes the grit of this Wednesday ritual. Each of us becomes a kind of burnt offering, and hears anew the words of the minister as we are stained: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return."

It's not something you hear every day -- or think about every day. Which may be one more reason why this particular holy day exerts such a primal pull on so many of us.