Dust in the Wind

I close my eyes

Only for a moment and the moment's gone

All my dreams

Pass before my eyes with curiosity

Dust in the wind

All they are is dust in the wind

I am riding in the car with my husband, talking about problems, and the beginning of this song pops into my head. It brings tears to my eyes and a heartache. I find it on my phone and play it over the speaker.

Later my husband tells me how hearing the song moved him to tears too. How suddenly he remembered that a hundred years from now he would be in his grave and no one would remember him or his problems or his achievements. But that eternity is forever. Eternity should be our only focus.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

I remember Ash Wednesday, receiving those ashes, grieving over all I had read in the Epstein Files. Feeling God whisper, “I see all. I have always seen.”

Eternity will overwhelm everything. Eternity is all that matters.

The next day I play piano at a funeral mass. It is a common scenario that breaks my heart every time, the product of children put through public schools and secular colleges and fed godless media. The grandmother who died was a practicing Catholic. The children are nominally Catholic. The grandchildren know nothing about Catholicism. I watch as one of the granddaughters, seeing the priest and deacon bowing, bows to her grandmother’s cremated ashes. She doesn’t realize that the Catholics in the room are bowing to the Presence.

The Presence sees all. The Presence is always there. The Presence has lived in all the Hosts of the world since the Last Supper two thousand years ago. It is not dust. It is divine.

That night I play piano at the vigil mass and afterward go to the chapel to soak in the Presence as long as I can before getting back home to nurse the baby. For Lent I am reading and praying “The Hours of the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ” by Servant of God Luisa Piccareta.

In the book, Jesus prays to the Father, “‘Now, allow Me to be incarnated in each Host, to continue their salvation and be Life for each one of my children…. Otherwise, where shall they go? Who will help them? Our works are eternal, my Love is irresistible, hence, I cannot leave my children, nor do I want to.’ … Jesus, my Life, I kiss Your most holy Face… I see it bleeding, livid and swollen. The souls, O Jesus, come before the Holy Host, and with their indecent postures and evil conversations in Your Presence, instead of giving You honors they give You slaps and spittle. And You, just like in the Passion, receive them all with peace and patience, and You bear them all…”

Sitting there in the chapel, I am struck to the heart. I think of all the times I have witnessed the continuation of His suffering in the disregard people show for His Presence. Passing by in the narthex with not a glance. Chattering loudly, distracting and detracting in the sanctuary. Being embarrassed to genuflect fully to their King and Creator.

I hear, “Write.” I ask Him what I should write, and the memories start flowing.

I remember being a Protestant teenager and the painful longing I had for God’s Presence, hiding in my family’s laundry room to escape the bustle of a busy household and lighting candles and praying with icons. How the first time I stepped into the Presence, as a Protestant who knew nothing except the emptiness I was running from, I felt Him, and knew.

I remember praying once for loved ones and feeling God’s grief pierce me straight from the Tabernacle as He confided in Me how deeply sad He was because those people did not visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament. That He wanted me to pray for them to love Him in the Blessed Sacrament.

I remember seeing the Tabernacle once on a Corpus Christi Sunday start shaking and glowing, so that I got goosebumps, got scared, and left the chapel.

And then it overwhelms me: gratitude. Deep joy. That I am here in His Presence! How deeply miraculous! What a precious and unsurpassed gift! That the Lover of my Soul, the Bridegroom, has satisfied my yearning for His Presence and led me to the chapel, to His very feet, to be filled with and held inside His very Heart