"Ash Wednesday is a day for honesty, a realistic assessment of the human heart. By tradition it is a day when we assert (unfashionably but rightly) the sinfulness of our nature, and ask God to 'create and make in us new and contrite hearts,' and many kneel to have ash placed on their foreheads in the shape of a cross. But even in the stringent days of Lent there is a complimentary truth which also needs affirming. We may be dust, but we are dust that is full of mystery and that dreams of glory; dust (we sense) that is to be changed, transfigured, into God's own likeness."

-----Michael Mayne, "Pray, Love, Remember"