For everything there is a season,and a time for every matter under heaven:a time to be born, and a time to die.

These opening lines from the book of Ecclesiastes say that there is a season for everything. There is a time to be born. There is a time to die. Such a time it is, for we are in the season of Lent. And if ever there is a time that the Christian faith dwells on death, practices it, even celebrates it, surely it is this time of Lent.

Lent began on Ash Wednesday with those solemn words of death: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

And in the words of the Psalmist, "You turn us back to the dust and say, 'Go back, O child of earth.' "

We receive the ashes of Ash Wednesday as a sign of our mortality: a precursor of our own death and those final words: "Ashes to a…