Ring around the rosy,

Pockets full of posies,

Ashes, Ashes,

We all fall down!

 

Did you ever sing that song when you were a child? I remember singing and twirling around in a circle with friends, arms linked, until the very last word, when we’d all drop to the ground in fits of giggles before standing to dance around once more. Over and over, we’d sing and circle and fall and stand again. It was only when somebody’s older sibling told us that the song was really about people dying from the Bubonic Plague that we gave up the game in alarm. 

A lot of nursery rhymes are rather alarming, even macabre, on closer inspection. Jack and Jill tumble down the hill with a broken crown. Humpty Dumpty is so broken up that no one can put him back together. Four-and-twenty blackbirds are baked alive and served to the king still chirping, and in the second verse one of them bites off the maid’s nose! The rock-a-bye baby’s cradle comes crashing down out of the tree. Children often don’t seem to notice or even care about these lyrics, cheerfully going on singing and dancing and laughing until somebody makes a fuss.

Ash Wednesday has me reflecting back on that “Ring Around the Rosy” song. It’s an odd juxtaposition: a singsong tune and joyous laughter along with lyrics that warn of the symptoms of plague and the looming threat of death. “We all fall down” was a joke to first-graders. It’s a looming threat to adults. We know very well that we will all “fall down” one day or another, that death comes to each of us, and not on a timeline of our own choosing.

Even as I reflect on the Ash Wednesday reminder: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” I also remember particular people whose foreheads will never be marked with an ashy cross again, those dear ones who have taken their last breaths. Family, friends, neighbors, classmates. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Is that really the end of the rhyme? I wonder. When children sing and play, the fallen ones always stand back up again, often with laughter and smiles. We laughed in the face of the fall. We knew that we would get right back up again. Even when the words have ended, the game isn’t over until the players rise.

I realize that’s how it works on Ash Wednesday, too. It’s true at every reminder of death: every funeral, every tragedy, every piece of bad news. Even when we seem to have run out of words, even when we have fallen down: it’s not over until we rise. Of course, we do not rise by our own power like children at play. We rise by the Holy Spirit’s power in us. We rise like Christ who rose from his tomb. We rise like the breath of God that first breathed life into the dust of the earth to create humanity.

By death’s hand, we all fall down. That’s the fact we cannot avoid. By God’s power, we all rise up. That’s the promise we trust.

Who knows? We might even learn to trust enough to laugh as we fall down.