I’ve been thinking a lot about dust lately. After all, I see it regularly.
Not metaphorical dust—just actual, ordinary, slow-settling dust. The kind that gathers on shelves you stop noticing. The kind that creeps in where no one goes. I used to brush it away every weekend, as if it were some sort of failure to keep things still and perfect. But these days I let it stay a little longer. I’m starting to think dust knows what it’s doing.
There’s something unsettling about dust—not because it’s messy, but because it’s quiet. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It waits. It accumulates in unnoticed places, and if you’re not paying attention, it makes itself at home. It’s not dangerous, exactly. But it shifts how a thing feels. What was once sharp and bright becomes… dulled. Veiled. Less urgent.
There’s a particular shelf in my house that holds a few things I rarely use—an old frame, a book I keep meaning to read again, a small bowl I once thought was beautiful. At some point, they stopped being objects and became something else: fixtures. Unquestioned. A little bit out of reach.
And that’s what I’ve been thinking about. How easy it is for something to rise—an idea, a title, a sense of self—and become untouchable. Not deliberately. Just quietly. Over time.
Thomas Aquinas said that order is the foundation of peace, and that humility is truth. But neither of those feel particularly fashionable in places where ascent is assumed to mean achievement. We’re good at climbing. Less good at remembering why we started.
Sometimes we climb so high, we forget the feel of the floor. We forget the people who stood below, holding the ladder. We forget that the view from above is often distorted. Cleaner, yes. But thinner. Like air that’s missing something essential.
I don’t think power always begins with corruption. I think it begins with forgetfulness. With the slow comfort of being above critique. With voices growing softer when we enter a room. With no one asking questions anymore—not even us.
The trouble is, we don’t notice when that happens. Because dust never announces itself.
I’ve started sitting lower in the chapel lately. I used to prefer the back row, (like a good Catholic) with the comforting perspective of watching everything unfold from a distance. But I missed the feel of the liturgy as movement, of being part of it. These days, I sit closer to the aisle. Close enough to see the shoes of the person in front of me, to hear the quiet shuffling, to notice who hesitates before stepping forward. To feel the swish of the thurible as the incense soars upwards.
There’s something sacred in remembering what it feels like to kneel on stone (even with bad knees).
There’s something holy about dust—not the kind we avoid, but the kind we return to.
And maybe it’s there, in the quiet accumulation of the ordinary, that we learn to tell the difference between what is elevated and what is merely aloft. Between what is polished, and what is true.
After all, she too was overshadowed—and still chose the low place (cf. Luke 1:35).
The Female Theologian 