The Lessons of the Ashes on Ash Wednesday

“Remember, man, that thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return.”—Genesis 3:19

For many – perhaps most – Western Christians, today is Ash Wednesday. It is the official beginning of the penitential season of Lent, leading up to the glorious celebration of Christ’s Resurrection at Easter. Many will be fasting and spending extra time in prayer. And many will attend worship services in which they will have ashes placed upon or rubbed on their foreheads, even as a minister intones the words above this article.

Those ashes and those words are a draw because they tell us something fundamentally true about ourselves. They free us by teaching us the limits we possess in ourselves and remind us that it is only by allowing God to transform us that we can reach our true potential.

Some people might find such a service depressing or even morbid. Why would anybody want to focus on the fact that death is inevitable? The truth is, however, that a lot of people do. Ask any Catholic priest, and you’ll find out Ash Wednesday ranks with Christmas and Easter as one of the most popular days of the year to go to Mass—even though it is not a “holy day of obligation” on which Catholics are obliged to attend, as the other two are. I suspect the same is true in most other Christian bodies.

As with any complex phenomenon, there are multiple reasons for this popularity. I suspect that one of the big ones today is that the rite of receiving ashes is a concrete and bodily thing. We, modern people, live much of our lives virtually (and thus in our heads!) even as we understand intuitively that we are not just spirits but a living combination of body and intellectual soul. Our bodies both express what is in our souls and affect those souls.

We can read or hear about our mortality, but how much more powerful to have ashes, which are the leftovers of something burned, placed upon us as we hear the words about our mortal nature.

I suspect that the very reality of the hard truth spoken to us in word and deed is another aspect of the popularity. We live in an age of flattery and salesmanship. We are ever being told happy and positive words about our situation, particularly about the possibilities of living ever longer, ever younger, ever fitter. Fifty is the new thirty! Seventy is the new fifty!

While we do give thanks for the benefits of modern developments in medicine and health, we all know deep down how fragile we are, how age and indeed death come for us all. The ashes and the command to remember this free us from the burden of false optimism and guilt if we are sick or in decline.

But those words of command do more. They are what God declared to our first parents after they had disobeyed Him, their loving Father. The ashes and the words remind us not just of the death of our bodies, but of the sin that is deeply connected with it. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.”     

The ashes represent our mortal bodies and also our souls, weighed down by sin. Indeed, the wearing of ashes is a venerable symbol used by those in the Bible to show their humility and their repentance. Around the year 1000 A.D., the Anglo-Saxon homilist Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham, wrote about what this practice of putting on ashes on the Wednesday meant. “We read,” he preached:

In the books, both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of our Lent that we strew ashes upon our heads to signify that we ought to repent of our sins during the Lenten fast.

Job, Mordecai, Daniel, the repentant King of Nineveh in the book of Jonah, and the whole body of Israel, in several cases, wore ashes at various points to show their repentance.

It is that action itself that really unlocks our possibilities. Ultimately, while we can care for our bodies in this life, they will not last. But our inner man, the soul, can be cleansed and remade if we turn to the Lord for healing and forgiveness. For Christians, it is being in Christ that allows us to act and think in ways that we never would have if we did not have the hope of eternal life. It is the grace of Christ that allows us to lead lives of true repentance, always turning back to the Lord even if we stumble and fall.

It is being in Christ that gives us renewal, even if our fifty looks like the new seventy. Or worse. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that “we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day.”

Those ashes that tell us what our bodies will be are also the symbols of the repentance by which our souls can be renewed. We can choose over and over to be conformed to the mind of Christ because of His grace. His promise for those who have thus turned and chosen Him is that He will raise them again, clothing souls in new bodies that will no longer return to dust.

These are the lessons of the ashes. It is no wonder that this day is so popular.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.