We don’t have much day-to-day contact with ashes these days. Awood stove in the winter, a fireplace, a barbecue grill, an ashtray. None of these is particularly symbolic or even suggestive of anything spiritual. And yet we gather once a year in great numbers to receive a cross of ashes on our foreheads.
In a book on Celtic traditions, much of one chapter involved welcome and protection rituals for home and hearth practiced by the ancient Celts. Fire was seen as carrying the protection and providence of the sun itself, an “indoor sun” as it were. Ashes from the hearth fire were sprinkled at the threshold of the home at certain times of the year as a form of protection for the inhabitants.
Wood ash was used by our pioneer forebears to make soap. The chemical reaction between the tallow and the ash created a harsh but effective soap for skin and clothes, providing much needed cleansing for people who worked hard in difficult and dirty conditions.
In ancient cultures, ashes were used as a sign of mourning, a symbolic acknowledgement that the fires of life had left not only the one who had died but also those who were left to grieve.
And of course the legend of the phoenix, dying in a burst of flame and then rising again reborn from the ashes of its old self has become familiar once again to readers of the Harry Potter books, where Dumbledore’s phoenix Fawlkes plays a significant role.
We stand at the threshold of one of the holiest and most rigorous seasons of our church year. We are signed with the ashes of repentance, of awareness of our limitations, our need for conversion. But they are blessed ashes, holy ashes, and they hold also the promise of cleansing, protection, and most importantly, the promise of resurrection.
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