Ash Wednesday: The Day of Dirty Foreheads or Affirmation of Creation?

I think I was ten or eleven. I had gotten to school a bit early that day, so I was one of the first kids in homeroom. When a classmate shuffled into the room, I resisted the urge to say, “You...umm...have a lil' something on your face.” After four or five more students came in with what looked like dirt on their foreheads, I figured it couldn't just be a coincidence. Those students were Catholic, and that was my first introduction to Ash Wednesday. I simply hadn't heard of the tradition until that morning, when some of my friends explained it to me. By the time they arrived at school, of course, most had inadvertently smudged it to the point of being completely unrecognizable as a cross. 

To be replaced with a picture of my own smudged forehead later 

Over the next several years, my opinion of the Day of Dirty Foreheads (as I called it then) didn't change much. I thought it was weird, silly even. It was a mostly-empty and superstitious ritual, one of the vestiges of medieval Catholicism. Part of me wondered if God cared at all whether my classmates had ashes on their forehead, or if He shared my own reaction to it. Today, I realize that my bias against the imposition of ashes was mostly a result of being raised as a low-church Methodist. We simply didn't “do that sort of thing.” 

My distaste for religious practices that involve a material aspect grew in high school, when I set up a dichotomy in my mind between the physical world and the spiritual one. I believed one of the main points of religion was to reject materiality, or at least to ignore it. Our bodies would die one day, our souls drifting up to heaven forever. The physical earth itself, as well as the universe, would be destroyed (hopefully in the far distant future). This was all part of God's plan. The sooner we realized that our bodies and earthly substance were irrelevant from God's perspective, the better. It's what's inside the head and heart that counts. What purpose did the imposition of ashes, baptism, and the Lord's Supper have other than as purely symbolic acts?

Skip forward in time several years. Later this evening, I'll be receiving ashes at my Lutheran church. Suffice it to say that my opinion on Ash Wednesday has evolved since I was a kid. So has my view of the material world. Those ashes won't secure my salvation. They won't effect forgiveness of sins, nor are they intended to. But to me, feeling those ashes on my forehead is a strong affirmation of the fact that God is the originator of the earth as much as He is of the heavens. He created this world, and He declared it to be good. He gave us custodianship over it and over our bodies, both of which we have abused and mistreated. In spite of this, and contrary to the popular idea that the Christian hope is to escape this rock before it falls to pieces, God hasn't given up on us or on any of His creation. To do so would have marked His greatest defeat at the hands of the powers of sin, death, and decay. 

Instead, we're promised that one day, Heaven and Earth will be fused together, and that He will then restore our bodies to us along with the ground on which we walk. For now, the ashes I receive are a reminder of my mortality and need for repentance. But if Jesus defeated death for all of us in his Resurrection, then our physical and moral frailty isn't a permanent condition. When he returns, we will become like him. With bodies no longer able to get sick or die, no one will be able to say of us, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” I'll take that vision of eternity over playing a harp on a cloud any day.