On Love and Painting with Ashes

Today is Valentine’s day! Annnnnd…. Ash Wednesday.  

While the aesthetics feel very different from one another (a little Wednesday Addams/Enid Sinclair, or Barbenheimer) I found myself reflecting today on how Creativity connects this seeming duality.

First, a little context: 

Ashes bear a special significance in the Christian faith. The ashes used in services are often ashes from the previous year’s Palm Sunday fronds, or a special sign of worship used to celebrate the kingship of Jesus. The palm fronds are waved around, awkwardly held, twisted into a cross… This sign of worship and excitement for the king of Jesus is then destroyed, green turns to grey, and the ashes are painted across a person’s forehead.

“Higher” churches with liturgies and structures do artistic signs like these with regularity. They mark special dates on a “church calendar,” a schedule that has its roots in Catholicism (and before that, in Jewish festivals). But in my extremely limited experience, I’ve found that Ash Wednesday is kind of a special favorite even among “lower” churches like the ones I’ve most often found myself in, and I was disappointed today to realize I wasn’t going to make it to an Ash Wednesday service. 

Overwhelmingly, the text associated with the holiday is taken from Genesis 3:19: “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” 

So I’ve often seen the holiday treated as a sort of memento mori to Christians: a reminder that we will die. 

But I think it begs the question: if we were just dust, and if we are apparently going to be dust again, then why… are we more than dust, for a little while? 

The answer can be found in Valentine’s day: Love.

God loved… dust. “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person.”

God gave us a little eskimo kiss, and He gave to us out of Himself–gave His very breath. 

Have you ever looked at someone and felt your breath catch in your throat? Have you ever taken a deep breath because you were nervous to tell someone something? We bear the breath of God, and when we love, as God loved, our breathing reflects that! 

Valentine’s day (the way I celebrate) is an incredibly joyful reminder that we are deeply, profoundly loved. In fact, the creation account details that God made not just man, but woman–in other words, that He valued diversity from the very beginning! He doesn’t just love “humanity,” but He loves individuals. He’s specifically formed you and me and made us different and given us life that is unique from one another. 

Ash Wednesday is a reminder that we came from dust, that we’re just… stuff. Until Love made us alive. 

But it’s also a reminder of death and brokenness. We’re told that we will return to dust as part of the curse of a life apart from God, part of the consequence of the choice we made in the garden to value Knowledge of Good and Evil and independence over trust and intimacy with God. 

Did you know painting ourselves with Ash the way we do on Ash Wednesday is actually a command in the Bible several times? Prophet after prophet paints himself in ashes and calls for God’s people to do the same. 

Love is not just a nice feeling thing, particularly in this world that’s dying. Love contains the seeds of grief, and as long as there is brokenness and death in the world, love without grief is impossible–from the small griefs of feeling misunderstood, to feeling empathy when someone you love experiences disappointment, to bigger griefs of watching someone you love destroy themselves with an addiction.

What can you do with love, in the face of death? 

The Biblical answer is not to live in denial of death, but to embrace it. To believe it can be transformed into something beautiful. To paint ourselves with ashes. 

Just as God’s love sparked creativity–the artistic creation of us–and transformed ashes into something beautiful, we are invited to take our love and use it to re-form grief and destruction into life and hope. 

I pray you know how loved you are today, fellow dustling. I pray you don’t harden your heart to the difficult death in loving others.

Take a deep breath. 

And paint yourself in ashes.