Do you know that feeling when you notice something wrong with someone’s outfit, but you are too embarrassed to tell them? Back in my divinity-student days, I once saw a fellow student come to class with what looked like dirt smeared across his forehead. I carried on chatting as though nothing were unusual, all the while wondering, “Whose basement was he cleaning that he managed to get so dirty?” A little later, another student walked in with the same “problem,” and then another.

It turned out that, although I had been attending church for years and had even begun studying theology, that day I encountered a religious custom that was new to me. Growing up, I was familiar with the concept of eating pancakes every day during the week that preceded Lent—I still remember my grandmother’s crepes as my favourite food—but I did not know about Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. The dirt smudge I was noticing for the first time that winter was, of course, ashes, and the church season we were about to embark on would take us to Easter. But Lenten math is such that it would take longer than forty days to get us there.

Liturgically, each Sunday in the church functions as a celebration of the resurrection, a proxy for Easter. In most Romance languages as well as Greek, the word for Sunday is “Lord’s Day”, whereas Russian goes further and actually uses the same word for Sunday and “resurrection”! So Sundays and a few major feasts do not count toward penitential seasons and involve a break in a fast if it is based on abstaining from certain kinds of food, as the Orthodox do, albeit not necessarily a full return to a normal diet. So although there are forty six calendar days between Ash Wednesday and Easter, as Sundays are not fasting days, Lent in Western church traditions ends up being exactly forty days-long.

The number forty carries deep symbolic weight in Scripture. It represents a time of testing, purification, transition, and preparation for a new stage in God’s work. We see it in the forty days of rain in the story of Noah and the flood, the forty years Israel spent in the wilderness, Moses’ forty days on Mount Sinai, Elijah’s forty-day journey to Horeb, and, most directly for Lent, Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the desert. We borrow that pattern for our own spiritual preparation, though the Gospel chronology and our liturgical calendar do not always align neatly. As one parishioner once asked me on Palm Sunday, “Has Jesus come out of the desert yet?” 

Admittedly, liturgically, we do move in and out of sync with the overarching narrative arc of Jesus’ life over the course of Lent. Symbolically, however, we do accompany Jesus through his three-year ministry to the final chapter of his life and its culmination. And historically, this forty-day period began as the final stage in the preparation of those who were about to be baptized at Easter. Early Christian converts often spent several years in formation, and Lent was their last, most intense period of prayer and self-examination before entering the Church. It did not take long for Christians to realize that lifelong believers, no less than new ones, could benefit from such a season of reflection and renewal, in line with the symbolism of the number forty.

Not every church tradition begins the season with Ash Wednesday, but those who do so use actual ashes, traditionally made by burning the palm branches used in the previous year’s Palm Sunday. In my interpretation, ashes carry three intertwined meanings. First, they remind me of my created status, which is both material and temporal, since the minister applying them does so with the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Second, following biblical Jewish practice, ashes signify mourning, sorrow, and sometimes repentance. And third, because these ashes come from burnt palm branches, they remind me of the fickleness of human nature that praises and elevates a person into an idol one day—waving the branches, shouting “Hosanna,” and welcoming them in triumph—only to call for them to be crucified a few days later. How often have we, too, turned on a dime in our relationships with God, public figures and mentors, loved ones, and even ourselves…

However, what is interesting is that in the Bible, to sit in ashes was to acknowledge that one’s life had gone astray, express grief, and seek a new beginning – but not necessarily because one had done anything wrong personally. In fact, ashes often seem to indicate mourning rather than repentance. For example, when Job sits among ashes after losing his family, health, and livelihood, he embodies human frailty in the face of random suffering that happens simply as “bad things happen to good people”. Tamar places ashes on her head and rends her robe after she had been violated, marking publicly both her personal anguish, the shattering of her social standing, and the sorrow caused by the callousness of her father, King David who failed to avenge the crime. Mordecai also mourns in sackcloth and ashes at the threat of his people’s destruction by the Persians, not because of his own failure. In a few other stories, however, ashes are explicitly the sign of repentance, often collective. The king of Nineveh descends from his throne to sit in ashes, acknowledging that even power returns to dust before God. Daniel in Babylon also prays in ashes on behalf of his people. But the shared element in all these scenes is that ashes bring human beings back to the dust from which we came—back to God, on whom we depend as our creator and sustainer. Overall, they seem to have less to do with acknowledging wrongdoing and more with acknowledging dependence, whether it is in light of one’s sin or sorrow, or both.

So, for me, the deepest mistake we may need to acknowledge and make amends for is precisely that we forget that we are dust—that we are creatures, not the Creator; that we are not necessarily the crowning glory of all creation, but creatures made of the very same elements as the rest of it—carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. We share these elements with nature, and depend on other creatures for everything from the food we eat to the air we breathe. When our lives end, our bodies return to the earth, and new life grows from what we were. In that sense, all creation shares one substance and one destiny. But this destiny is far from worthlessness—its shared goal is to be gathered back together in Christ in eternity.

Thus, creatureliness is not humiliation. Rather, it is a call to humility and kinship: with other people, with all living beings, and with the earth itself. The ashes also remind me how brief my existence is in the vastness of time, how small I am on the cosmic scale, and yet how meaningful my choices are in the lives immediately around me. In our increasingly hurried and self-absorbed world, nearly everyone could benefit from a reminder of our shared fragility and interdependence, and from the chance to acknowledge what we have done and left undone.

On Ash Wednesday, then, we receive ashes in that spirit of reflection. Some wash them off afterwards in compliance with Matthew 6:16–18 that we read today, in which Jesus instructs his followers to fast in secret before God alone, anointing the head and washing the face, rather than appearing gloomy or dishevelled to impress others. However, in some church traditions, people do leave the ashes visible, partly out of respect for them as a sacramental sign, partly as a reminder that the day is special, or perhaps as a quiet sign that prompts conversation in public places. Many people also observe the day with simplicity—eating lightly, abstaining from meat, and setting aside entertainment.

What follows is the season of Lent itself: forty days of preparation for Easter, plus the six intervening Sundays. The word Lent comes from an Old English word meaning “spring,” which in turn derives from a Germanic root “langitinaz” meaning “the lengthening of days.” After acknowledging our dependence, created status, and need for renewal on Ash Wednesday, Lent invites us to remove the obstacles to spiritual growth. Traditionally, Christians either give up something that has become excessive or distracting—more from a stance of rest and simplification than punishment or testing one’s limits—or else add a practice that fosters depth and compassion. So, as a metaphor that will hopefully very soon become a reality, I can use what I have learned about tending roses, my new gardening passion! Lent is like allowing your rose to go dormant and rest over the winter, then pruning it when it wakes up to make room for new growth, and finally fertilizing to nourish it—and then watching it bloom, often all summer long!

What might you consider setting aside or taking on for forty days? Few of us would give up coffee entirely, but perhaps we might forgo the hyper-sugary concoctions, choose only fair-trade sources, or simply try to rely on it a little less. Some people tell me they might reduce or give up single-use plastic, desserts, alcohol, meat, or screen time. Whatever we relinquish can be replaced with something life-giving: family time, quiet evenings, journaling, prayer, study, or a creative project or theme that unfolds through the season. We might declutter instead of shopping, read a novel instead of doomscrolling, increase exercise and generosity… The possibilities are surprisingly rich.

The crucial question, however, is why we choose any Lenten practice. I believe it should be meaningful, never punitive because the impulse to appease a guilty conscience is already nearly universal. From early childhood, human beings develop a sense of shame. It is out of that shame that we cling to rituals and even invent our own forms of sacrifice, much as ancient peoples did. For many of us, the traditional Lenten set of disciplines—scripture study, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—can quietly become an attempt to make amends with and appeasing ourselves, rather than to return to God. Yet Scripture insists that God does not delight in sacrifice for its own sake. What God desires is deeper conversion: not a tally of our failures, but the recovery of our awareness that we are dependent on God and bound to one another.

This is why Lent is not meant to be the time of grim self-denial but a pause—a deliberate loosening of the frantic pace that erodes attention and relationship. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2018 Lenten exhortation:

“Pause a little, leave behind the unrest and commotion that fill the soul with bitter feelings which never get us anywhere. Pause from this compulsion to a fast-paced life that scatters, divides and ultimately destroys time with family, with friends, with children, with grandparents, and time as a gift…”

Ash Wednesday and Lent invite us into precisely such a pause: to remember that we are dust, yet beloved dust; finite, yet capable of love; small, yet responsible for one another. And in that remembering, to begin again.