Ashes for the Redemption of All Creation
 

On Ash Wednesday, we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return, as God told the first human beings in the garden of Eden. The crosses on our foreheads, the smudged mixture of oil and ashes, are a sign that we are of the ground. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
 
Tertullian, a third-century church leader and theologian asked, “What is flesh but earth?” Tertullian saw, “muscles as clods, bones as stones, nerves as roots, veins as rivulet, and hair as grass.” As such “every living body incarnates the world.”
 
The ashes remind us that we are earth formations, that the material of our bodies is in solidarity with the rest of creation. All of life sprouts from the earth, flora and fauna together, each as part of the other. I was shocked to reading about a medical study several years ago which revealed that more than half of my body is not human—that, at a given moment, approximately 57 percent of my cells belong to other species. I contain multitudes: bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, a whole microbiome of life. Our bodies are microcosms of the world around us. Human life exists as an arrangement of mutual belonging with our environment. We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species. We are much of what is other to us, each of us teeming with other creatures. (If you want to know more about that study, you can read this article from the BBC).
 
When I’ve preached on past Ash Wednesdays, I’ve said that the ashes confront us with mortality – a reminder that life is a gift, not property, that we have no good reason to tighten our grip on possessions because everything is grace, because existence comes from God. All of that is still true for me.
 
But the ashes this year—after summers of unprecedented forest fires in the West, leaving blackened landscapes from California to Washington and carrying ashes all the way to the East Coast – remind me that we’re in this mess together, this planetary devastation we’ve instigated as human societies.
 
In his novel The Overstory, Richard Powers, cites this little known fact, “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.”
 
The palm ashes of the ritual affix us to cremated trees, our skin welcoming their remains into our bodies. The ritual displays our mutual belonging, that the material of their lives becomes ours. This liturgical practice offers a moment to contemplate the features of our relationship—to notice, for example, that we share the intimacies of breath: their oxygen and our carbon dioxide, a rhythm of inhale and exhale, one becoming internal to the other. The breeze carries the trees’ sighs to our lungs, as if conspiring with the God who breathed into the first human beings. Each tree in my neighborhood is the tree of life.
 
In the eighth century, the tree upon which Christ was killed appeared in a dream to a Northumbrian poet. “I beheld the sorrowful tree of the Savior,” the author of The Dream of the Rood recounts. “It began to bleed on the right side.” The wounded tree soon moaned sounds that became words. “I was cut down from the edge of the woods…They seized me there, these enemies, who made me into a rood, a spectacle.” The crucified tree describes the moment when the soldiers execute Jesus. “They pierced me with nails; on me are the wounds visible…I was all drenched with blood poured out from that man’s side.” The two are victims of human violence together. The story of Jesus cannot be told without the story of the tree. The crucifixion fastens their identities to one another.
 
My favorite Christmas Carol is a poem written by a British Calvinist in 1761 and set to music by several composers across the years. The poem compares Jesus Christ to an apple tree…
 
The tree of life my soul hath seen,
Laden with fruit and always green;
The trees of nature fruitless be,
Compared with Christ the Apple Tree.
 
For happiness I long have sought,
And pleasure dearly I have bought;
I missed of all but now I see
'Tis found in Christ the Apple Tree.
 
I'm weary with my former toil -
Here I will sit and rest awhile,
Under the shadow I will be,
Of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree.
 
This fruit doth make my soul to thrive,
It keeps my dying faith alive;
Which makes my soul in haste to be
With Jesus Christ the Appletree.
 
On Ash Wednesday we are drawn into Christ’s relationship to trees. To receive the sign of the cross in ashes is to bear witness to a truth: that we are fragile, our bodies easily broken, our flesh an extension of this endangered world.
 
During our years together with our neighbors in this habitat, we wear ashes on our foreheads once a year as a kind of prayer—to offer ourselves as a walking plea for the redemption of all creation. For God to redeem our bodies involves a world of material relations, because other lives compose our own. We are composed of reciprocal attachments, bound up in mutual care for a life that possesses all of us. The ashes gesture toward our hope for a resurrection that will mean renewed life for each of God’s creatures.
 
Peace,
--Tony