Ash Wednesday - Lent is Not Rocket Science, with Bishop Knisely

From Bishop Knisely's new book published by Forward Movement. You can read the first week's meditations here, and download the ebook for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or iTunes at a discounted $1.99 price to follow along as we discuss this book the rest of Lent.

Ash Wednesday

First the Fire

And the fire will test what sort of work each has done.

— 1 Corinthians 3:13

Many Episcopalians and other Christians will have ashes placed on their foreheads in the sign of the cross today. And many congregations make their ashes the day before, by burning the palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday service.

When I was a parish priest, I started asking people in the middle of the season of Epiphany to bring in any palms that had been blessed and that they wished to recycle. We collected the dried-out palms in a bag in the sacristy during the weeks leading up to Lent. After the traditional pancake supper on Fat Tuesday, the day of celebration before Ash Wednesday, I gathered the children to help me with burning the palms.

Over the years I had perfected my technique: Find an aluminum baking pan, a large tin can, and three small, similar-sized rocks. Place the rocks in the bottom of the pan. Use a can opener to take the top and bottom off the tin can so that it becomes a large empty cylinder. Place the cylinder on top of the three rocks. (Children and parents often asked me why I used three rocks, expecting that it had something to do with the Trinity or Richard Hooker’s three-legged stool. I wish I had come up with a better explanation than the one that is the truth—it simply takes three points to make a stable balance for the cylinder.)

On Fat Tuesday I took the palms that we had collected and stuffed them down into the cylinder. I then used a long-necked butane lighter to light the palms on fire from the very bottom of the cylinder. As the bottoms of the palms smoldered, they gave off a growing cloud of tan smoke. Once the tan smoke was rising in a thick column, I put the long-necked lighter back down at the bottom of the can and made a new flame. That flame ignited the column of smoke into a column of fire, and the palms in the can rapidly turned to ash. (I always kept the children way back for this part, of course.) After the fire died out and the ashes were cooled, the children and I took forks and smashed the remaining ashes into smaller and smaller bits until only a fine powder remained. I used that fine powder the next day as the dust for Ash Wednesday. 

The reason the second small flame makes such a dramatic change in the way the palms burn is because when something “burns” what actually ignites are the gasses given off by the material that is decomposing in the heat. The gas is the release of all the complicated organic molecules that the palm tree gathered from the soil in which it grew and the atmosphere it breathed, then combined with the rainwater from the sky and the energy of the sunlight, and stored in the cells of its branches. The first fire that I lit started taking apart all that work, so that the organic molecules trapped in the cellulose of the palm would be freed and lit. The second flame I used ignited the gasses in the rising column of tan smoke, and their ignition created the small fireball and dramatic column of flame. 

I find it very evocative that the ashes we use on this day come from the destruction of the work of creation. The microbes and cellular creatures of creation labored for years to organize the minerals and chemicals that made up the structure of the leaf of palm. When we cut the leaf off the tree, taking it away from its source of nourishment and water, those cells began to die. They dried out and become mere husks of what they once were. But the fire of Fat Tuesday released the molecules back into the atmosphere so that a new plant could use them again. Fire, water, air, and Earth are all present in the moment of the creation of the ashes. And though we put the end product on our foreheads, the life-giving parts have been returned to creation to be used again and again.

In our own lives there are times when the fire must come to release the elements we’ve stored up in careful, complicated containers in our hearts. Ash Wednesday reminds us not to fear that experience but to see in it the wonder of God’s economy, the working out of the plan of creation and salvation.

Where is the fire going to come into your heart this Lent? 

And what will it release to others?

What needs to be broken down in you to release the fire of the Holy Spirit in your life this Lent?
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"Lent is Not rocket Science" was published by Forward Movement, a ministry of the Episcopal Church which publishes accessible low cost resources on discipleship written by the laity, clergy, and bishops of the church largely on a pro bono basis.