Dear Father,
I have to work on Ash Wednesday. Is it a mortal sin to not get ashes? If so, can I make my own and put them on myself? Also, what do I tell my friends who quote Matthew 6:16 to me?
-Edie
Dear Edie,
While it’s customary for Catholics to go to Mass on Ash Wednesday and receive ashes on their head, it’s not a mortal sin to miss Mass on Ash Wednesday, or are ashes on your head absolutely necessary. Ash Wednesday is not a holy day of obligation.
I hasten to caution you against making your own ashes, too. It may be dangerous. I’ve heard a fellow Dominican tell of a non-Catholic minister who wanted to introduce the Catholic custom of ashes on Ash Wednesday. During the day, the congregants were rubbing the place where he had imposed ashes. As the ashes fell off, a red cross appeared on each forehead.
The minister went to the Catholic priest and told him what had happened and asked if this happens to Catholics, too. The wise priest asked the minister where the ashes that he used had come from. The minister replied that he simply took some ashes from his wood-burning stove and mixed them with a bit of water. What the poor minister didn’t know was that when wood ash is mixed with water it becomes lye, which is extremely alkaline and burns.
The ashes we use in the Catholic Church come from burning the old and left-over palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. (I guess you could say that we’re very “green!”) Some Catholic parishes have a palm-burning ceremony before Lent. Others purchase ashes from a special company.
I’ve also heard of Catholic clerics who want the ashes to be darker or stickier, so they add graphite or oil to the ashes, making a kind of paste. Both are bad ideas. The imposition of ashes is not a matter of theatrics, after all.
Ashes are a sign of penance. That’s why we start Lent with ashes imposed on our heads. In the United States, the customary way to impose ashes is to make a sign of the cross on the forehead with the words “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” based on Genesis 3:19. See also Ecclesiastes 3:20 refers to both beasts and humans who are made from dust and return to dust.
An optional Ash Wednesday formula is “Repent, and believe in the Gospel.” The first formula expresses more clearly the meaning of the ashes, namely our mortality and dependance on God for our very lives.
Job (41:3) covers himself in ashes and dust to demonstrate his sincere sorrow for offending God with his proud words. Esther (ch 4), even as a queen, covered her head with ashes and dung as part of her prayer of repentance on behalf of her kin. When Jonah (having been vomited from the whale) preached repentance in the non-Jewish city of Nineveh, they all begged mercy from God, beginning with the king, who put on sackcloth and sat in a pile of ashes, and commanded all the people to do the same.
Receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday, though not obligatory, is important because we all need to be reminded that we are not our own. Our bodies and our souls belong first to God. When we forget whose we are (God’s) and His love for us, we tend to think we are our own masters. This kind of pride always leads to sin. Humility and repentance are the hallmarks of a Christian life every day, not just during Lent.
Those who quote Matthew 6:16 often use it as a prooftext against receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday. In that text, our Lord says that when we fast should not alter our appearance so as to show others that we are fasting. In ancient times, fasting accompanied the wearing of ashes.
Our Lord is not against outward penitential practices, per se. He warns that mere externals by themselves are not what save us from our sins and transform us. Christ is teaching us that God wants our interior to match the exterior, and that what we do to please Him in the secret of our souls is more important than putting on a show of holiness for others to see.
Consider that Christ also mentions wearing sackcloth and ashes when He upbraided people who refused to repent (Matt 11:20-24). He compares the unbelievers with those foreign peoples who repented and used the external signs of sackcloth and ashes to show their humility.
The wearing of ashes on Ash Wednesday is a sacramental. It is meant to help us on the road to heaven by calling ourselves to detach from this world and focus on the things of God and heaven. The ashen cross on our foreheads (or, in some places such as Rome, the ashes sprinkled on the crowns of our heads) should reach deep within our souls and cause us to hate the sins that prevent the reign of God from having first place.