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For a long time I was accustomed to experiencing Ash Wednesday as a private apocalypse, a time of self-revealing. The fire of Ash Wednesday burned away my defenses, revealing the pain that I carried, the sins that burdened me, the challenges I intended to face in my Lent. I was accustomed to facing my own mortality. 

Now as I walk through Ash Wednesday each year, my own mortality is no longer uppermost in my mind. Three years ago I came to church on Ash Wednesday with my eight-month-old daughter Julia in my arms. It would have been easier not to go at all, especially with a baby, but everywhere around me the world is burning.  

Fire news seems nearly constant these days. Every year I brace my emotions for the American wildfire season, the horrific images from California, Texas, Montana, Georgia — the walls of flame, the acrid smoke, the race to evacuate, the tragedy of those unable to escape. But the whole world is on fire. In 2019 millions of acres of the Amazon biome burned, much of it intentionally, through slash-and-burn deforestation with the blessing of the Bolsonaro government. Tens of millions of acres of land burn in Australia. Canada burns, Siberia burns, even Greenland burns. The world's boreal forests are burning at a rate higher than at any time in the last 10,000 years. Hundreds of millions of animals die.  

Wildfire terrifies me, but in fact our entire civilization is rooted in fire. The vast majority of the burning that surrounds us is not wild but industrial in nature: the burning of fossil fuels in manmade combustion engines of all sizes. The burning of fossil fuels is profoundly unnatural; it has no niche, no place within the boundaries of fire ecology. And its existence rests squarely on our own shoulders. Fire historian Stephen Pyne writes, “The act of exhuming, burning, distilling, or otherwise processing fossil biomass is humanity's alone. If people leave the scene, the principles of industrial fire leave with them.... Humans are not simply disturbers: we are what make the system work.” (1)  

Every wildfire is made worse by a climate we are deliberately making warmer and weirder through the burning of fossil fuels. We have quite literally heaped ashes upon our own heads. On Ash Wednesday the irony is not lost on me.  

We are like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, walking around in the fiery furnace, every day. 

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On Ash Wednesday, now, I stare into the wreckage of the burn, looking not just at my own life but at what is uncovered in the world around me. Fire not only reduces bodies to ash; it turns our lives into stories. Julia sleeps on my chest as the service begins. My story is no longer my own.  

After the traditional reading from Joel, the choir begins to chant the psalm in stark plainsong. Here is the moment that astounds me, year after year: whereas the Roman Missal I grew up with prays Psalm 51 after Joel, the Book of Common Prayer saves that psalm for later in the service and places here instead Psalm 103. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy Name.... He forgives all your sins and heals all your infirmities.”  

I come prepared to “lament my sins” and “acknowledge my wretchedness,” as the opening collect states, and then each year, before I have even had a chance to bewail that wretchedness, the psalm brings me up short, and floods me with God's compassion and mercy. “He redeems your life from the grave,” the psalmist writes, “and crowns you with mercy and loving-kindness. He satisfies you with good things, and your youth is renewed like an eagle's.” It is a tremendous reminder for me, going forward to receive the ash, that my mortality is redeemed, that death is a renewal — not a negation but a transformation.  

Natural fire, unlike industrial fire, can create similar transformations. Some ecosystems have not only adapted to fire but become dependent upon it. Lodgepole pine and jack pine only open their cones and spread their seeds in the high temperatures of wildfire. At the same time, many animals have become adapted to the changes that fire brings to landscapes. Kirtland's warblers, for instance, only nest in the dense safety of those same jack pines recovering from wildfire. 

If natural fire does this for jack pines and warblers, how much more does God work in this way? God's fire burns the bush but does not consume it. It rests like tongues on our heads but does not singe us. Wherever we encounter it, God's fire uncovers reality and lays bare the truth. This is the way, I believe, in which Jesus embraced the image of fire and applied it to himself: “I came to bring fire to the earth,” he said, “and how I wish it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49 NRSV). The fire that Jesus applies is the clarifying, refining fire that tests and proves us. But that refining keeps us always on the edge of pain.  

I want this fiery untameable God, but still I grieve, because I look at the fires we create on earth and the real ash they leave behind, and the pain is overwhelming. Our wildfires now are often hotter and longer than they ought to be, making it harder for forests to recover. We show no signs of giving up our fossil fuels. What transformation is at work? Who do we become when we consign our neighbors, of whatever species, to the flames? Is there redemption for them, and for us? 

What will I tell Julia?  

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Here the striking words of Psalm 103 bring me to my knees again, with Julia sleeping soundly in my arms, her head pressed to the inside of my elbow: “As a father has compassion for his children,” the psalmist continues, “so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust.” 

Just as my wife and I will keep the story of Julia's birth and childhood, from the years her memory will be unable to harvest, so the psalmist tells me that God remembers the parts of me I cannot. God knows the beginning, and remembers our foolish earthiness. Bearing Julia's story, remembering the things she will not, is a weight, a responsibility, but one borne out of love and compassion and devotion. That weight teaches me a little something of the burden God bears of loving us, even though (maybe simply because) we are dust — simply because we are.  

What will I tell Julia? I will tell her that I believe — that I have to believe — that when species pass into extinction, when the fires rage and we hand over cranes and frogs and bacteria and hemlock trees to the flames of Molech, God remembers. God holds their memory, because God encompasses all that was, is, and will be. I grieve their loss, and entrust them to God. 

It is not enough, but it is a place to start. 

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. The priest’s words at the imposition are quiet, almost a whisper, meant for my ears alone. I do remember. And God remembers. The priest smears the ash on my forehead. I cannot see it but I can feel it, almost warm on my skin, in the same place where the waters of baptism were poured upon me, the same place where the chrism oil sealed me at confirmation. God remembers that, too.  

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In a burning world, Ash Wednesday is my narrow path through the fire, and Psalm 103 is the point on which that path balances. We walk through the fiery furnace, acknowledging that we are the ones who have set the flames. But we hold fast to God who remembers us, in grief and in hope, in death and in life.  

Let the cross be the sign of Christ's triumph; let the ash be the reminder of our own sin. If we have unleashed fire in a way that puts our own safety at risk, then let us bear the symbol of our shame on our bodies. Let our fires break us open like lodgepole pines, to release our healing. Let us praise God through it all. God help us to love the ash. 

1. Stephen J. Pyne, Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 158.