The Mysterious Magic of Ashes

Dear friends,

I am posting a story I wrote several years ago, because it feels as timely now as it was then.

                                                            Ashes

            He was out there before I was on a frigid winter morning, loading firewood from his barn to the back of his truck.  It was 7:30, an hour past the agreed-upon meeting time.   I trotted over from next door, guilty of having overslept.  He was a country man, a father and a teacher, doing me a favor.  I’d equipped a barn with a wood-burning stove, but had no clue how to make it work.   He sold wood on the side, extra income for his family — beautiful cords that he split himself.  He’d offered to take part of his precious Sunday morning to stock me up.

            I followed his instructions: found a plastic sled, waited for his truck to pull up with the wood.  Together we slid it down the frozen hill, stacked it in a spot he thought best, then went out to look at the brilliant winter sky.  An hour had passed.

            “What do I owe you,” I asked.

            “Don’t worry about it,” he said.  “See how much you burn in the next few days and we can take it from there.”

            After four tries, I got a fire going.  Between stints of work, I‘d sidle over to the stove like a new mother and peer in.  Did it need another piece of wood?  Should I open the vents, or close them down?

            I learned a lot about stove fires that day.  Once a fire is concentrated, its capacity to create heat boosts exponentially.  It took an hour to climb from 39 degrees into the mid-40s.  From there, the thermostat hurtled to 60 in half an hour.

My grasp of physics is poor, but my experience of life is not.  A small blaze, well laid, whether in time or relationships, will warm many a space times bigger than we imagine.  By the time the sun fell below the trees, I found it hard to believe that all that heat would sink back to nothing, and come morning I would find just a pile of ash.

Lent begins with the ritual of Ash Wednesday, reminding us of our radical contingency. Dust to dust.  It goads us to imagine what our own small fires can warm and change in the blink-of-an-eye journeys we are on, before we turn to ash.  We are meant to ask the only question that matters:  in the midst of the world’s current infernos, how can I bend my days to the building of warmth and welcome?

            My neighbor gave two hours of a Sunday to provide me with wood, and the wood in turn rendered my barn habitable.  In the process, he also set down a small and gracious warmth between us, two people who until that moment didn’t know much about one another.   As we loaded and carried wood, I learned that he taught in a school where more than 75 percent of the kids are on government-supported meals, where the boys own, at best, two shirts to their names.  They rotate through these every school week, year in and year out, until they fall apart.  I learned that he rummages through his own closet to find anything he might pass along.  Behind the pickup truck, I discovered a man of generosity and inner strength.

I returned to my city home and the start of Lent with new eyes.  My neighbor gave up Sunday morning coffee in his bathrobe and slippers by his own fire to make one for me.  There is an inexorable equation to love and justice:  Until we give to strangers, willingly sacrificing our comforts for them, we are unformed, mere children of the spiritual life.

When I peered into the stove at the morning’s mound of ash, I saw shadow forms of the logs that had burned there.   I was, and am, still warmed by the gift of those ashes.

May the start of your Lent be filled with the mysterious gift of ashes, my friends.