The Taste of Ashes
Sunset Over Desert Neighborhood Street by Chris Townley
Dr. Chris Townley has been a trusted friend, accomplice, colleague, and pastor for almost two decades, faithfully engaging in the good and challenging work of justice and community building. He is a gifted writer and in 2024 completed his dissertation, A Trinitarian Vision for Shared Leadership: Embracing Hospitality as a Transformative Pathway, which will soon be published as a book! We are honored to count him among our dearest friends and to have him serve on our Board of Advisors for BLK South. Learn More
When Ash Wednesday rolled around last week my wife asked if I wanted to go to any of the church services in town. You see, after seventeen years in pastoral ministry I’d been spending the last two learning the trade of earthen building. Separated from the rhythms of traditional church life, and more particularly the life of a pastor, I said I’d like to do laundry instead. But that Wednesday moved fast and it was dark and late by the time we left the adobe house we’re building. We opted for enchiladas and a Modelo and dirty clothes. After finishing our meal we chatted with the restaurant owner as the plaza in our small town was being cordoned off after rumors of an active shooter and bomb threat were being addressed. Snow was falling for what felt like the first time all winter.
He pulled up the weather of his home town in Guadalajara and said it was getting hot there faster each year. We all turned to one another, as if alluding to the weather and threats of violence and state of the country, and said, “We are doing this to one another.” I thought to myself, soon we will be dust, but today I did not taste the ashes, I tasted the homemade sweetness of fine Mexican cuisine.
Around a decade ago I was sitting in a room with the leadership of the church where I pastored preparing for the season of Lent. I’d proposed we move through the book of Lamentations and we called the series of sermons, “The Taste of Ashes.” There was much skepticism because who wants to taste ashes and lament and cry out and then, and here’s the catch, change their ways?
In this meeting I said I wanted us, the church, to repent for a complicated history in which we (the collective, not necessarily the individuals in the room) had done harm to women. The consensus was, “no, we won’t do that,” so we compromised and at the beginning of each homily women in our community read the passages from Lamentations. Performance art, I told myself, was better than nothing. Maybe I should have walked away on that day, but I did not. The taste is still bitter in my mouth.
Years later when I had walked away, lamented and repented and changed my ways, I learned of a man leading an Ash Wednesday service in our community. He was eating the dirt and crying out from the ground. I was perplexed and judgemental then, but now I know he was offering me a taste of liberation. What lengths would I go to taste what is good, not only for me, but for all of Creation. The dirt he tasted, I know now, was crying out.
And this all echoed back into the present: We are doing this to one another.
Blooming Through the Cracks by Chris Townley
This, and stay with me here, got me pondering Black History Month. We, as people of a country built upon slavery and genocide, have still not learned the history. And as an elder once taught me, we cannot know the wisdom until we know the history.
If we (and by “we” I suppose I mean any who participate and benefit from the White supremacist systems that uphold this country) do not atone for the damage we are doing to one another and the Earth where we reside, we will forever strain and struggle to receive the wisdom of those who’ve suffered under the oppression of slavery (in all its forms) and genocide (in all its forms). I suppose this is part of why we still need months that teach about our history.
One reason it is such an honor to support and partner in the work of BLK South is because it's a vision of what my former church couldn’t muster. BLK South is a vision of Black Present/Future, and it’s not a month, but a year round endeavor in real life action. And there is so much wisdom here to be gleaned if only those, like myself, would lament, taste the ashes, and commit to changing their ways (repentance). If such ego work is addressed, and we stop doing this to one another, then I think we’ll begin to taste what is good. The resources and witness and testimony is present all across BLK South’s various platforms and initiatives.
As for me, I’m still learning to like the taste of dirt that roots me to the land and to the history of those who have walked it before me. The gravel in my mouth reminds me of the wisdom I continue to find while living in communion with the community of creation. To learn this wisdom is to learn the history, and we all have much to learn.
Reflection Questions:
Where in your life or community have you avoided “tasting the ashes” — resisting lament, accountability, or repentance — and what might change if you chose to face that history honestly?
What would it mean for you to atone not only in word but in action — to stop “doing this to one another” and instead root yourself in the wisdom of those whose history and land you inhabit?
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