Religion in Your Face: Ash Wednesday and the Practice of Religious Facial Marking

February 20, 2023

Several years ago, when I was living in Houston, TX, a man walked up to me at a local café and kindly said, "Excuse me sir, you've...um...I think you have dirt on your face."

He was half right.

It wasn’t exactly dirt, but ashes. Ashes smudged on my forehead in the shape – if you looked at it just right and from a 43-degree angle – of a cross.

One could not blame the man for mistaking my visible marker of inward penance and outward allegiance to a particular strand of religiosity…for dirt.

These days, in places like H-town, you don’t see too many people wearing their religion on their face.

Nonetheless, later this month (February 22, 2023) millions of Christians across the world -- Catholic, Lutheran, Anglicans, others – will also don gray smudges on their brows to commemorate Ash Wednesday.

Traditionally viewed as the start of Lent – a 40-day penitential season of fasting and preparation preceding Easter – Ash Wednesday is most widely associated with the "imposition" or "infliction" of ashes on practitioners’ foreheads.

Christians, however, are not alone in marking their faces with religious symbols. There are traditions in India, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that involve religious symbology born on foreheads, cheeks, and chins.

While such outward signs of devotion may seem an extreme in our seemingly secular age, more often than not, these religious facial markings tell us relatively little about the “inner religion” of the devotee and much more about spiritual symbols’ social function(s).

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Fifty Shades of Ash

February 18, 2015

Here’s a funny story. A church I was on staff with once had a “white elephant gift exchange” party. Apparently, there was this rule that if you touched a gift it became yours. As I was clearly not paying attention, I did not hear this crucial regulation. When my turn came up I started by perusing the gift options that had already been opened before heading to the table with all the still-wrapped gifts and bobbles. That’s when I came upon E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey and an accompanying small whip. This is the moment when remembering that “you touch it, you bought it” rule would have been important. Attempting to ever be the jester, I reached for the book and sealed my doom.

The book, the bullwhip, were mine. And, as added benefit, I was the butt of all jokes for the rest of the evening.

That whip proudly hung in my office over the next couple of years, resplendent with a red bow. I never read the book. But, from what I gather it’s about a virginal college student (Ana) who falls for a billionaire (Christian Grey) with a kink for BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, and masochism) relationships, and he wants the unspoiled Ana to play the submissive to his dominant.

There’s, well…how do you put this…been a lot of opinion whipping around the internet this last fortnight as the book came to the big screen on Valentine’s Day (how sweet).

Not wanting to throw comment and critique to the way side (which is a nice way of saying I am going to) I am not about to weigh the merits and/or debatably deplorable nature of the book/film. Instead, I’m going to do what any normal person would do and make a clear connection between Fifty Shades of Grey, Ash Wednesday, and the forty days of Lent.

See the whip in the background? See the ambivalent look on my face? This is awkward.

Today (February 18, 2015) is Ash Wednesday. Millions of Christians across the world -- Catholic, Lutheran, Anglicans, others — will commemorate the commencement of Lent, a 40-day penitential season of fasting and preparation preceding Easter, the celebration of Jesus' resurrection from the dead — with the "imposition" or "infliction" of ashes on their foreheads.

The symbol of ashes on the forehead are meant to serve as a reminder of the contrite believers' physical return to dust (accompanied by a ritualistic repetition of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" or "from dust you came, from dust you shall return") and their spiritual condition as sinners in need of mourning over their sin, confession, and repentance.

Here’s a sampling of a prayer from an Ash Wednesday liturgy, or rite of worship:

Savior, prostrate I fall at thy feet this day…to ponder upon thy passion….In spirit I appear before thee in sackcloth and ashes, in true repentance. Let not the pleasures of life….crowd thee out of my heart and out of my thoughts. Draw me to thy wounded side, and cleanse me with thy most precious blood….By thy grace let me crucify my sinful afflictions, lusts, and desires….I am dust, and to dust I shall return…chastise me, break my sinful will, restore me, cleanse me, O Lord. Amen.

So, to recap: mourning, ashes, down on your knees, prostrate, no pleasure, sinful lust and temptation, wounds, blood, sinful afflictions, chastising, breaking. Are we talking Ash Wednesday here or Fifty Shades?

Or, let’s put it another way, as an atheist friend of mine once asked me in Houston. After reading through the crucifixion narratives in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, she asked me, “does it ever appear to you that y’all have a ‘masochist Messiah?’ Really, with all the blood, pain, and sin payments you have a pretty sadistic spirituality.

Do we Christians worship a "masochist Messiah?” Do we practice some sick, sadistic, 'Fifty Shades of Grey' spirituality?

A lot of the censure that came out about the Fifty Shades book/film is that it denigrated women and promoted a myth of healthy violence. Indeed, in his book The Powers that Be, Walter Wink (excellent name, sir) called out religion’s role, Christianity included, in furthering the cause of “the myth of redemptive violence” which he saw as a literary/mythological tool that impacts modern culture and its role in maintaining oppressive power structures. Crucifixion as myth of redemptive violence anyone?

It’s true that Ash Wednesday, Lent, and other liturgical moments in the Christian church tend to invite us to the dark side of life, spirituality, and our relationship with the Creator of the cosmos. Yet, I don’t believe there is any good reason to say we worship a masochist Messiah or engage in a particularly sadistic spirituality replete with soul bondage and deistic domination.

Instead, I contend, Ash Wednesday and Lent are times for us to collectively reflect on the very potent and omnipresent realities of suffering, pain, and death. It is a communal opportunity to acknowledge that there is misery, affliction, and slaughter in this world.

Of course, we may not need to go to church to see this. We may need only look at the headlines.

We look out on a world where a jihadist group is terrorizing its way across the Middle East and North Africa; planes fall out of the sky nearly every week; civilians are perishing in Israel-Gaza, the Ukraine, Somalia-Kenya; innocents are gunned down in our city streets, and others are wasting away under the threat of Ebola. The world, we feel, is collapsing around us. Closer to home, we are struggling with financial stress, cancer, broken relationships, piss-poor body image, binge drinking, or deeper personal pains. The world, our lives, are in such a mess that we might be tempted to cry out with the teacher from Ecclesiastes, “Meaningless, meaningless…everything is meaningless!” (Ecc. 12:18).

In truth, there is something to observing, and calling out, the wretchedness of this world. Rabbis from the early part of the first millennia said that after Adam and Eve fell in the garden that God did not assign the curses in Genesis 3, but he observed them. He said to our progenitors, “this is how it’s going to be now guys, this is the situation as it is — there will be pain, there will be sweat, there will be toil, there will be death. All because of sin.”

Our ritual reading of the headlines, or the imposition of ashes, acknowledges the pain of the world and reminds us that we live in limited bodies, in a limited world, with death as its inevitable end.

Bummer. Dude.

Yet, while the headlines roll on in seemingly measureless melancholy and rancor fills our social media feeds over books, religious groups, or movies, Ash Wednesday and Lent remind us not only of the pain, but of the succor of our Savior.

You see, there is not only one, single, shade to Ash Wednesday or Lent. It’s not just about death black and penitential purple. Sado-masochistic moods of repentance and anguish are not the sole shade of this season. Instead, the “fiftieth” shade of this season is one of heavenly hope, one of corporeal compassion, one of redemption.

Indeed, the message of Ash Wednesday and Lent is not only that we are all going to die someday, but also that we will rise and be restored. How? Why?

Max Ernst's "Crucifixion" captures the pain, the agony, the violence, of the cross.

The message of Ash Wednesday, Lent, and the Gospel is that Jesus lived amidst the pain, the suffering, the death and he felt it personally, in his body. He was touched with the same feeling, able to sympathize with our weakness (Heb 4:15-16). He knew our pain. He did not revel in it or celebrate it. He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, stricken, smitten, and afflicted (Is. 53).

Instead of inviting us into the myth of redemptive violence this season and the liturgical rhythms invite us to embrace the reality of redemptive suffering.

More than simply going through the motions of Lent, or even endeavoring to fast our way through the forty days, the call of this penitential season is to let those forty days transform, and even transfigure, us.

And what is the transformation? Turning from an elitist, escapist, and illusory understanding of the world as all glory and growth to a redemptive, real, and tender understanding of the suffering in our world. But we mustn't stop there. We must see the redemptive value of suffering.

South African anti-apartheid hero Desmond Tutu wrote, “When we are able to see the larger purpose of our suffering, it is transformed, transmuted. It becomes redemptive suffering.” When we see what Christ did with suffering, sin, and death on the cross by defeating them, today’s suffering is put in its place, in its rightful perspective. And we can suffer it, knowing it does not have the final word. The pain is transformed, it is transfigured.

Richard Rohr, a Catholic contemplative, added that pain, if not transformed, will be transmitted. Think about that. If we do not allow our pain, our suffering to be transformed by Jesus, it will be spread out to others or, in the very least, other parts of our own life. Think of all the untransformed pain and how it has spread – in bitter fights in our home, in passive aggressive rage at work, in friendships spoiled, in massacre, rape, thievery, jealousy, and acidic anger.

But when our pain is transformed it contributes to the healing and re-creation of the world. So then how we decide to respond to the pain & suffering in our life is a very serious matter.

Just as Jesus’ life has this rhythm to it, so does our spirituality: Redemption involves suffering; transfiguration involves pain; resurrection always involves the cross. We follow in his suffering, because we follow Him in redemption. They are connected. No cross, then no crown, it would seem as Claude Nikondeha put it.

It is my prayer for you, for me, this Ash Wednesday and Lent that we may, in the smearing of ashes across our foreheads, in the hunger pains of fasting, or in the simple prayers of repentance and reminders of everyday suffering, see see the strange, mystical, and miraculous connection between suffering and redemption.

Or as, the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky put it, I pray “you will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

You see, as we suffer, and allow that pain to be redeemed we contribute to the transfiguration of the world in some mystical way. We are partnering with Christ in the restoration of all things. We are letting Christ do his work, and have his way with us. In this season we are not only living the forty shades of Lent or the fifty shades of ash, but embodying the many shades of God’s redemptive work in the world through suffering, pain, and death.

And that is a thought to dwell on today, and throughout, I think, the season of Lent to come.

Christians across the world remember Ash Wednesday on Feb. 18, 2015. What other religious face markings exist? And why are they so prominent? — Christians across the world remember Ash Wednesday on Feb. 18, 2015. What other religious face markings exist? And why are they so prominent?

Religion in your face: Ash Wednesday & religious face markings

February 17, 2015

"Dude, you've...um...I think you have dirt on your face."

"No sir, it's not dirt. It's a marker of allegiance to a particular strand of religiosity, in this instance focused on a liturgical posture of penance, which, in turn, may have little bearing on my day-to-day lived religious identity and practice....but yeah, otherwise, it's dirt on my face."

Or, perhaps, ash would be more accurate. Tomorrow (February 18, 2015) is Ash Wednesday. Millions of Christians across the world -- Catholic, Lutheran, Anglicans, others -- will commemorate the commencement of Lent -- a 40-day penitential season of fasting and preparation preceding Easter, the celebration of Jesus' resurrection from the dead -- with the "imposition" or "infliction" of ashes on their foreheads.

*For more on religion & culture, follow @kchitwood on Twitter

Christians are not alone in marking their faces with religious symbols. There are traditions in India, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere that involve religious symbology being born on foreheads, cheeks, and mouth. While this may seem an extreme sign of devotion, more often than not, these religious facial markings tell us relatively little about the lived religion of the devotee marking their visible features with spiritual symbols.

Ash Wednesday

While traditionally practiced among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, there are a growing number of evangelical and other mainline Protestant churches taking up the practice. And not only are Christians getting their ash in church, they're getting dusted in the streets. In her book City of God, recovering journalist and Episcopalian lay liturgist Sara Miles shared her Lenten adventure of perambulating San Francisco's mission district in black cassock on Ash Wednesday marking those she meets with the ashes of Lent. There, in the cracked sidewalks and fractured realities of the city she calls home, Miles finds bodies marked not only with poverty and pain, but "the realities of death."

Revealing in an interview with Publisher's Weekly the premise that "God has left the [church] building," Miles believes she does not take faith to the streets, but finds it there. "I am in this privileged position to get to see what people's experience of faith and God is, and for each person it is slightly different." In her book she aims to voice this urban canon, this discovery of people who are "hungry for something that's real."

Of marking foreheads with ashes, Miles says the yearning for belief that is solid and can be touched is part of the draw of that ritual. "It's stunning how many people want to be told they are dust and that they will die," she says. "The chronic lie of our culture is that people don't die. But people want to know the truth."

For over twelve hundred years on the dies cinerum (Day of Ashes) faithful followers have approached the altar to receive ashes on their foreheads. These ashes are often made from the burnt palm fronds that were blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year. The ashes are sprinkled with water, usually fragranced with incense and blessed. The ceremonial use of ashes for repentance and penance can be traced even further back and is practiced throughout the world.

What this seemingly utmost devotional act does not reveal is how quickly many practitioners may wash their foreheads or remove their ashes once they leave the sanctuary. In the case of the individuals on the streets of San Francisco, and elsewhere, that get their ashes to-go, it tells us nothing of their personal faithfulness through the rest of Lent or as day-to-day Christians for that matter.

South Indian Tripundra

The same can be said for the mark of a saiva in South India known as the "tripundra" (also "tilak").

Consisting of three horizontal lines of vibhuti (holy ash) on the forehead often with a dot (bindu) acting as "a third eye," the tripundra may evoke a sense of the Ash Wednesday practice. However, there are different motivations in this Hindu tradition. The three lines symbolize the the real self's (atman's) three bonds: anava, karma, and maya.

Anava is the sense of "I" or "mine" within each of us and is, according to the Shaiva tradition under consideration by Dr. Elaine Fisher of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the impetus for the individual atman's misplaced notion of separate being apart from the god Shiva. It is the final bond to be broken before moksha, or self-realization and release. Karma literally means "action, work or deed." In both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, karma is the universal law of cause and effect -- the effect (or fruits) of a person's actions not only have ramifications in this life, but also in the next. Over the centuries, the various schools of Hinduism have conceived of many variations on the karmic theme, some making karma appear quite deterministic, others making room for free will and individual agency. Maya is power and wisdom. The debate rages over whether this ability is real or illusory. In some Vedic texts, maya is a "magical show, an illusion," but in Shaivism maya is potent and truly existent and deterministic. It is real insofar as it endows the individual with the cosmos, tangible elements of the world, and a body to be realized, and to practice, in. However, the vibhuti, composed of burnt cow dung, or in some Shaiva traditions the funerary ashes of cremated corpses, is an omnipresent reminder of the temporary nature of physical existence and the urgency to strive for self-realization and spiritual attainment (moksha).

As Fischer explained the bearing of tripundra actively mark's one in South India as part of a certain body/religious public and community, but it tells us little else about other aspects of their religious identity.

Māori Ta Moko

This dynamic is even more evident in the modern practice of ta moko among Māori, and others, in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Uetonga tattooing his son-in-law Mataora in the under world.

The Māori traditionally chiseled marks on their faces, called ta moko. Each individual’s ta moko is unique and sacred to them. As mentioned, the traditional way of applying ta moko to the face was to dip a narrow blade in black pigment and then tap the blade with a mallet to chisel deep incisions into the skin. This process not only left a tattoo of the designs, but permanent grooves in the skin. Today, most ta moko are tattooed according to international standards, but still informed by Māori lore.

The traditional form of ta moko was practiced by tohunga, who were both ritual experts and skilled artisans. A woman’s moko, which covered only the chin and lips, would take one or two days to complete. A man’s moko, which covered the whole face, was done in stages over several years due to the immense pain, swelling, and blood often involved in the process. Because of this, while the scars were healing, the person being tattooed was in a state of tapu (taboo, sacred or set apart). They could not look in a mirror, touch their own food, engage in sexual activity, or even wash the tattooed skin.

It is mythically believed that the Māori received the practice of ta moko from the underworld -- Rarohenga -- when the ancestor Mataora went in search of his wife Niwareka there. Encountering a different people than what he was used to in "the upper world," Mataora came across a man being tattooed and bleeding profusely. He thought something must be wrong. Uetonga, the chief applying the tattoo, informed Mataora that his method of tattooing was permanent, while the upper world's was "merely a marking" (whakairo tuhi or hopara makaurangiI) that could be wiped away. The tattoos were often made of red, blue, and white ochre and were temporary. Uetonga then smeared Mataora's tuhi and instructed him in the ways of ta moko, puncturing his skin and marking the lines in his face with a chisel. When Mataora returned to the upper world, he adopted ta moko and made it known among the Maori and their neighbors. As the myth says, "prior to the visit of Mataora to Rarohenga, people painted pictures on their faces" and now they practice "real tattooing by puncture."

Since the 1970s and 80s, some Māori have begun wearing ta moko again as a marker, and assertion of their cultural identity as part of the wider Māori cultural revival (Ngā tuakiri hōu). Even a few Māori tattoo artists are reviving traditional methods of applying ta moko to the face, thighs, and arms. Formerly a sign of status and prestige, now Māori people who wear ta moko assert their identity in a world of rapid change and cultural incursion.

Sub-Saharan African Tribal Marks

A Maasai woman with facial markings on her cheeks.

Similarly in many locales throughout sub-Saharan Africa various tribes include face markings as part of their ethnic identification. However, some markings in African tribes have more spiritual intimations. In some Yoruba settings children believed to be a "reincarnated child" (abiku), will be given marks on their face and body. It is believed that to take away the potentially destructive spiritual powers of the child, he/she has to be identified by the marks when he/she is born. Otherwise, it is believed, the child may die at an early age. It can also be used to wade away evil spirits ravaging around a certain group of people or family. In this case, the marks are not only on the face but other parts of the body as well. In Ghana among most tribes a "reincarnated child," referred to as "Kosanma" will bear "Donko" marks on the face.

Like the Yoruba, most tribes in sub-Saharan Africa give marks to their people for spiritual protection. Most often, it is religious ritual experts (shamans, herbalists, etc.) who apply the marks by cutting the body and inserting powerful herbs with spiritual potency to help heal the wound. Cuts will not only be made on the face, but on hips, wrists, stomachs, and shoulders.

Regardless of the source or tradition, most who do not practice such religious facial markings may react with surprise or even horror when they see someone with their religious identity splashed, or scarred, across their faces. Extreme. Outlandish. Drastic.

In one sense, inscribing, or marking, one's religion on one's face is powerful and evocative. Not only does it identity the believer with a particular religious or cultural community, it also locates that believer within the drama. By marking one's body, either permanently or temporarily, the adherent weaves themselves into the dogmatic and ritualistic narrative of their religion. With permanent markings, this placement is deeper both physically -- scars and chiseled skin -- and spiritually.

Yet, as has been hinted at throughout this post, while these markings may disclose a particular religious self-identification or membership in a certain religious community or body politic, they tell us very little about how these individuals construct their daily religious life or if they do so at all. In a globalized world, cultural identity is a precious commodity. Thus, facial markings are a way to fetishize the body, to inscribe it with communal meaning, profound purpose, and public sacrality in a world perceived as increasingly homogenous, superficial, individualized, secular, and privatized.

More often than not, these markings are temporary. When they are not, they are markers of cultural identity more than religious ritual. Either way, they force the issue of religiosity in the 21st-century and continuously drive us to ask why it is that so many, whether Christian or Māori, Yoruba or Hindu, choose to not only bear their religion on their face, but put it in ours as they meet us in the public square. By proudly bearing their markings for a day, a season, or their entire lives, these devotees and religious faithful are a constant reminder that religion has not gone by the wayside in a globalized world, but is ever more present, potent, and potentially "in our face."

*For more on religion & culture, follow @kchitwood on Twitter