The Ash Wednesday holocaust

It started that June with a spark.

The spark found a dry place to take shelter and it grew, and grew. And grew. Before long it was a raging fire, consuming deadwood, undergrowth and everything else combustible that it could find. No one worried at first. Fires are a part of the life cycle of forests, and the National Park Service had a policy of letting them burn themselves out.

But as the fire grew, people started questioning that wisdom. Homes and lives were threatened, and before long the fire had created its own weather system, sucking in air to keep itself going, and triggering lightning strikes that caused still more fires.

That summer more than 25,000 firefighters from across the United States traveled to Yellowstone to contain the fire. By the time the fire drifted quietly to sleep, lulled by the soft winter snows of November of 1988, more than 1.2 million acres in the greater Yellowstone National Park area were in ashes.

As the winter passed, fears grew that the park -- the oldest in the nation -- had been destroyed. It wasn't just a horrible forest fire. It had been a holocaust.

Ashes are the gray ruins of beauty. Stream flowers in your hair and you look as lovely as a dryad in the spring. Streak ashes on your face and you're just filthy. Grass rolls when the wind blows, and trees sway; but ashes just spread, covering everything in a fine layer of bitter.

Ashes mark the end of things. They're the funeral, the dissolution of life's chemistry, the final debasement. Oh, look, it's a pile of ashes! Was this a cedar tree, a house, or Aunt Sally? Can't tell. Move on, move on.

Except a phoenix, when its end comes, will burst into flames, crumble into ashes, and then emerge as its own chick.

Tragic ending. Beautiful beginning.

So it was at Yellowstone. As spring came in 1989 it brought with it an explosion of new life. Ground that hadn't felt sunlight in decades brought forth a new arrangement of plants, fueling an explosion of insects and the birds that ate them. Rivers teemed with fish. Wildflowers and wild grasses burst from soil laden with new depths of carbon, so that herds of grazing animals swelled in number and grew fat.

There is a lesson here.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day we come together and recall the things that we have endured, together and as individuals.

The consuming fire was intense. It was more than we were ready for, and we thought it would destroy us. When we stood in the ashes left in its wake, we thought it had, and we wept.

Have faith. The ashes are only the beginning. In time we will find ourselves transformed and made into something more beautiful than we can remember ever being in the past.


Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The Unremarkable Man at the River

The sun was high above the ground, and the air was filled with the buzz of the crowd when the unremarkable man walked into the river.

He'd walked a long way to get here, over rocks and hills, past sheep and goats, and among both countrymen and foreigners. He was tired from the walking, but even since he'd heard there was a prophet down by the river, the unremarkable man had felt his soul stir within him, compelling him to go see this strange man who wore clothing made from camel's hair.

Everyone in the crowd had a reason to see the prophet. The world was ending, and some of them just wanted to know how to survive. Others were desperate and wanted nothing more than shelter from a life that left them battered and ashamed of what they did to survive, and some were just curious.

For Jesus, visiting the Jordan River was the first leg on a journey of self-discovery.

Ever since he was little, he'd felt out of place in his hometown. It wasn't just the time he'd spent in Egypt with his parents, and it wasn't just the scandal around his birth that people had whispered about behind his back when they thought he and his parents weren't listening. This was something else.

All his childhood and even into his adulthood he'd been just like the other children in Nazareth ad yet not like them.

Sometimes he'd felt it keenly, like the year they had gone on the annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem to visit Herod’s temple, and Jesus had decided to stay behind when everyone else had gone home. (His parents rarely mentioned it in the years afterward, but too many times he'd felt his mother's eyes on him and he knew she was thinking of that trip.)

Other times the difference was harder to identify but still felt as keenly as if he had swallowed a coal. His heart would ache with a distress he couldn't understand, or he would see things with such clarity he couldn't understand why everyone else was confused. And through it all was woven a longing he couldn't express and a loneliness even his younger siblings couldn't always lift.

But then the prophet had arrived in the desert, and Jesus knew without anyone telling him that his time had arrived. He'd handed the carpentry shop over to his brothers, and set out for the prophet and the river.

The water was cool when he stepped in, and it cleaned the dirt and dust from his feet as it swirled past. Another step, and it was up past his ankles, and then it was up to his calves and his clothes were getting soaked.

What happened next, people disagree about. Some said that when the prophet baptized the unremarkable man, a rumble of thunder rolled across the sky. They pulled their children from the water and looked for a safe place to be when the storm hit. Others looked around, decided nothing was amiss, and shrugged their shoulders.

Others looked at the unremarkable man with curiosity in their eyes and wonder on their faces, as he climbed up the river bank, water streaming from his clothes and hair, and then strode off into the desert. In the thunder, he had heard a voice and he had to know what it had meant.

For the next forty days, he would fast and he would empty himself. The experience would harrow him like no other, but the odyssey he was undertaking would reveal himself to himself like nothing else ever had.

And when he returned, the people who heard him would know he was speaking with the very voice of God.



Copyright © 20189 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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