ASH WEDNESDAY IS when Catholics smear ash on their forehead in the shape of a cross to remind themselves that they “are dust and unto dust they shall return.” The point of smearing such ash on one's face, other than selling the Catholic brand of guilt, is to remind people that they should be ashamed of being human, and aspire to become "like God," just like the serpent promised Adam & Eve they would become if they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. After all, no "tree" (in the form of a cross) claims to be as infallible as Catholicism in proclaiming to know what God defines as good and evil. And the only way to overcome this shame is to aspire to "become like God" by shuffling loose one's own sinful and mortal coil and becoming completely a pure idea of one's righteousness. Outside of religion, an idea of one's self is defined as our ego, and the sense that a person's ego is so special that it deserves nothing less than eternal life would qualify as a form of Narcissism. Ahh yes, Ash Wednesday: the begining of Lent every year, when Catholics mark their forehead with ash like the mark of a beast that lives inside of an incinerator.
Ash Wednesday, like Christianity on the whole, is simply a reminder that, to Hamlet's question of "to be or not to be," the Christian should always aspire "not to be," at least not in any physical sense, for that is the only way to "become like God," for "God" is completely immaterial. Thanks to the great St. Augustine, who infused Catholicism with a Manichaean theology - even though Manicheanism was considered heretical at the time - that taught a dualistic view of good and evil, Christianity adopted a view that "good" was that which was immaterial, such as ideas, while "evil" was anything made of material reality, and espeically human flesh. From this view, the "mind" was perfect even though the brain it emanated from was corrupt; and the true original sin that necessarily preceded the original sin of Adam & Eve was that God had ever stuffed the spirit of the former into the human hot-pocket of the other. Augustine never dared to ask, and never allowed anyone to ask, why a "perfect" immaterial God would then feel a need or desire to make such an imperfect material reality, nor did Augustine allow anyone to dare to wonder how God could be considered to be "perfect" if the only evidence we had for such a God in the first place was a material reality that Augustine decided was wholly imperfect. For Augustine, the fallen and flawed nature of material existence meant that all of the pleasures of material reality were considered to be offensive to an immaterial "God" or Logos, which was seen as a "universal divine form of reason." Because Augustine confessed to being addicted to the prostitutes of Rome, he saw philosophy as being godlike and sex as one of the greatest evils of all. This is in part why, for of all of the attributes of the Christian God, the greatest of all is that said "God" possesses all of the attributes of something that does not exist, at least not in any physcial sense. And because he does not, so Christians love to gloat, science can ever demonstrate that such a God does not exist at all. Despite this fact, Augustine assured his followers that, while all of the other gods which had for centuries been worshiped in Rome at the time needed to be rejected as pure fiction, his own brand of "God" must nevertheless be "believed" to exist, or they'l be hell to pay in which a person can only wish they would be turned to ash - but they won't. And to remind faithful Catholics of the need to maintain a proper level of disdain for their own flesh, out of fear that an immaterial "God" would cast such "unbelievers" bodily into the ovens of Hades, Ash Wednesday was born.
When I was a kid in Catholic school, once a year a priest would smear ash on my forehead, and I was expected to walk around all day with this ash as if I'd forgotten to wash my face from playing with the lump of coal I'd be given for Christmas, even though I didn't really know why walking around with such dirt on my face was supposed to be such a mark of pride and accomplishment. It certianly reminded me of all the children who sometimes worked 18 hour days in coal mines during the early 20th century. So I guess I was advertising my devotion to working for my religion's brand of God. In effect, my face was being used to sell my Catholic brand, and my forehead was being used as a billboard. It used to remind me of that line in the Book of Revelations about how the "mark of the beast" would be seen on people's foreheads during the end times. And, really, what could be a better "mark of the beast" that lives in the bowels of hell than ash?
Every year, just as Lent got under way, a priest would press his thumb in a bowl of ash and the smear it on my forehead, as if to indicate all of the children in my Catholic school were "under his thumb." More than a cross, the smear of ash that priest left on my face always looked more like a smudge from an eraser. And as I got older, this interpretation seemed to far more accurate than anything else, because I increasingly felt like my Catholicism was slowly erasing everything that made me, "me,” and replacing me with a Catholic robot,one programmed to focus on death as the doorway to when the best life has to offer finally begins: after we die. Indeed, eight years of Catholic school can feel like one's own likes and wants have been slowly erased. Like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” so my Catholicism was a process by which my own desires were to be replaced with a single desire to be the best Catholic I could be, and all out of a desire to sell my brand of religion in order to alleviate my daily fear of dying in a state of mortal sin. To die in a state of mortal sin, for those who don’t know, means you are destined to burn for all eternity in hell. Fire is understood to burn away the material form with all of its corruption, all that is human flesh in other words, leaving only the immaterial perfection of pure "spirit" or ideals behind. This, in part, is why the "Holy Spirit" is often depicted as fire in the Bible, and why "witches" were burned to purify their sinful souls. But, according to Catholicism, this depends on what kind of sin you are suffering from when you die.
There are two types of sin for Catholics: mortal and venal. If you die in a state of mortal sin, like if you die from lust after masturbating to a porn magazine, you roast for all eternity without a chance for parole. This is because your flesh is thought to be so corrupt, due to taking such "sinful" delight in it, a person is irredeemable. If you die in a state of venal sin, like if you die after banging your thumb with a hammer and screaming “God damn it!,” you’ll do time in purgatory. Purgatory is like a halfway house, halfway between heaven and hell, where a proper amount of fire induced agony can cure a person of their affinity for thier own flesh. The point of fasting and self flegellation, from this perspective, are about using the mind to overcome the body, and pain is simply the means of showing God you have dutifully spent your life acquiring a proper love of one and hatred of the other. This, in fact, is the point of the crucifixtion. (Thanks for that, St. Augustine!) Unlike hell, you will eventually get out of purgatory, but no one knows when. Since “time” doesn’t exist, or at least it doesn’t operate, in the afterlife the way it does in this life, how long someone spends in purgatory is impossible to say. Hell, it might be just one day shy of eternity. And smudging ash on your forehead once a year, in order to sell the Catholic brand, is one way of getting out of purgatory for good behavior.
Painting a black cross on your forehead is like the Hebrew painting blood on their doorway duruig the first "passover," when God sent the spirit of death to murder the inocent first born sons of Egyptians who had all failed to realize they could have saved their own children if they'd simply done the same thing the Hebrews were doing. In a similar way, so Catholics smear ask on their forehead not just to remind themselves they will return to the dust from whence Adam was said to be made, but also to remind themselves that they will be spared the "eternal death" of being burned like coal in the bowels of hell for failing to wipe ash on their forehead as God comands. Incredibly, Catholics don't care who ultimately ends up in hell, even if it is their own children, because they believe God will wipe the memory of such children from their mind when they get to heaven. In other words, Catholics look forward to having their minds brainwashed from caring about anyone who ends up in hell. Just wow.
That forehead full of ask also reflects the idea that a person is being rewritten for a religion by divine programmers. Why God didn't just install such programming in the first place, the way birds are programmed to fly or fish to swim, is beacsue God wanted to provide the opportunity to create a Church, and then stad idle as that Church raped children. Is it really just a coincidence that those “divine programmers” happen to dress in ash black uniforms with a white collar, as if priests and nuns are shadowy demons prowling the earth hungry for children's souls, or black and blue pens writting their bloody and sacred ideas - many of which are even more horrifying than a Stephen King novel, in which Jesus returns like that cat from "Pet Cemetery" - into the blank pages of a child's imagination? Part of what a person is being rewritten to focus on with the ash shaped cross on their forehead is death itself (and a hope that, like Jesus and that cat from "Pet Cemetery," they will one day rise from the dead). Make no mistake: Christianity is a religion that teaches its followers to spend their whole life focusing on their moment of death in the hope that the next life will be better than this one. In this respect, it is simply a death cult that sees this life as a B grade movie they have to endure to get a promotion to playing the role of God Almighty in the heavenly hills of a Hollywood studio. And again, this hatred of being human and lust for spiritual perfection is embodied no where more clearly than in the crucifix.
Go into any Catholic Church and you’re likely to see a giant crucifix. The crucifix was the device used by the Romans to torture and execute criminals for disobeying Roman law. If 5000 years from now, archeologists ignorant of Christianity happened to unearth such giant symbols of Catholic disdain for bodily sins, the same way those giant head statues were unearthed on Easter Island or the Terra-Cotta warriors in China, they would likely conclude that human sacrifice was as common among 21st century Americans as it was among the Aztecs and the Mayans. It is likely they would also conclude that such ritual sacrifices were performed for the same reason: to ensure a prosperous civilization. Nor would they be entirely wrong in that assessment. After all, isn’t that the whole point of Christian Nationalism?
Human nature is incredibly creative. And because it is, we have a potentially infinite capacity for interpretation. According to the Catholic Church, this is fine for everything but interpreting what the Catholic Church has alone been given the authority and ability to interpret: the Holy Bible. If anyone dares to interpret that book differently from the Catholic Church, so the Catholic Church assures us, they can expect no less than eternity in hell. Put simply, the Christian perspective boils down to a "belief" that God created humans to have an infinite capacity for creativity and interpretation, and then decided to establish an earthly Church through his own death to rein in that infinite capacity. And with this Church, God would call the few to use their infinite capacity for creativity and interpretation to defend and impose a single interpretaton of one of the most cryptic and confusing books ever written, one which has more violence and sin in it than a Stephen King novel, in order to "save" the rest of humanity from derserving to be roasted alive for all eternity for failing to forego their own capacity for creativity and interpretation of such a book, and obeying the creative interpretations offered only by those who work for the Catholic Church. Nevermind that the book in question amounts to a Rorschach inkblot make in words (which is what the smear of ash on one's forehead resembles, by the way) that can be interpreted in any infinite number of ways, of which there are currently 40,000 so interpretations among the Christian religion alone today. For the Christian of each of those 40,000+ brands, convincing people to subscribe to their interpreation of the Bible is a necessary part of saving one's own soul from the fires of hell.
And this is where we come to interpreting that bloody symbol that, on its face, looks as much like a celebration of torture and death as the ash on one's forehead looks like a scuff mark from a jackboot. To the uninitiated, that is all the crucifix looks like: simply the immortalization of torture and death. To the Christian, however, it is a doorway, on the other side of which is what life is really all about: eternal heaven, perferrably in some immaterial form, like an idea that never dies. Sadly, Christians must also "believe" that all those who see the former and not the latter (or who fail to see how they must focus on the latter and "correct" those who only see the former) are destined to have done to them in the afterlife far worse than what they see on the cross, even if they don’t realize it. To avoid such a fate, the Christian is taught to spend their whole life obsessing about their "ideas" concernign both their own interpretation of the Bible and the hour of their death. Only by doing so, so Christianity wants Christians to believe, can one best ensure they will not end up spending all of eternity in more physical pain than is depicted in their crucifix. (With a divine friend like that, who needs a devil?)
Naturally, the Christian insists their religion is NOT about death, but about eternal life, which is most easily obtained through a willingness to allow their physical form to die for one's immaterial "beliefs," rather than ever admit that, as fallible human beings, they could ever be wrong. That wanting eternal life is a supreme act of ingratitude for the life they’ve been given never occurs to the Christian, of course, any more than the fact that their refusal to ever admit that their "beliefs" - in things like original sin and hell and all the rest - are simply "beliefs," not verifiable facts, makes them more obstainate than even the devil is famous for being. But if that crucifix was really about “eternal life,” and not preying upon how such an image instills trauma in the impressionable brains of children that can then be manipulated throughout that child’s life by a priestly class of “vipers,” than why do such Churches not have an empty tomb as their symbol rather than a cross?
On the other hand, if the cross really represents the eternal life Catholics expect to receive upon their death as a reward for their obedience (like promising to give a dog an everlasting bone after it dies), then why smear ash on one’s face once a year, to remind oneself that they are destined to return to the dust from whence they came? After all, such an idea contradicts the Bible and Catholic teaching. In the Bible, when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he did not simply raise his spirit, but his body. It was simply the human flesh that constituted the phyiscal body of the human being named "Jesus" that rose from the dead, not "Jesus" as a divine God, since such a "God" cannot die in any way, shape, or form. Even Mary was said to have ascended into Heaven bodily. Indeed, in Philippians 3:21, we are told that Christ “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body”. Preacher Billy Graham pointed out that "as Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, so we too will be raised and given new bodies—bodies like His resurrection body." In a precursor to the believers’ resurrection, some were raised at the time of Christ’s resurrection in Matthew 27:52 where it says that their "bodies...were raised." Job wrote that he knew for sure that even after he dies and his skin is long gone, that "in my FLESH I shall SEE God" (Job 19:26), meaning he has a body.
So why do Christians smear ash on their face once a year? The practice kicks off the season of Lent, which is the 40 days before Jesus’s brutal torture and death, culminating in Easter and the festive eating of choclate bunnies, which may simply signify the rabbit hole that such a story sends children down like Alice. That such a practice proceeds the Passover dinner that Christ is said to have celebrated before his own death – known as “the Last Supper” – reminds us of how, during the original Passover, the ancient Hebrews smeared the blood of the lambs they ate for dinner on their front doors to let the Spirit of Death that God had sent know it should “passover” their home, as it killed the first born sons of the ancient Egyptians. By smearing ash on their faces, so Catholics paint a stain over their mind that reflects the idea that their souls are born with the stain of original sin. And the ancient Greek work for soul was "psyche," from which we get the word pyschology. By painting black ash on their face, as such, the Catholic paints a black mark over their own soul, as if it were the doorway through which their mind may escape its fleshly coffin.
Ash Wednesday, like Christianity on the whole, is simply a reminder that, to Hamlet's question of "to be or not to be," the Christian should always aspire "not to be," at least not in any physical sense, for that is the only way to "become like God," for "God" is completely immaterial. Thanks to the great St. Augustine, who infused Catholicism with a Manichaean theology - even though Manicheanism was considered heretical at the time - that taught a dualistic view of good and evil, Christianity adopted a view that "good" was that which was immaterial, such as ideas, while "evil" was anything made of material reality, and espeically human flesh. From this view, the "mind" was perfect even though the brain it emanated from was corrupt; and the true original sin that necessarily preceded the original sin of Adam & Eve was that God had ever stuffed the spirit of the former into the human hot-pocket of the other. Augustine never dared to ask, and never allowed anyone to ask, why a "perfect" immaterial God would then feel a need or desire to make such an imperfect material reality, nor did Augustine allow anyone to dare to wonder how God could be considered to be "perfect" if the only evidence we had for such a God in the first place was a material reality that Augustine decided was wholly imperfect. For Augustine, the fallen and flawed nature of material existence meant that all of the pleasures of material reality were considered to be offensive to an immaterial "God" or Logos, which was seen as a "universal divine form of reason." Because Augustine confessed to being addicted to the prostitutes of Rome, he saw philosophy as being godlike and sex as one of the greatest evils of all. This is in part why, for of all of the attributes of the Christian God, the greatest of all is that said "God" possesses all of the attributes of something that does not exist, at least not in any physcial sense. And because he does not, so Christians love to gloat, science can ever demonstrate that such a God does not exist at all. Despite this fact, Augustine assured his followers that, while all of the other gods which had for centuries been worshiped in Rome at the time needed to be rejected as pure fiction, his own brand of "God" must nevertheless be "believed" to exist, or they'l be hell to pay in which a person can only wish they would be turned to ash - but they won't. And to remind faithful Catholics of the need to maintain a proper level of disdain for their own flesh, out of fear that an immaterial "God" would cast such "unbelievers" bodily into the ovens of Hades, Ash Wednesday was born.
When I was a kid in Catholic school, once a year a priest would smear ash on my forehead, and I was expected to walk around all day with this ash as if I'd forgotten to wash my face from playing with the lump of coal I'd be given for Christmas, even though I didn't really know why walking around with such dirt on my face was supposed to be such a mark of pride and accomplishment. It certianly reminded me of all the children who sometimes worked 18 hour days in coal mines during the early 20th century. So I guess I was advertising my devotion to working for my religion's brand of God. In effect, my face was being used to sell my Catholic brand, and my forehead was being used as a billboard. It used to remind me of that line in the Book of Revelations about how the "mark of the beast" would be seen on people's foreheads during the end times. And, really, what could be a better "mark of the beast" that lives in the bowels of hell than ash?
Every year, just as Lent got under way, a priest would press his thumb in a bowl of ash and the smear it on my forehead, as if to indicate all of the children in my Catholic school were "under his thumb." More than a cross, the smear of ash that priest left on my face always looked more like a smudge from an eraser. And as I got older, this interpretation seemed to far more accurate than anything else, because I increasingly felt like my Catholicism was slowly erasing everything that made me, "me,” and replacing me with a Catholic robot,one programmed to focus on death as the doorway to when the best life has to offer finally begins: after we die. Indeed, eight years of Catholic school can feel like one's own likes and wants have been slowly erased. Like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” so my Catholicism was a process by which my own desires were to be replaced with a single desire to be the best Catholic I could be, and all out of a desire to sell my brand of religion in order to alleviate my daily fear of dying in a state of mortal sin. To die in a state of mortal sin, for those who don’t know, means you are destined to burn for all eternity in hell. Fire is understood to burn away the material form with all of its corruption, all that is human flesh in other words, leaving only the immaterial perfection of pure "spirit" or ideals behind. This, in part, is why the "Holy Spirit" is often depicted as fire in the Bible, and why "witches" were burned to purify their sinful souls. But, according to Catholicism, this depends on what kind of sin you are suffering from when you die.
There are two types of sin for Catholics: mortal and venal. If you die in a state of mortal sin, like if you die from lust after masturbating to a porn magazine, you roast for all eternity without a chance for parole. This is because your flesh is thought to be so corrupt, due to taking such "sinful" delight in it, a person is irredeemable. If you die in a state of venal sin, like if you die after banging your thumb with a hammer and screaming “God damn it!,” you’ll do time in purgatory. Purgatory is like a halfway house, halfway between heaven and hell, where a proper amount of fire induced agony can cure a person of their affinity for thier own flesh. The point of fasting and self flegellation, from this perspective, are about using the mind to overcome the body, and pain is simply the means of showing God you have dutifully spent your life acquiring a proper love of one and hatred of the other. This, in fact, is the point of the crucifixtion. (Thanks for that, St. Augustine!) Unlike hell, you will eventually get out of purgatory, but no one knows when. Since “time” doesn’t exist, or at least it doesn’t operate, in the afterlife the way it does in this life, how long someone spends in purgatory is impossible to say. Hell, it might be just one day shy of eternity. And smudging ash on your forehead once a year, in order to sell the Catholic brand, is one way of getting out of purgatory for good behavior.
Painting a black cross on your forehead is like the Hebrew painting blood on their doorway duruig the first "passover," when God sent the spirit of death to murder the inocent first born sons of Egyptians who had all failed to realize they could have saved their own children if they'd simply done the same thing the Hebrews were doing. In a similar way, so Catholics smear ask on their forehead not just to remind themselves they will return to the dust from whence Adam was said to be made, but also to remind themselves that they will be spared the "eternal death" of being burned like coal in the bowels of hell for failing to wipe ash on their forehead as God comands. Incredibly, Catholics don't care who ultimately ends up in hell, even if it is their own children, because they believe God will wipe the memory of such children from their mind when they get to heaven. In other words, Catholics look forward to having their minds brainwashed from caring about anyone who ends up in hell. Just wow.
That forehead full of ask also reflects the idea that a person is being rewritten for a religion by divine programmers. Why God didn't just install such programming in the first place, the way birds are programmed to fly or fish to swim, is beacsue God wanted to provide the opportunity to create a Church, and then stad idle as that Church raped children. Is it really just a coincidence that those “divine programmers” happen to dress in ash black uniforms with a white collar, as if priests and nuns are shadowy demons prowling the earth hungry for children's souls, or black and blue pens writting their bloody and sacred ideas - many of which are even more horrifying than a Stephen King novel, in which Jesus returns like that cat from "Pet Cemetery" - into the blank pages of a child's imagination? Part of what a person is being rewritten to focus on with the ash shaped cross on their forehead is death itself (and a hope that, like Jesus and that cat from "Pet Cemetery," they will one day rise from the dead). Make no mistake: Christianity is a religion that teaches its followers to spend their whole life focusing on their moment of death in the hope that the next life will be better than this one. In this respect, it is simply a death cult that sees this life as a B grade movie they have to endure to get a promotion to playing the role of God Almighty in the heavenly hills of a Hollywood studio. And again, this hatred of being human and lust for spiritual perfection is embodied no where more clearly than in the crucifix.
Go into any Catholic Church and you’re likely to see a giant crucifix. The crucifix was the device used by the Romans to torture and execute criminals for disobeying Roman law. If 5000 years from now, archeologists ignorant of Christianity happened to unearth such giant symbols of Catholic disdain for bodily sins, the same way those giant head statues were unearthed on Easter Island or the Terra-Cotta warriors in China, they would likely conclude that human sacrifice was as common among 21st century Americans as it was among the Aztecs and the Mayans. It is likely they would also conclude that such ritual sacrifices were performed for the same reason: to ensure a prosperous civilization. Nor would they be entirely wrong in that assessment. After all, isn’t that the whole point of Christian Nationalism?
Human nature is incredibly creative. And because it is, we have a potentially infinite capacity for interpretation. According to the Catholic Church, this is fine for everything but interpreting what the Catholic Church has alone been given the authority and ability to interpret: the Holy Bible. If anyone dares to interpret that book differently from the Catholic Church, so the Catholic Church assures us, they can expect no less than eternity in hell. Put simply, the Christian perspective boils down to a "belief" that God created humans to have an infinite capacity for creativity and interpretation, and then decided to establish an earthly Church through his own death to rein in that infinite capacity. And with this Church, God would call the few to use their infinite capacity for creativity and interpretation to defend and impose a single interpretaton of one of the most cryptic and confusing books ever written, one which has more violence and sin in it than a Stephen King novel, in order to "save" the rest of humanity from derserving to be roasted alive for all eternity for failing to forego their own capacity for creativity and interpretation of such a book, and obeying the creative interpretations offered only by those who work for the Catholic Church. Nevermind that the book in question amounts to a Rorschach inkblot make in words (which is what the smear of ash on one's forehead resembles, by the way) that can be interpreted in any infinite number of ways, of which there are currently 40,000 so interpretations among the Christian religion alone today. For the Christian of each of those 40,000+ brands, convincing people to subscribe to their interpreation of the Bible is a necessary part of saving one's own soul from the fires of hell.
And this is where we come to interpreting that bloody symbol that, on its face, looks as much like a celebration of torture and death as the ash on one's forehead looks like a scuff mark from a jackboot. To the uninitiated, that is all the crucifix looks like: simply the immortalization of torture and death. To the Christian, however, it is a doorway, on the other side of which is what life is really all about: eternal heaven, perferrably in some immaterial form, like an idea that never dies. Sadly, Christians must also "believe" that all those who see the former and not the latter (or who fail to see how they must focus on the latter and "correct" those who only see the former) are destined to have done to them in the afterlife far worse than what they see on the cross, even if they don’t realize it. To avoid such a fate, the Christian is taught to spend their whole life obsessing about their "ideas" concernign both their own interpretation of the Bible and the hour of their death. Only by doing so, so Christianity wants Christians to believe, can one best ensure they will not end up spending all of eternity in more physical pain than is depicted in their crucifix. (With a divine friend like that, who needs a devil?)
Naturally, the Christian insists their religion is NOT about death, but about eternal life, which is most easily obtained through a willingness to allow their physical form to die for one's immaterial "beliefs," rather than ever admit that, as fallible human beings, they could ever be wrong. That wanting eternal life is a supreme act of ingratitude for the life they’ve been given never occurs to the Christian, of course, any more than the fact that their refusal to ever admit that their "beliefs" - in things like original sin and hell and all the rest - are simply "beliefs," not verifiable facts, makes them more obstainate than even the devil is famous for being. But if that crucifix was really about “eternal life,” and not preying upon how such an image instills trauma in the impressionable brains of children that can then be manipulated throughout that child’s life by a priestly class of “vipers,” than why do such Churches not have an empty tomb as their symbol rather than a cross?
On the other hand, if the cross really represents the eternal life Catholics expect to receive upon their death as a reward for their obedience (like promising to give a dog an everlasting bone after it dies), then why smear ash on one’s face once a year, to remind oneself that they are destined to return to the dust from whence they came? After all, such an idea contradicts the Bible and Catholic teaching. In the Bible, when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he did not simply raise his spirit, but his body. It was simply the human flesh that constituted the phyiscal body of the human being named "Jesus" that rose from the dead, not "Jesus" as a divine God, since such a "God" cannot die in any way, shape, or form. Even Mary was said to have ascended into Heaven bodily. Indeed, in Philippians 3:21, we are told that Christ “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body”. Preacher Billy Graham pointed out that "as Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, so we too will be raised and given new bodies—bodies like His resurrection body." In a precursor to the believers’ resurrection, some were raised at the time of Christ’s resurrection in Matthew 27:52 where it says that their "bodies...were raised." Job wrote that he knew for sure that even after he dies and his skin is long gone, that "in my FLESH I shall SEE God" (Job 19:26), meaning he has a body.
So why do Christians smear ash on their face once a year? The practice kicks off the season of Lent, which is the 40 days before Jesus’s brutal torture and death, culminating in Easter and the festive eating of choclate bunnies, which may simply signify the rabbit hole that such a story sends children down like Alice. That such a practice proceeds the Passover dinner that Christ is said to have celebrated before his own death – known as “the Last Supper” – reminds us of how, during the original Passover, the ancient Hebrews smeared the blood of the lambs they ate for dinner on their front doors to let the Spirit of Death that God had sent know it should “passover” their home, as it killed the first born sons of the ancient Egyptians. By smearing ash on their faces, so Catholics paint a stain over their mind that reflects the idea that their souls are born with the stain of original sin. And the ancient Greek work for soul was "psyche," from which we get the word pyschology. By painting black ash on their face, as such, the Catholic paints a black mark over their own soul, as if it were the doorway through which their mind may escape its fleshly coffin.
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