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 this, other than selling the Catholic brand of guilt, is to remind people that they should be ashamed of being human, made of material stuff, sinful by nature because nature itself is less than a divine ideal. And the only way to overcome this shame is to aspire to "become like God," as the serpent in the Garden of Eden said to Adam & Eve, by shuffling loose their mortal coil and becoming that ideal, by becoming completely immaterial.
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 be just like an wholly immaterial intelligence they call God. Thanks to the great St. Augustine, who infused Catholicism with a Manichean theology - even though Manichean-ism 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 especially human flesh.
From this view, the "mind" of God was perfect even though the material reality that mind had thought up was woefully flawed and nothing like itself. Homo sapiens being but lesser versions of said God, only our ideals were pure, even though the brain they emanated from was corrupt. For Augustine, this 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. It is also why Mary needed to remain "ever virgin," for nothing was so debasing as that a child should be the result of sex rather than pure will, free from physical requirements.
Despite this fact, Augustine assured his followers that said "God" must nevertheless be "believed" to exist, or they'll 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 of what an immaterial "God" would do to those who failed to do so, 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 smudge on my face as both a badge of honor and shame at the same time. If I similarly walked around with mud on my face from playing football in the park, proudly showing my grit from having survived the grueling mud bowl on the grid iron, I was supposed to feel nothing but shame for failing to wash up.
The ash-smudge was about fearing God, loving Catholicism, and worrying about being dead, while the mud-smudge was about being a kid, playing football, and having fun. The former reminded me of kids who worked in coal mines during the early 20th century. Rather than resembling the shame of a cross, it always looked more like a smudge from an eraser, as if my religion 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. In effect, my face was being used to sell my Catholic brand, and my forehead was the 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.
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 alleviate my daily fear of dying in a state of sin. To die in a state of sin, for those who don’t know, means you may burn for all eternity in hell.But it 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 after masturbating to a porn magazine, you roast for all eternity without a chance for parole. 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. 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. 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 also reflects the idea that a person is being rewritten by divine programmers. Is it really just a coincidence that those “divine programmers” happen to dress in black with a white collar, as if priests and nuns are black and blue pens writing 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 focus on their moment of death. In this respect, it is simply a death cult.
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 crucifixes, 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.
And this is where we come to interpreting that bloody symbol that, on its face, looks like a celebration of torture and death. 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.
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 crucifix, even if they don’t realize it. To avoid such a fate, the Christian is taught to spend their whole life obsessing about 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 pain than is depicted by their crucifix. (With a divine friend like that, who needs an enemy?)
Naturally, the Christian insists their religion is NOT about death, but about eternal life, which is most easily obtained through a willingness to die for one's 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 original sin and hell are simply "beliefs," not verifiable facts, makes them more obstinate than even the devil is famous for.
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,” then why do such Churches not have an empty tomb as their symbol rather than a cross? And worse, if the cross really represents the eternal life Catholics expect to receive upon their death, as their final reward for their faithful obedience to the Catholic Church and refusal to accept that their "beliefs" are just beliefs, 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?
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