Ashes, and the Forty Days

Ash Wednesday opens the Western Lent, the seventh Wednesday before Easter, so placed that the forty fasting days to Easter exclude the Sundays, which are never fast days. Its central rite is the imposition of ashes, traditionally from the burnt palms of the previous Palm Sunday, marked on the forehead with the words "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" or a call to repent and believe the gospel. The ashes are an ancient biblical sign of mourning and penance, and the gesture makes the season's theme visible on the body.

The forty days recall Christ's fast in the wilderness and are kept with fasting, almsgiving and prayer, the three classic disciplines. The distinct Wednesday beginning developed in the early medieval West as the older public penance of Lent was extended to all the faithful; the Eastern churches begin their Great Lent instead on Clean Monday, two days earlier, and do not use ashes. Ash Wednesday is not a day of obligation, yet in many places it draws some of the largest congregations of the year, and the smudge of ash worn in public has become one of the most recognisable Christian signs in secular society.