(RNS) — I did not grow up with Ash Wednesday. My childhood was mostly spent in nondenominational churches that were liturgically spare and spiritually intense. Sundays promised altar calls and extended prayer, but no liturgical calendar to speak of — no seasons of penitence, no purple vestments and certainly no ritual smudging of foreheads. If someone had mentioned Ash Wednesday to me as a teenager, I would have had only the vaguest idea of what it meant.

It was only after a painful church split in my early adulthood that I began wandering into traditions unfamiliar to me. One February evening I found myself at a small Lutheran church and, for the first time, received the imposition of ashes.

It was an evening service, and the early darkness felt merciful as it meant I did not yet have to decide to carry the swipe of black ashes on my forehead into the daylight. But I could sense, if not find the words to explain, that something important was taking place.

A few years later, when I was a student at Fuller Seminary in Seattle, I was assigned to lead a pre-class devotion. It just happened to be early February, and I so decided — somewhat nervously, given Fuller’s evangelical low-church tradition — to attempt a version of an Ash Wednesday liturgy. Some classmates participated; others politely declined. I remember how awkward it felt to press ash onto the foreheads of fellow students. I remember, too, how foreign and slightly transgressive it felt to be handling something so tactile and liturgical. I felt myself caught between church traditions.

Yet that moment marked a turning point for me. For the first time, I experienced spirituality as something not confined to thought or emotion, but enacted in and through the body. The Ash Wednesday rite’s words, taken from Genesis, the first book of the Bible, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return,” were no longer simply a text used to formulate a doctrine about human mortality. Spoken while touching skin, they became something more immediate. Faith had become material.

That instinct, of spirituality tethered to materiality, led me further into liturgical worship and eventually to the Episcopal Church, and the priesthood.

Along the way I learned that Ash Wednesday has its own complicated history. In England, the imposition of ashes was explicitly abolished in 1548 under Edward VI, along with the blessing of candles and palms, which in my tradition and others we brandish on Palm Sunday to commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, then burn to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. But the Tudor reformers were rejecting late medieval Christians’ propensity to regard such practices as the imposition of ashes as conveying grace in their own right. Thomas Cranmer and others feared that such rites, however venerable, risked obscuring the power of Christ as the sole source of salvation.

For centuries, then, Anglicans kept the somewhat anachronistic name “Ash Wednesday” while dispensing with the ashes. Only in the 20th century, amid broader liturgical renewal and cross-pollination with other Christian traditions, did the imposition of ashes become a mainstream feature of Anglican, and broader mainline Protestant, worship.

Even before the Reformation, however, the practice was not immune from satire. In his 1992 history of the late medieval British church, “The Stripping of the Altars,” Eamon Duffy recounts a story from the late medieval jest-book “A Hundred Merry Tales” in which a priest, hearing confessions on Ash Wednesday, is so hung over from the previous night’s revelry that he collapses in the confessional. The humor works because it exposes the gap between public penitence and private vice. Ritual, however solemn, has always lived under the shadow of hypocrisy.

These historical layers deepened my own understanding of the ritual, but they were not what keeps me returning to Ash Wednesday. What I have come to cherish as a priest is something simpler and, I think, more urgent: the ritual’s insistence on finitude.

Each year I stand before a congregation, often filled with young professionals, parents, students and retirees, and trace the sign of the cross in ash on their foreheads. I’m not attempting to dampen their spirits or add to the litany of modern anxieties. We have no shortage of those. Rather, I am inviting them to tell the truth about what it means to be human.

In an age when tech executives speak openly about uploading consciousness and companies promise to preserve our digital selves indefinitely, we are everywhere being encouraged to imagine that the self might outlast the body. Against that backdrop, the church dares to say something unfashionable: “You are dust.”

In a culture increasingly oriented toward the denial of limits, that truth is not self-evident. We track our health metrics, optimize our productivity and entertain serious conversations about radical life extension. Even our digital lives encourage a kind of curated permanence, an illusion that the self can be endlessly projected and refined. Mortality is treated either as a technical problem to be solved or as an inconvenience to be quietly ignored.

Ash Wednesday counters that denial, quietly and without spectacle. The mark of ash does not announce spiritual achievement or moral superiority; it simply names our condition: We are creatures, and we are finite.

Sometimes the young professionals and students I mark with ashes ask whether it’s OK to wipe them off before heading into work or going to school. I have no objection if they do. I do not regard the ash as an evangelistic badge. In fact, I am wary of treating it as such. In my view, the rite belongs most properly within the gathered community, embedded in confession, prayer and Eucharist. There is something profoundly ecclesial about kneeling alongside others and hearing the same words spoken over us all. In a time of increasing atomization, that shared reckoning with mortality binds us together in ways few other rituals can.

I understand the appeal of “Ashes to Go,” now common in many cities (and often a highlight of the liturgical year for my seminarians). Clergy and volunteers stand outside subway stations offering commuters a brief imposition on their way to work. I respect the pastoral impulse behind it. Yet the deeper power of Ash Wednesday, I’m convinced, lies less in public visibility than in the formation of a community. There is something uniquely human about facing mortality not alone, but together, kneeling shoulder to shoulder, hearing the same sentence spoken over every life.

In an atomized age, where so much of existence is individualized and curated, our acknowledgment of our shared finitude becomes a quiet form of social glue. It binds us not through ideology or preference, but through the simple truth that none of us escapes dust. The rite is not primarily about being seen; it is about being formed, together, by that truth.

As an amateur potter, when I leave the pottery studio after hours of working with clay, I am often covered in dust and mud. It is an outward sign of what I have been doing, but I don’t walk around the city in order to be seen. The point is the work itself: shaping, forming, learning the resistance and fragility of the material. Ash Wednesday feels similar. The mark may linger on the forehead for a few hours, or it may be washed away before the next meeting. What matters is the truth it signifies and the community in which it is received.

For those of us who stand each year to be marked with ash, the ritual is not about advertising piety. It is about remembering who we are and, just as importantly, who we are not. We are not infinite. We are not immune to decay. We are not self-sufficient. We are dust and, in the Christian story, dust beloved by God.

(The Rev. Michael W. DeLashmutt is dean of the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and senior vice president at the General Theological Seminary in New York City, where he also serves as associate professor of theology. His most recent book is “A Lived Theology of Everyday Life.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)