I remember when I made my first “go bag,” the disaster preparedness kit that everyone is supposed to have in case of natural disaster, but especially in Northern California, where there are many. Soon after we moved to Berkeley for seminary in 2011 we had a few small earthquakes, and I looked up where the nearest fault line was, and it was like, 2 blocks from our apartment, so I thought I had better order some supplies. We refreshed them a few times over the years when we moved from place to place, trading out the cans of beans and bags of cat food for new ones. It was a reminder periodically, to consider what we really needed, to remember the fragility of each day. But it was just that- it was a reminder- we never had to use them until the fire that we had in the Napa Valley in 2020.
We were pretty prepared for that fire. Since it was a very dry season, and we had a young baby, we had stacked up most of what we had decided we wanted to take with us if we had to evacuate. As the fire moved over the hill toward us in the afternoon and evening, we loaded up the cars with the basics of survival, and what we had decided were our most important tangible memories- Christmas ornaments, art, photos. But in the middle of the night, when the fire jumped across the valley and was burning on both sides, and we decided to evacuate, we still had a few anxious minutes each when we grabbed things that we hadn’t realized were essential until the last minute. I think that’s probably inevitable- you can be super prepared, but there’s something about hearing and seeing something like a fire that threatens your house that makes you realize what’s essential.
When we were able to return home 10 days later, everything was coated with ash. That included the hillsides around us. The town down in the valley hadn’t burned, but much of the hillsides around us had. For the rest of our time there, when we walked outside and looked up at the hillside, just a quarter mile or so from our home, we saw a mostly blackened hillside. Many homes and natural areas had been reduced to ash. Most people had enough time to gather their essential things, though some people had fled without them. Miraculously, no one died in the Glass Fire; I know that many of the firefighters and local leaders were tremendously proud that the local preparation had prevented death and more destruction from happening- that they had been able to save many essential things, and of course, the most essential thing of all, life.
In a way that I didn’t before, I understand now how ashes remind us of what’s essential, and of what’s essentially true. We gather on this day each year to remember that we are humans, that we are mortal, that one day we will return to the earth. There is a fragility in remembering that- at any moment, disaster could strike, our life could end. Perhaps for many of us the realization that the world can burn down around us has never been so present as it has been for the last 2 years. We know the wisdom required to discern about what we cannot control and what is ours to protect. We know better what is worth protecting and what doesn’t matter at all.
The other thing I learned from the ashes of the Glass Fire, though, are that ashes hold the richness of what has burned. Ash nourishes the soil- things grow from ash. The images of the hillsides on fire is imprinted on my memory, and so is the image of them later, covered in ash. But when the rains came, the valley began to grow again, and the brightest green and the brightest yellow mustard flowers grew in that place too. You could still see the ashes, but the life among them was so bright and vibrant, so beautiful.
We learned, too, in these last 2 years, from our indigenous leaders in the area, about how fully the land had been tended by their people, and that both the burning and the ash that came from it was an important part of that tending. The magnitude and danger of our fires now come from 150 years of American settlers suppressing fires, after having ignored and even killed those who knew its importance to the land. There is a deep danger to our belief that things can grow and grow indefinitely, that we can have more and more forever. Times of winnowing, of rediscovering what’s essential, of letting go of what is not, those things are all crucial to our survival, to our health, and I think, to our connection to the God who created us and this world.
What we do here on this night, and in this season of Lent, is I think, at least in part, about rediscovering what’s essential. Sometimes that is painful and scary. Sometimes it will even leave things that we loved, or even things that were good, as ashes. This is not a world where everything lasts forever. We will die too.
And yet when we are in death, we are in life. In the ashes, there is new life and growth. God is in all of it, somehow.
As I drove down the highway that night of the fire, the hillside around me turning to ash, I sang to Isaiah, as much to keep myself calm as to keep him calm. I sang to him that God was our shepherd. It has been true at other times in my life when everything is crumbling to ash, and it was true then, that I knew God’s presence in those ashes in a way that is harder to perceive when everything is easy and growing and green. These times highlight what is essential, what we need in our spiritual go bags when the world is on fire around us. They focus us on God’s presence, on what we truly need.
So in these ashes, and wherever there are ashes tonight, let God’s presence be known. Let the seeds that are planted in the ashes burst forth and grow and be nourished by what has been but is no more. God is in the ashes, God is in the life, God is in us. God shepherds our life, through death, to what is beyond it.