Daily Manna · Day 170 · June 19
Beauty for Ashes
“To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.”
Beauty for ashes is not a slogan. It is an exchange, and somebody has to do the exchanging.
There is a story told about Christopher Wren clearing the burnt ground of old St Paul's after the Great Fire of London. He needed a marker at the centre of the new dome and told a workman to bring a flat stone out of the rubble. What the man brought back was a piece of a broken gravestone, and the only word still legible on it was Resurgam. I shall rise again. Wren had it carved above the south door, where it is to this day, under a phoenix. He did not choose the word. He found it in the debris.
Isaiah is speaking to people still sitting in ash, and he never tells them to cheer up. He announces an appointment: to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. The first pair is a pun in Hebrew, pe'er for epher, headdress for ashes, two words made of almost the same letters. Sitting in ashes with an uncovered head was the posture of mourning, and the exchange puts a turban where the dust was; even the words turn into one another. Then the purpose, which is not cosmetic: that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified. Something is grown out of burned ground, and the ground is not disguised. It is planted.
Say nothing to this today. Do not sing, do not resolve, do not tell anyone. Sit still with the ash you actually have, and let the word spoken over it be somebody else's to speak.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 170 is Open Thine Hand (Deuteronomy 15:11).