by Dr. Yolanda Pierce,
Today is Ash Wednesday and some Christian churches will impose ashes on foreheads as a visible sign of the start of this Lenten season. The ashes are a sign of repentance and contrition. But I’ve been thinking about the less familiar counterpart to ashes: sackcloth. Like ashes, sackcloth was a sign of repentance and mourning. People would rend their garments and cover themselves in this heavy, scratchy material, as a sign of their grief or their anger or their despair. Anyone who looked at you would be able to recognize the wearing a sackcloth as a sign of affliction.
While I was writing my first book on slave narratives, I came across a reference to sackcloth that forever changed the way I thought about this “garment of affliction.” Enslaved children were incredibly vulnerable to disease and death due to malnourishment and lack of clothing. To have an article of clothing, any clothing, was a relative luxury for babies and small children who could not “earn” the cost of their upkeep.
One writer describes the deprivation of his childhood in slavery, but also the incredible sacrifices his family made to feed, clothe, and shelter him. The enslaved children on this plantation had been given burlap grain bags – sackcloth – as Christmas presents, to serve as clothing for them. He describes the feeling of the heavy, rough material literally rubbing his skin raw. The discomfort of this crude material was so intense that he preferred to be naked, despite his age and his sense of modesty.
This writer subsequently describes his brother’s sacrificial act: for weeks, his elder sibling would wear the sackcloth garment, using his skin and his very body as a softening agent. He would then pass on the now softer garment to a younger sibling. The writer, who later became a Christian minister and prominent abolitionist, describes his brother’s wearing of the sackcloth as the greatest sacrifice he had ever known.
We are in a Lenten season of anticipation with a focus on the sacrifice of Christ. And it is a brutal and bloody sacrifice. But long before the end of this Lenten journey, we need to consider all those sacrificial acts, large and small, that make our lives both comfortable and possible. Workers in cramped factories we cannot locate on a map make our technology possible. Migrant workers in fields far away labor without benefits so we can have cheap salads. Single mothers travel by three different buses to send their children to better schools in safer neighborhoods. And brothers, out of love for their younger siblings, willingly take on pain and ridicule, to make the path for another a little easier.
In the biblical record, sackcloth is the garment of affliction; what can be worn after comfortable garments are torn asunder. But in this account from slavery, sackcloth was sometimes the only garment available, and it could be the very expression of unconditional love. My weary heart needs the reminder of this very human and very tender sacrifice.
[box_light]
Dr. Yolanda Pierce is the Elmer G. Homrighausen Associate Professor of African American Religion and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, and Liaison with the Princeton University Center for African American Studies. She blogs @ Reflections of an Afro-Christian Scholar[/box_light]
