The soil on my property is very acidic. Some plants -- azaleas, blueberries, hydrangeas -- like this, but most do not. There are treatments you can buy to alkanize the soil, but I have a lot of ground and try to do things on the cheap. The best way to raise the pH of soil without spending a lot of money is to mix wood ash into it. For four years now I have been dumping the charcoal grill into what I hope will finally this spring be a rose bed. Every spring I dig a firebreak around the garden, wait for a windless day, heap fallen branches in the middle, and burn them. (I have to be tricky with this, though -- bonfires are technically illegal without a permit, and the fire department doesn't like to grant them. But there's an exemption for cooking fires. So I have to stand out there with a package of hot dogs in case the Brandywine VFD comes snooping around.)
So I've come to look at ashes like fertilizer. They make it possible to grow things. They nourish living things. Before this, they just seemed dead and dirty to me, and wearing them was a penitence simply because they felt gritty and nasty. But now I'm able to see another meaning in them, that makes their connection to salvation and the resurrection clearer.