Ash Wednesday ain’t what it used to be.
In my hometown, Ash Wednesday was an annual coming out party for the Catholics. On that one day each year, everybody knew who they–myself included–were.
The ash smudges on foreheads seemed a perfect metaphor for all things Catholic. Translation: Ash Wednesday proved for all to see that Catholics do guilt well.
Guilt drove my Catholic self to church. What the priests implied, the nuns made explicit: salvation hinges upon doing good, or alternatively, for expending painstaking effort to demonstrate remorse for “any act of rebellion against a known law.”
For Mom, the child psychology professor, Catholic guilt provided the ever-ready alternative to corporal discipline of her four children.
At age 14, I got too smart to believe in God. I skipped Ash Wednesday that year.
A few months later I reconnected with God, this time through a Protestant church. The faith I experienced there overflowed with enthusiasm and confidence. “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine” produced happier feelings than the Latin translation of “Lord I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof.”
Then came the ecumenical movement, and the lines between camps blurred. Soon Catholics were singing Protestant songs, and Protestants’ foreheads were sporting black smudges one day each winter.
It’s not hard to imagine how Catholics would want to sing our happier songs of praise. But why would we want to descend into their depths of guilt and shame? Could it be that some of us had found something among the ashes that shines like a diamond?
To be honest, this isn’t the first time we Protestants have taken forays into the lands of ash. We confess our sins in the midst of our worship, as do our Catholic sisters and brothers. In fact, we Presbyterians say that a worship service isn’t really a worship service if we don’t incorporate into that worship a confession of sins and an assurance of God’s pardon.
Bud Earhart helped me understand the importance of such confessions. An earthy, former naval officer, Bud was spending his retirement serving as treasurer of my first church. A few months after my ordination and installation as his young pastor, he popped in my office with a question. “You know how you always give us a few moments to reflect on our week so we can confess our sins?” he asked politely.
“Sure, Bud.”
“Well, you’re not giving enough time. I’m only up to Tuesday by the time you start the unison prayer.”
The time of silence was tripled the following Sunday, and it remained so through my years of congregational pastoral ministry.
The annual application of ashes was also added to my pastoral practices. In fact, I saved the leftover fronds each Palm Sunday, dried them in my office closet, and then burned them the following February to prepare the ashes for Ash Wednesday. The personal connection to those ashes somehow granted me a key moment of connection with the gospel for my life of Christian service.
The sharing of those ashes then became one of the deepest moments of connection I experienced with church members and Savior. On that day and in that way, we “made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves,” as 12-step programs outline. Our penitence opened us to the Spirit’s deeper work.
We do well to take such penitent inventories from time to time. We do well to study each of the Ten Commandments, along with the two great commandments, and hold ourselves up against them, adding the sub-categories, “thoughts, words, and deeds.” How do you stack up?
It is easy to avoid such a process. A triumphalist faith can insulate us from our real selves and from the potential for true holiness that await those willing to follow Jesus to the depths.
We need not give up the joys of the blessed assurance. But we experience a deeper joy when we also carry a weightier cross, even one that shows on our foreheads.
Ash Wednesday ain’t what it used to be, and that’s good. Why should the Catholics have all the smudges?
— JHH
