Lauren Winner, author of several popular books on spirituality, writes in the Washington Post about the essentially public nature of Ash Wednesday: “This is a rare day when I cannot and could not hide my Christian commitments and my Christian aspirations, even if I wanted to.”
As she notes, this must be utterly unlike Pharisaical boasting or fasting “with a sad countenance,” and we must be vigilant about sliding into this temptation. Nevertheless:
Repentance has a public aspect and a private aspect. Jesus speaks very clearly about doing one’s repentance in secret — not chattering on in public about how hungry your pious fasting has left you. At the same time, the church also has a ministry to call — publicly — for repentance, to sometimes play the role of John the Baptist. Calls for repentance happen every week, every day, inside religious buildings, inside religious communities. Sometimes calls for repentance need to happen out on the street corners, too.
[. . .] I would add that there is something about Ash Wednesday — the day the church sets aside for people to acknowledge, before God and one another, our mortality, our finitude and our moral failings — that suggests taking this particular liturgical action into the streets (besides following, as it does, the public revelry of Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday). We are going into public with our ashes because Jesus died in public.
That discomfiting call to conversion, especially when carried away from the pulpit into the streets—is today often subject to suspicion, derision, or hostility. But it’s an integral part of the faith, one at the root of the unavoidable personal and cultural claims Christianity makes. The kind of “offense” these reminders of our mortality give is precisely the point.
Though some of Winner’s other points may be overstated (why does its public element imply Ash Wednesday belongs “out of the church” entirely?), the piece is, on the whole, well worth a read for its on-target deconstruction of the public/private split this day of the liturgical year so unsubtly reminds us is false.
February 22nd, 2012 | 8:19 pm
The sense of connection you see when the people you encounter today are also wearing ashes is not unlike the one the nuns inspired when they still wore the habit.
February 22nd, 2012 | 8:55 pm
I know we’re not supposed to feel proud of our ashes, but I have to say I am pleased with the young Deacon’s work on my forehead. Perfect cross, no smudges.
Well done, sir.
February 23rd, 2012 | 9:10 am
On Ash Wednesday, I waited for the 6:15 PM inbound train to Manhattan. The outbound arrived two minutes earlier packed with rush hour commuters. Among the arrivals, there was precisely one forehead with ashes.
On a full train into Grand Central, aboard the uptown Metro, and along the streets
to 57th Street, I passed six—six—people wearing ashes. At the gallery event I attended, a Madrid-born collector and fellow Catholic made dismissive mention of the fact that, by wearing ashes, I was making “a show.”
Tell me, please, the numbers are not prophetic.
February 23rd, 2012 | 10:11 am
Maureen …
New York City is a universe unto itself.
At my parish in Queens yesterday, we must have served between three and four thousand people at three Masses and an afternoon prayer service.
At our noon Mass, the church built to contain 900 people had, I’d guess, around 1200. SRO. In the back, even in the aisles. It was a long Mass, just over an hour (because it took so long to distribute ashes) and, to my amazement, about 3/4 of the people stayed for the entire liturgy. They didn’t bolt after getting the ashes. The other liturgies were close to capacity, too.
I saw this as a great sign of hope!
Deacon Greg
February 23rd, 2012 | 12:03 pm
Maureen,
I live in St. Louis, and I’d say just under half the people you saw had ashes.
There were a lot of 7 and 8 pm masses, though, so you don’t see the people who got them there.
Nor could you have told, by 4 pm, that I got ashes at 8 am, as they’d rubbed off.
I don’t think there is cause for discouragement.
February 23rd, 2012 | 12:57 pm
I went to a noon mass in Alexandria, VA and it was packed, standing room only—I estimate over 500 people. It was one of four masses, so I’d guess they were kept busy.
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