I’m at the corner of Broadway and West 73rd Street trying to decide whether the security guard at the building next door dislikes me. Earlier he was giving me dirty looks when I bent down to study the sign in front of the church he is guarding. With apologies to a man who is just trying to do his job (though I confess I have never been to a church with a security guard before), it’s sort of hard not to linger over an advertisement for Ash Wednesday service that features an image of a swirling nebula emblazoned with a cross that looks more like two partially torn Band-Aids. Then there’s the slogan: “We are Stardust.”

Glitter+Ash Wednesday is sponsored by a New York–based gay rights organization called Parity. Rutgers Presbyterian Church is one of two houses of worship in the city and dozens throughout the country where an admixture of glitter and ashes is being handed out today, in lieu of the usual repurposed Palm Sunday fronds. Why glitter? According to Parity’s website:

Glitter+Ash is an inherently queer sign of Christian belief, blending symbols of mortality and hope, of penance and celebration. Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, a season of repentance. During Lent, Christians look inward and take account in order to move forward with greater health. At this moment in history, glitter ashes will be a powerful reminder of St. Augustine’s teaching that we cannot despair because despair paralyzes, thwarting repentance and impeding the change that we are called to make.

This morning at what is now the Stonewall National Monument in Greenwich Village, the Revs. Marian Edmonds-Allen, Parity’s executive director, and Elizabeth M. Edman, a self-described “Episcopal priest and political strategist,” held a “liturgy” and spent three hours distributing glitter-plus-ashes to passersby. This was “an act of profound love and respect” (the Rev. Edman’s words) that would bear “witness to a gritty, glittery, scandalous hope that is both utterly queer and deeply Christian.”

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