Ashes to asses

ON Wednesday – when a long overdue cleaning exercise took place at Maison Duke – I tipped four overflowing ashtrays into a bin, and not over the heads of some readily identifiable Christians.

: It’s a look, but not a good one. The Rev Scott Elliott, a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, takes the sign of Lent to the public on Ash Wednesday in 2011.

I hadn’t realised that it was Ash Wednesday, which apparently gives one licence to ashify the faithful … at least in America where an “Ashes to Go” campaign has spread like wildfire.

First concocted back in 2007 by the Episcopalian Rev Teresa K M Danieley, the scheme has now caught on among least 49 Episcopal parishes across 12 states in the USA which, according to this report, offers ashes to passersby at train stations, bus stops and college campuses.

Ash Wednesday derives its name from the practice of placing ashes on the foreheads of Christians as a sign of mourning and repentance to some non-existent deity called “God”. The ashes used are typically gathered after the palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday are burned.

Which means, I guess, the burned up remains of my Camels aren’t acceptable. Pity.

Justifying “Ashes to Go”, Bishop Stacy F Sauls, chief Operating Officer for the New York-based Episcopal Church said:

We live in a time where we can’t just sit back and wait for people to come to us. We have to meet people where they actually are.

Danieley, the rector of St John’s Episcopal Church in St Louis, said the idea was born in a Bible study discussion in late 2006 or early 2007. That first year, she offered a brief Ash Wednesday liturgy to about 75 or 100 people who crossed her path.

For at least some people, it’s working. Kathleen Dimmich, a 26-year-old real estate agent, became an active St John’s parishioner after getting her ashes from Danieley in 2009.

I had been in St Louis for maybe a month and hadn’t found a church yet. The mobile Ash Wednesday programme showed that St. John’s was obviously an active parish in my neighborhood, which was important to me.

Danieley rejects any notion that “Ashes to Go” is “cheap grace”.

We can’t pretend that the way we did things 50 years ago is what we should be doing today. When a church is seen as inflexible, it’s seen as not in touch. What is more important: that someone participates in a meaningful liturgy or that they do it in a particular space?

Please note: there may be a break in service starting soon as I am in the process of changing internet provider, and have been warned that I may be off-line for a period.

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AngieRS

Posted February 24, 2012 at 12:39 PM

“We have to meet people where they actually are.”
Does it not occur to them that people are elsewhere because they choose not to be where the bible thumpers are?

Trevor blake

Posted February 24, 2012 at 3:14 PM

“We can’t pretend that the way we did things 50 years ago is what we should be doing today.”

Christianity in the West has been so thoroughly scraped empty by secular thought that the few remaining true believers reveal how thin the shell is by the act of holding it up. An echo of Mithraism mixed with one band of Judaism, rolled across Europe to pick up stray local deities as saints, muddled with America – and his concern is updating things from the last 50 years. Fashion in clothes has deeper roots than that.

tony e

Posted February 24, 2012 at 3:19 PM

At least the ashes allow us to spot the braindead at a distance.

Stuart H.

Posted February 24, 2012 at 3:32 PM

Well, cheaper than having ‘gullible’ tattooed across your forehead, I suppose!
Seeing Elliott I remembered that way back in the 1980′s some glue-sniffing skinheads who hung around the British Movement also had a craze for tattooing a little cross on their foreheads. Mind you, they grew out of it.

nelmonster

Posted February 24, 2012 at 7:04 PM

I don’t get this lent thing, I mean who do you lend stuff too? Can anyone lend me a fiver please?

Stonyground

Posted February 24, 2012 at 8:30 PM

I recall hearing a discussion on Radio 4 about Lent and its Muslim equivalent. Subsequently Christian speakers on Thought for the Day lamented that the discussion had to open with an explanation of what Lent was, because most of us didn’t know.

The Muslim equivalent involved giving up some luxury for a set period and giving the money that you would have spent on it to charity. It seemed to me that that was a fairly admirable idea. The charitable part provides some point to the whole exercise which the Christian version lacks.

If only the Muslim religion would make this kind of thing a priority instead of all that flying into a rage because someone drew a picture and death to the apostates, I might start to think that they were OK.