They Focus-Grouped That. Looks Too Weird.

Roman Catholic Andrew Sullivan on the Ash Wednesday GOP debate:

Neither of the Catholics has ash on their forehead.

Remind me to tell you about the time I imposed ashes on Sean Hannity.

Ash Wednesday Sky

6:17 a.m., route 241

Remember That We Are Dust

For behold, you look for truth deep within me, and will make me understand wisdom secretly. Psalm 51:7

Holy Smoke

Nancy Constable and Cheryl Dunn of the St. John's Altar Guild are burning up last year's Palm Sunday palm crosses and fronds for tomorrow's Ash Wednesday ashes. Don't worry: Cheryl's an attorney, and Nancy's son-in-law is a firefighter.

Ashes To Ashes, Finally

I kept them in my old 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Five crosses from Palm Sunday services I attended when I was a boy in Detroit during the 1960s.

My mother, Jean, gave me the leather-bound book, with its golf-leaf, onionskin pages, when I was confirmed in 1967. The crosses were pressed in the front, where she’d written her dedication. I’d finger them when I got the book down from the shelf to check an old prayer or service. They were dry but not as brittle as you might think, as though I’d put them there last year rather than during the Johnson administration.

Seeing them always made me think of going with my mother and grandparents to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave. On the way, we’d drive by the Vernor's ginger ale plant. Afterward we’d go to a diner for silver-dollar pancakes or the Art Institute for an egg salad sandwich and a peek at the famed Diego Rivera murals and an Egyptian mummy that was on display.

Every year at St. John’s Church, repeating the Altar Guild’s call to bring in last year’s crosses so we could burn them for Ash Wednesday, I’d feel a little guilty about my hoard of keepsakes.

But this year, driving to church on the morning of the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I thought about an Altar Guild member who was so eager to light the mighty pyre that she was coming to church in the throes of her recovery from surgery. I thought of my children or grandchildren finding the crosses on some occasion (far in the future, I trust) and wondering what to do with them. I realized that my memories were alive in my heart and spirit and that in any event my precious crosses, lent but not given, were a half-century overdue.

So I added my ancient crosses to our congregants' newer ones, to be formed into fateful black marks on a thousand foreheads Wednesday during four services at our Orange County Episcopal church and school. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

If anyone says he's thirsty after Ash Wednesday service, I'll recommend he try a Vernor's.

Ash Wednesday On $2 A Day

Some Ash Wednesday economics from Barbara Born:

How can the solidarity we feel – our faith’s call to emulate the Lord’s compassion toward those engulfed in darkness on the labyrinth of life – become concrete in our Ash Wednesday fasting? Consider spending $2 or less on the meager meal you will eat, remembering how much of the world lives on $2 per day or less. Take the time to place a glass of water on the table, remembering millions that suffer disease, poverty and conflict, for they have no glass of water to drink. May the water remind us of our baptism, which calls us to be Christians not just in name, but by the actions we undertake for justice and peace.

Let your daily walk, used to dispel a sedentary lifestyle, become a fast from consumerism. Place in a grocery bag items you would take if you were going to be homeless, and carry them while you walk. Feel the solidarity by remembering those without shelter — what it is like to place all your belongings in one bag — and think about the earthly treasures we reverence.

From The Forehead To The Frontal Lobe

Ashes ready for young foreheads at St. John's School

Some Christian denominations crease their unobscured brows at the mention of the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, pointing to a passage in Matthew's gospel in which Jesus cautions his friends against "practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them" (6:1). We read that verse in the Bible, these faithful skeptics ask us, and nonetheless walk around one winter's day with a big black cross on our foreheads?

Deepening the paradox is that most ash-imposing Christians will hear that very passage in church today. Each year a different solution to the puzzle comes to mind. It seems to me that the cross on the forehead should be an outward symbol of Lenten resolves which we commit to keep in the forefront of our hearts and minds. In addition to the carbon scoring on the forehead, do we have something new cooking in our frontal lobes?

My first Lenten resolve (as my family mourns the death yesterday of my stepfather, Dr. Richard J. Lescoe, after a long struggle against Parkinson's Disease) is to be especially mindful and less fearful of the cycle of death, life, and rebirth (and also of fear and peace, sadness and joy, love and alienation) we experience in our lives and our Christian walk.

Second, did you see the way official Washington couldn't keep its hands off the President last night as he made his way down the aisle before the SOTU? The man was poked and stroked, grasped and grabbed. Lousy with pride and ambition, fear and anxiety though our politics may be, they're fundamentally rooted in relationships. Christians would say politics are incarnational. Our religion should be as well. Off the e-mail and text-messaging, people of God, and back to Starbucks and, at the very least, the telephone. May our wonderful St. John's preschoolers, shown learning about Ash Wednesday from chaplain Patti Peebles, be masters of the modern communications at their disposal rather than their slaves, as we too often seem to be. Intertwined digits are better than digital any day.

In moments of anxiety and emotional chaos, in transition and illness, in mourning, or in anger over the way loved ones are being treated, our relationship with God often comes in second. Leaving one job and immersing myself full time in another, which proved more complicated than I'd expected, I noticed I was talking to myself more than Jesus. So my third Lenten resolve is to pray more. At St. John's, in the corner of the Chrysostom Chapel, we've just installed votive candles. I'll be spending plenty of time there this sacred season. I promise the Altar Guild not to get ashes onto the purple fabric of the beautiful prie-deu today, but I do look forward to the day that it looks a little less new and a lot more prayed-with.

No Short Shrift Tonight

If you shrive me, you listen to my testimony or confession, and you reassure me of God's grace as expressed by his forgiveness and boundless love. If you begrudge me this kindness, if you refuse to be a minister to me, you give me short shrift.

And if you come out for a pancake supper on the evening before Ash Wednesday, you're participating in Shrove Tuesday (or if you're in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, Fat Tuesday). Anglicans and Episcopalians sometimes call it Pancake Tuesday. People used to cook up all the fatty foods and eggs in the larder, since they didn't eat them during Lent.

These days, while we're less concerned with denying ourselves during Lent, we definitely still go for the pancakes. At St. John's, the men's group makes plenty of the blueberry and chocolate chip variety, while Chef Gene Guazzo of the St. John's School kitchen cooks up a mess of succulent sausage and bacon. Before supper, Nancy Constable, on behalf of the Altar Guild, burned last year's Palm Sunday crosses for use during imposition of ashes at four services tomorrow. Remember that you are dust, the minister intones, and to dust you shall return. Christians have been doing it since the 10th century, going out into the proud, death-denying world with a rough, cross-shaped smudge on their foreheads denoting repentance and proclaiming their mortality.

But that's tomorrow. Today Bob Hayden, Tom Woodruff (shown in his red apron), and others in the men's group set the tables, cooked, and cleaned up afterward. Choir members offered two rousing folk numbers, we said some ancient evening prayers, and the children marched into the church and hit the "Alleluia" (since our liturgies won't include that Resurrection word until the Great Vigil of Easter on Holy Saturday). As we conducted our joyful business, the southern California sky glowed like a Lenten purple banner behind the mountains that hug the neighborhood around our church.