This is hardly the year in which we need someone to tell us that we’re all mortal.
Or maybe, as panicked voices declare that we need to reduce the risks to zero before we can, say, let our children go to school, this is precisely the time we need a reminder that we are but dust, and to dust we will, with 100% certainty, return.
And what an Ash Wednesday it was this year, with masks and social distancing reshaping the ancient customs.
Simply going to church (that is, physically stepping inside a building with other people) still scares millions of people too much, which left the pews far emptier than normal. It doesn’t help that the media seem to believe that church is the only thing more dangerous than a Florida beach during this pandemic.
But a priest or pastor smudging ashes, with his fingers, across the forehead of several hundred people? That wasn’t going to happen in most churches.
So, clergy got creative.
The Vatican instructed priests to forgo smudging and instead sprinkle the ashes on top of the heads of congregants. Most priests, it seemed, followed that (somewhat traditional) practice.
So, in churches all across the United States, the faithful got ash showers, making the ashes nearly invisible (except on bald men). Perhaps the hidden ashes are more fitting with Jesus’s warning, read at Mass every Ash Wednesday, to not pray on street corners like the hypocrites seeking public recognition. Ashes sprinkled in your hair are seen only by “your Father, who sees what is done in secret.”
Many priests and pastors simply replaced the fingertip with a Q-tip, smudging the old-fashioned cross on the faithful foreheads, just with finer lines.
Methodists did it more self-service, apparently: passing out ash-filled cups and your own personal Q-tip.
“Our pastor distributed tiny bags of ashes to each family and directed us to mix it with a little bit of olive oil,” one worshipper in Washington explained. “We’ll put the ashes on each other while we watch the virtual service tonight.”
Some Presbyterians got their ashes in the mail and left the smudging to the parents in the ecclesia domestica.
The Church of England took remote smudging to another level, creating an Instagram filter allowing users to superimpose a digital ash-cross on their forehead.
Of course, Ash Wednesday ushers in the solemn season of Lent. Maybe this year, some of us will give up fear and start going to church again.
