I should ask, do you volunteer at a soup kitchen? Well, apparently, Matthew 6:3 says you should only give in that way if you can sneak in and out without being seen. But before I go there, let’s stay with Matthew 6. It makes visible what the one kneeling is owed.

Kneeling, and then smearing ashes on one’s face, takes that posture into much deeper strata.

We kneel in humility because God is great, and we are not. Kneeling is a Christian posture that demonstrates, among other things, the distinction between the Creator and the creature. Or perhaps instead, somewhere deep down inside, there’s an exceptional fearfulness of the event’s deeper stare into the human soul-a gaze that’s far heavier, far more personal, than so many other pious practices they already employ the rest of the year. Besides, ashes are not easily scrubbed clean from coffee cups and stadium seating cushions. I mean, the phrase “historic rites and ceremonies” just sounds so primitive-as though we Christians see ourselves as distinct from the surrounding world, as having our own culture and vernacular. Or perhaps they exchanged ancient liturgies and their aesthetics for things deemed more modern. Perhaps that’s true because they simply strayed away over time. Maybe it’s as simple as particular churches having never done it before. I guess what I can’t figure out is if the critics truly believe the rites and ceremonies of Ash Wednesday are bad practices. That must be what Jesus means in the text. It smears an ashen cross right in the middle of its participants’ foreheads. Ash Wednesday, if it’s done right, certainly isn’t discreet. I say “strangely” because it’s a reading that appears to discourage Christian pieties observable to others. Still, when this escape hatch won’t open, the next angle is the apparent counterintuition of Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, which, so strangely, is the appointed Gospel reading for Ash Wednesday. What’s more, when one discovers Early Church Fathers casually prescribing ashes as a sign of repentance-as though such prescriptions were normal-it’s likely the ceremonies themselves can be found among the first Christians. Since similar liturgies for the “Day of Ashes” can be found on the scene as early as the eighth century, the Gregorian Sacramentary being one particular source, it’s hardly an innovation. As always, some call it and its ceremony-the imposition of ashes-a liturgical innovation, as if the Church had just started employing the practice last week. It has already begun-the seasonal bemoaning of Ash Wednesday. The imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday is accompanied by the admonition to “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Created from dust imposition of ashes