Tangible Reality

Today is the first day of Lent. Around the world today people are lining up before their priest or pastor to have their foreheads smeared with ashes.  They will get up early, take time off work, skip their morning round of golf, or leave after their shift ends to participate in this centuries old ritual.  Followers of Jesus who frequent Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and other places of worship will shuffle awkwardly down the line until they are greeted with the refrain, “Turn away from sin and turn to the Gospel.”[1] They will bow their heads.  Their foreheads will be traced with ash in the shape of a cross.  Then they will leave solemnly for breakfast, work, golf, or the sofa, marked by an ancient symbol of death and hope. 

They are encouraged to leave the symbol there until it wears off of its own accord.

 Ash has been a symbol of mourning since long before the time of Jesus.  A grieved prophet Jeremiah once declared, “O my people, put on sackcloth and roll in ashes.”[2]  Sometime around the eleventh century this ritual was adopted by Jesus’ followers, often with burned palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday branches.[3]  For them it was a symbol of mourning their personal sin and the death of Christ that resulted from that sin. 

Does this millennium-old practice fit in today’s digital age?

In this smartphone world too fast for email and too tech-dependent for print media, how does a thousand-year-old ritual find a place of any relevance?  Yet it does.  Many people today, even those with enflamed texting thumbs, will unplug their iPods for twenty minutes today and do something that seems particularly countercultural.  It defies most pop trends and it doesn’t involve a single tweet, poke, or text.  It is the simple, tactile, and spiritually profound act of mourning achieved through a simple physical experience.

 Perhaps these are two things we need to do more of in the digital age: grieve our brokenness, and experience life tangibly, not just virtually.  Some of us - namely those with dark smudges on their foreheads today - have already begun to figure this out.  

A

www.knoxmidland.ca

---

[1] Mark 1:15

[2] Jeremiah 6:26  

[3] http://www.americancatholic.org/newsletters/cu/ac0204.asp