Month: March 2006

A reader writes:

Tonight my family and I went to Ash Wednesday Mass. We came home and immediately prepared ourselves for bedtime since it was already way past kids’ bedtime, and I wondered what to do with the ashes on our faces.  If Ash Wednesday Mass is in the morning, then typically the ashes gradually fade over the course of the day, and so I don’t feel bad to wash the residual ash off my face– the ashes served their purpose most throughout the day. But this evening when I arrived home it seemed disrespectful to immediately remove the ashes that had only been on for 30 minutes and unseen by anyone outside church. 

My wife stuck to her extensive face-washing routine, and I (hey, I’m a guy) left my face ‘as is’, with the exception of some gentle and reverent blotting to clean off excess ash that might soil the bed linens.

Does the Church teach specifics how to treat the ashes once applied to the forehead?  For example, how long should we wear the cross on our forehead?  And in what manner should we wash-off?

The Church does not require us to get ashes on our heads in the first place. It’s a custom, but the individual members of the congregation are not bound to go forward to receive them.

Neither is there a mandate about how long they should say on. If they stay on for a long time and others see them then that is a side benefit, but their real purpose is to remind you of your mortality (hence what the priest says when he puts them on you) and your need to repent.

Once that goal is accomplished, you can wash them off at any time–especially to avoid things like getting them on bedsheets–though if you can leave them on longer then it is a good public testimony to one’s faith.

I would definitely not have them on the day after Ash Wednesday. Then you’d look like a nut and the good of a public witness would be undone.

There also is no specific manner mandated for washing them off. Just don’t be deliberately respectful as you do so.

Incidentally. lightly blotting the ashes would have never worked for me yesterday. So as to be a better public witness, at Mass at Catholic Answers, Fr. Serpa put BIG BOLD BLACK CROSSES on everyone’s foreheads, not the customary small grey smudges you get most places. We had ashes falling on our clothes all day, and the ashes were so dense that there would have been plenty left to get on my pillowcase if I hadn’t washed them off first.

More and more Protestants are beginning to see Lent as less and less of a "papist" barnacle on the barque of the Christian Church and instead something to which they feel called to observe.

"So, how did Catholic Lenten traditions spread across the border [to Protestantism]? For one thing, the boundaries between traditions are not what they used to be. Crossing them is a steady traffic of believers and seekers. Want to meet someone who was raised Catholic? Try an evangelical megachurch, or the local United Church of Christ. About one-third of believers change churches at least once, according to commonly cited studies. Inevitably, all this changing of churches ends up changing the churches, as people bring bits of their worship traditions with them. Catholic liturgy has appropriated pop music and hand-holding in evangelical style. So, maybe it’s not that surprising that more Protestants are now dipping into the well of Catholic ritual and devotions. In that sense, Lent may be part of a trend: Check out the Ecumenical Miracle Rosary, which recasts Catholic devotional beads for Protestant use by eliminating those troublesome Hail Marys.

"Observing Lent is also part of a Protestant move in the last generation toward more classical forms of spiritual discipline. The hugely influential 1978 book Celebration of Discipline, by Quaker theologian Richard J. Foster, encouraged churchgoers to rediscover fasting and meditation in ‘answer to a hollow world’ and as a way to turn toward God. Some questing Protestants started making like monks, practicing silence and solitude. All this was made more palatable by the improved relations between Catholics and Protestants that followed the Second Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s.

"Perhaps it’s the things that made Lent hard to take as a Catholic kid — the solemnity, the self-denial, the disappearance of hot dogs from the lunchroom — that account most for the season’s broadening appeal. I was schooled to see Lent as a time apart, a respite from the daily pursuit of self-gratification. That apartness seems not unlike the ‘inward and spiritual reality’ that Foster suggested could be found in the ancient disciplines. Catholics have for so long thought of themselves as the defenders of ritual — the masters of incense, genuflection, and splendor — that it still seems strange to be sharing ash-wearing with Presbyterians and Methodists. But our shared affection of late for some of the old ways of worship represents a small victory for mystery, ritual, and awe. Now if we could just come to ecumenical agreement about the evils of frozen fish sticks."

GET THE STORY.

Perhaps the main reason why Lent is migrating again is because the human heart sees in it a helpful spiritual discipline in which the Christian believer may draw near to Christ. That human longing for asceticism as a spiritual discipline may be stifled but cannot be smothered. The renewal of Lent in Protestant circles goes to show that when a wheel is useful enough, it will be reinvented.

Good. It was Ash Wednesday. You were supposed to be.

Ash Wednesday is one of two days of mandatory fast under current Church law. (The other is Good Friday.) Neither day of fasting is severe. In fact, the reduction in food required by law is quite mild.

This is not how it has always been, though. There used to be many more days of customary fasting in Lent. In fact, you basically had to fast for the whole of Lent under universal law.

Sometimes fasting has also been much more severe than it is now.

And that’s okay. There is no one right way to do fasting, and the same amount is not always suitable for everybody in every time and every place, which makes it a good thing that Christ didn’t mandate a particular amount of manner of fasting for his followers. He simply said

And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by men but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you [Matt. 6:16-18].

The general manner in which Jesus addressed fasting allowed his Church to adjust the requirements of fasting to meet the changing needs of society.

It’d be really hard–in a developed society today–to mandate a whole month of severe fasting for the entire populace.

For example, if you required people to fast all day and only eat at night then people would get up (or stay up) to eat before it was light and then be tired during they day, perform their job duties sluggishly from lack of sleep and food, and then drive home at 90 miles an hour in a hunger-induced panic to get their evening meal, causing bunches of traffic accidents.

If the only fasting requirement was that you not eat during the day then people would gorge themselves at night, actually gain weight during the month of fasting, and make each night a sleepless Mardi Gras, figuring they’d sleep on the weekends.

How do I know this?

BECAUSE IT’S WHAT HAPPENS IN SAUDI ARABIA EVERY RAMADAN.

Unfortunately, the specificity with which Muhammad is held to have mandated the Ramadan fast makes it difficult or impossible to adapt the institution to the needs of a modern society.

It’s easy for us today to look at the Ash Wednesday and Good Friday fasts as not very much to ask–perhaps even too little to ask–but more severe fasting for long periods of time causes its own problems. It’s one thing to keep a strict fast when the pace of life is slow and you’re in a pre-industrial society and don’t have to get behind the wheel of a car while you’re ravening with hunger.

But those kinds of long, more severe, society-wide fasts are not suited to the living conditions we find ourselves in today in much of the world.

Whether or not the Church always adapts its laws on these matters wisely, I’m so glad that the Church has the Christ-given freedom to adapt them.