![]() It’s a small act, true, but it is an act which requires us to voluntarily allow somebody else to invade our personal space, mess up our hair, touch us skin-to-skin and rub dirt onto an area that many of us spend a great deal of effort to keep clean and tidy.Īs I stood at the front of the chancel last night, smearing ashes onto face after face, I thought of the blemishes that people were presenting to me: wrinkles and age spots, acne and receding hair lines. In a culture that is so sensitive about personal contact between strangers and so deeply aware of our own appearance, people somehow are able to come forward and allow a pastor (sometimes a stranger, sometimes not) to mar their appearance. ![]() What is truly incredible about it is that it is itself an act of vulnerability. The imposition of ashes is meant to remind us of our own mortality and stand as an act of repentance it is a sign of our vulnerability. It is an action that we will, at some point, have to remedy by washing our foreheads. ![]() It is an imposition to have ashes placed on us by another person. Last night we observed Ash Wednesday with a ritual called “the imposition of ashes.” It’s called an “imposition,” I assume, because ashes are being put (“imposed”) on a person, rather than a person putting them on him- or herself.Īnd yet, the name of the ritual is strangely, ironically appropriate.
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