Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Smudge

I almost forewent the ashes today. It’s a strange holiday, a day when you hear a reading reminding you not to do your good deeds and your prayer and your fasting to be seen by men, then you turn around and ask for a penitent’s mark in the most conspicuous place possible, to wear around town the rest of the day. The churches are packed. Everyone wants ashes. Plenty leave mass as soon as they get them, before communion, parading their own disregard or ignorance of the reason for the ashes, and thereby creating an irresistable temptation for those who stay behind to feel self-righteous. It’s a mess of misplaced movtives.

That’s not why I almost skipped the ashes, though. My reason was banal: I was busy. I was as busy as I’d ever been at work, and didn’t I have a duty to my employer? Could I really justify not only slipping out for mass at noon, but to a mass that was guaranteed to take twice as long as usual?

But then there I was in front of the line, and Father Arne was rubbing his thumb in the little brass bowl and lifting it to my forehead for a smudge. Remember, Man, that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

After that there was nothing left to do but go back and crouch in the hallway—the chapel itself being completely full—until mass resumed. I couldn’t leave now that I’d gotten my ashes. (A whiff of self-righteousness—or was it jealousy?) And what happened then? A thought, a picture in my mind of a beach, my jeans rolled up above my calves, my feet pressing into the wet, coarse sand, and a person waiting in the foam, holding onto a little rowboat, asking me where I wanted to go. I said I didn’t know. He laughed.