Yesterday I wrote about Shrove Tuesday, and mentioned that it had no particular significance for me back when I was religious. Ash Wednesday wasn’t a particularly big deal, but I still have memories of that.I think that my dad held services on the evening of Ash Wednesday, but it was one of the times I wasn’t required to go, so I don’t remember if I ever did (which is why I’m not even sure if he held services). My most enduring memory of Ash Wednesday, though, has nothing to do with me or anyone I know.
Every year up until 1976, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley (pictured) would appear before TV cameras on Ash Wednesday with a little smudge in the middle of his forehead. I had no idea what that was and thought it was dirt. I was later told it was a Catholic ritual (other churches may have done it, too), but we did nothing even remotely similar. To my child’s eyes, it seemed that the smudge stayed on for days, and I wondered how he did that (in reality, it probably wasn’t there more than the one day).
Daley died suddenly at the end of 1976. Years later, when I’d had a chance to study various religions, and actually gotten to know some Catholics, I understood what had been going on all those years (I also found out that Daley, like his mother, went to mass every day).
So, Daley’s Ash Wednesday appearance wasn’t what I thought it was at the time. But it remains my one enduring memory of a religious day for which I have no other memories.
4 comments:
Being raised Roman Catholic, I have a lot of memories of Ash Wednesday.
In school we made the ashes ourselves a day or two in advance by writing a sin we wish to confess on a card and giving it to the school priest. In the younger grades, we were asked to illustrate the sin rather than write it, but everyone participated. (I would always write something that could barely be considered a sin. After all, why should I confess something that I otherwise had got away with? ;)
The priest would make us say a bunch of Hail Marys and Our Fathers (the number depending on the severity of the sin) and then we would collectively burn the ashes in an old coffee canister. They then had to go away to be blessed somehow.
On Ash Wednesday, at a school ceremony, the priest would return with the ashes and then draw a cross on our forehead with a mixture of ash, oil, and holy water. We were absolutely forbidden to wipe or wash it off and had to go through the rest of the day with gross, oily crosses on our faces.
As a kid, I think that was the only time that I actually looked forward to washing my face when I got home.
It's funny, though, since I was raised with this nonsense, it all seemed very normal to me at the time. Whenever I tell these stories to my friends who went to public schools, I get looks as though I had just asked to take a dump in their sink or something.
Ash Wednesday was definitely a Catholic when I was a kid. But in the era of ecumenicism, I've experienced it in Methodist and Presbyterian churches as well in recent years.
I don't remember attending the Ash Wednesday service either as a kid. Years later I saw a coworker with a "dirty spot" on his forehead. I almost told him about it, assuming he didn't know. But then I saw a few more people with a spot, too. One of them had it in the shape of a cross, while most just had a big black dot. When I saw the cross shaped one, it dawned on me that it was Ash Wednesday. It saved me from an embarassing moment!
When I attended a Lutheran church a few years later, they also observed Ash Wednesday with the marking of the cross. These ashes were made from the palms left over from the prior year's Palm Sunday.
I went to a service after work, however.
Mark: I couldn't possibly comment on the comparison of Catholic rituals with taking a dump, though I can perhaps understand that reaction (the whole transubstantiation thing still gives me the creeps).
Roger: It's my impression that observation of Ash Wednesday has been spreading among Protestants, but it started after I stopped attending any churches.
Sis: Good! If you don't remember it, then we probably never did go to Ash Wednesday services as kids. If a church had done it when I was still religious, I probably would've stayed home because then as now I didn't like that ritual.
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