Ash Wednesday

Every year, Ash Wednesday comes around. Every year, some Protestants take the occasion to take a swipe at Ash Wednesday, usually with Roman Catholicism in their sights. Every year I think about doing a little post on Ash Wednesday, and every year the occasion gets past me because I'm overtaken by other priorities. So here are some belated musings on Ash Wednesday:

1. If you take the Puritan view, then you oppose Ash Wednesday for the same reason you oppose manmade holy days in general. There are, however, Protestants who celebrate Christmas and Easter, but take issue with Ash Wednesday. So they're not opposed to manmade holy days in general.

2. There's a distinction between whether it's obligatory or optional. I think Ash Wednesday is permissible but hardly mandatory. Moreover, it's spiritually delusive to imagine a manmade custom compels God to confer a spiritual benefit on the observance. 

3. Ash Wednesday is somewhat different from Christmas or Easter. Those commemorate particular events in the life of Christ. 

By contrast, the significance of Ash Wednesday is more artificial, eclectic, and diffuse. It is based in part on an idea (human mortality) rather than an event. It's good to be mindful of our mortality, although an annual ceremony isn't much of a reminder. 

In addition, it commemorates Jesus in the desert, after his baptism. It's a lead-in to Lent, as a season of fasting and penitence. So unlike Christmas and Easter, the significance of Ash Wednesday seems to be more of a pastiche. As it evolved, disparate things became attached to it.

4. There's no particular season when Christians out to be especially penitent. They should be contrite whenever they sin. But presumably they don't sin according to a calendar. So they shouldn't be more penitent during one part of the year and less penitent during another part of the year.

5. And, of course, I reject the Catholic sacrament of Penance. 

6. The significance of Jesus in the wilderness is usually taken to be that that his baptism symbolically reenacts the Red Sea Crossing while his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness reenacts the time of testing and punitive wandering of Israel in the Sinai. Only that involves a point of contrast as well as comparison because Jesus succeeds where Israel failed.

In any case, that's not an experience which Christians can properly emulate. It figures in the unique work of Christ. We can commemorate the baptism and temptation of Christ, but we can't parallel his over experience. At best our efforts will recapitulate the failure of Israel.

7. Lenten fasting isn't analogous to the experience of Christ in the wilderness.  It's just token fasting.

8. Some Christians say they find fasting a useful spiritual exercise. It helps to concentrate the mind on prayer. Help take their mind of the world. 

I don't have a considered opinion on fasting. I don't practice fasting as a spiritual discipline. There may be the danger that fasting has a placebo effect: the perceived spiritual benefit is autosuggestive. It has that a certain result because you expect it to have that result. You think it's supposed to make a difference, and that in itself exerts a psychological influence. So the conditioning may be naturally self-induced.

9. Ash Wednesday also has a spiritually ostentatious potential. Having the sign of the cross in ashes on your forehead as you go out in public can be a form of virtue-signaling. 

10. If you regard the church calendar as optional, you can be selective. You might attend an Ash Wednesday service, but skip the Catholic rigamarole associated with Lent. 

I don't have a problem with a lead-in to Easter. Just depends on how that's structured.

11. I used to have an elderly relative who asked me to drive her to Ash Wednesday services. I remember the last time she asked. But then she'd suffered a medical breakdown. I told her that I didn't think she had the stamina for the service. She reluctantly agreed. She wanted to go but her body let her down. It was poignant. I associate Ash Wednesday less with the traditional ceremony than with my devout deceased relative. It reminds me of her more than anything else.