This Ash Wednesday, Green Anglicans are beginning Lent by smearing carbon on their foreheads in order to find out what their carbon footprint is. The answer, of course, is: a littler higher than it would have been if you hadn’t set fire to palm leaves and plastered the carbon residue on your head.
For the non- green Anglicans among us, here is a song:
There is something about Ash Wednesday that brings out the the worst in those Anglican panjandra who are desperate to create a spurious aura of relevance in a culture that has no use for them.
Here we have Ashes to Go from the Diocese of Toronto, brought to you by three McDonalds ex-employees who found their way into the Anglican priesthood to continue their fast food vocation in another form:
And in the UK, climate zealots are using fake oil instead of ashes. Remember You are Dust and to Synthetic Oil You Shall Return:
If, as I did, you attended an Ash Wednesday service, you will have received a sombre reminder that the day will come when mortality’s grip will cause you to breathe your last and your mortal frame will return to the dust from whence it came.
Unless you are gay, in which case you will return to glitter:
What is Glitter+Ash Wednesday?
Ash Wednesday is a day when Christians receive the mark of the cross on their foreheads to begin the 40 days of reflection and repentance in preparation for Easter.
Glitter Ashes lets the world know that we are progressive, queer-positive Christians. We are in the pews, in the pulpits and giving glitter ashes in the street to those who either may not have time to go to a church—or may have been rejected by a church.
To complete the illusion, you can bury your glittering remains in a glitter coffin supplied by the Glitter Coffin Company. Here is a tasteful example:
It’s glitter all the way to the glitter encrusted pearly gates.
As Kierkegaard noted:
A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age, that is at the same time reflective and passionless, transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually whilst by a dialectical deceit, privatissime, it supplies a secret interpretation — that it does not exist.
A perfect description of today’s mainline churches who pay careful attention to their symbols, liturgies and traditions but have meticulously emptied them of meaning.
Thus we have drive-through ashes, ashes to go and ashes to joke about.
Rowan Williams and sundry lesser clerics have decided that Ash Wednesday is really all about condemning consumerism and fossil fuels. Let’s hope the ashes they use are not the product of a carbon spewing conflagration.
From here:
Rt Hon Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Rt Rev Richard Chartres, Bishop of London; Most Rev Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales; Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and leaders of the Methodist, Baptist and URC churches are among those signing Operation Noah’s Ash Wednesday Declaration.
[….]
“Traditionally, Christians commit themselves to repentance and renewed faith in Jesus Christ on Ash Wednesday,” said David Atkinson, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Southwark. “We must live out that faith in relation to our damaging consumer economy, over-dependence on fossil fuels and the devastation we, as a species, are inflicting on God’s world. We believe that responsible care for God’s creation is foundational to the Gospel and central to the Church’s mission.”
