Of gimmicks and Gospel

From Seven Whole Days-

Now, this time of year, I’m likely to be accused of sowing confusion on this topic, because I’m a proponent of Ashes to Go. How can this be? Isn’t it a gimmick? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. The chief complaint about Ashes to Go is that it is cheap, since you don’t have to go to an entire liturgy; one merely receives ashes in a public place. My sense is that in our culture, wearing ashes is costly. This is why Christians love to rationalize wiping them off pronto. Indeed, the Gospel for the day exhorts us to, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them.”

If wearing ashes on your forehead were viewed as cool (and you’d know this because celebrities and powerful people would wear their ashes on the teevees), then we would want to remove them pronto. But I suspect a smudge on one’s forehead is actually a bit embarrassing to most people. It invites questions, “What is that, and why is it there?” In other words, there is a cost to that ashen cross. So when someone in a train station receives this reminder of their mortality, they are doing it at some cost — as opposed to the socially acceptable way of getting into a station wagon and driving to church where the ashes are quickly removed in the narthex after mass, which is, from the perspective of culture, cheap and easy. My point is that what is in our hearts matters more than some other measure. Like a good GenXer, I view this through the lens of authenticity. I like Ashes to Go, because I think it can carry deep authenticity matching what happens in church.

More here-

http://www.sevenwholedays.org/2014/03/03/of-gimmicks-and-gospel/