Invitation offered on Ash Wednesday not just verbal, it is tangible

In an age of falling church attendance, the annual ritual of the distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday continues to attract larger than average numbers. Working on a university campus, I am always struck by how many college students show up on this occasion and often wonder why.

Could it really be that the moment of the imprinting of the Sign of the Cross with ashes on a person’s forehead, accompanied by the words “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel” appeals to the extent of drawing such inordinate numbers?

After all, could it not be argued that church congregations are invited on a weekly basis, through the verbal proclamation of the Gospel and the homilist’s preaching, to do the very same thing?

What, I wondered, makes the liturgy of Ash Wednesday any different? For me, the answer lies in the way in which the invitation is given. While the eloquence of Christ’s teaching in scripture, and even the homilist’s words, may be compelling for some, nevertheless these still lie at the level of the intellect.

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The invitation offered on Ash Wednesday, however, has a different quality to it. It’s not just verbal; it’s also tangible. The person in the pew hasn’t simply been invited to turn away from sin; they have the mark to prove it. It can be felt, and so will be less easy to dismiss from your mind.

Earthy ritual

Allowing ourselves to receive the slightly wet imprint of ashes on our foreheads also constitutes a public acknowledgement that we are far from perfect, but are called to something greater.

There is something real about recognising this; often, I think, we are far more comfortable with the idea of our being sinners than we ever are with the notion of becoming saints.

There is a grittiness to Ash Wednesday, and this is good. At a time when religion is perceived by many as “pie-in-the-sky”, here is a ritual that is positively earthy (and was even more so in the past when the wording ran “Remember, man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return”).

It acknowledges the reality of our often messy lives. No wonder that GK Chesterton once opined that the doctrine of original sin was the only part of Christian theology that could really be proved.

The tangibility of the invitation on Ash Wednesday also speaks to the incarnational nature of Christianity, in which religious experience is not confined to the cerebral.

Rather, the sights, sounds, smells, tastes that we encounter, the things we touch, and the bodily postures that we assume, have deep significance for our lived faith.

Indeed, in recent years, the academic study of religion has paid increasing attention to this area of materiality. It is a world in which a gesture often means more than a thousand words.

Physical penance

In this regard, I often think of Rodrigo Mendoza, the slave-trader played by Robert De Niro in the film The Mission (1986). Having confessed his sins to the Jesuit, Fr Gabriel (Jeremy Irons), including the murder of his own brother, Mendoza is assigned an agonisingly harsh penance.

He is strapped to a heavy cache of his former weapons, which he must drag through the torturous terrain of the Paraguayan rainforest to the Jesuit mission where he is to stay.

At one point, having reached the top of a dangerous cliff, the load slips from him and plummets to the bottom of a ravine.

Although his Jesuit travelling companions indicate he has done enough, he nevertheless insists on clambering all the way down the precipice to retrieve his weighty burden and haul it for the remainder of the journey until, fittingly, some members of the Guaraní he had once enslaved sever the ropes, freeing the tearful Mendoza from his sin-burden.

This penitential journey, albeit dramatic, illustrates something significant about tangible religion. Fr Gabriel had perceptively concluded that merely prescribing a verbal penance to a man like Mendoza was never going to convince him that he was forgiven. Mendoza needed to feel forgiveness in his bones.

Spiritual journeys are often like that: embodied. The feel of bare feet on Lough Derg; the warm glow of a candle; the imprint of ash.

Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick's College, Maynooth. He is editor (with Henning Laugerud and Laura Katrine Skinnebach) of The Materiality of Devotion in Late Medieval Northern Europe (Dublin: Four Courts, 2016).