Drive-in 'no contact' ashes @ St. Luke's

111 Whalley Avenue,New Haven CT 06511

17 February, 2021

Description

At 12:30 p.m. we will offer ashes on a drive-thru basis in our parking lot. Please enter the parking lot via the Sperry Street driveway. We are returning to the old - actually ancient - practice of sprinkling ashes on the head (instead of using ashes to make a cross on your forehead). This allows us to offer no-contact imposition of ashes while you remain in your car. Our clergy will be double-masked and wearing gloves to add additional layers of protection. In the Episcopal Church, ashes may be imposed on the heads of participants in the Ash Wednesday service as a sign of mortality and penitence. The ashes are imposed with the words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (BCP, p. 265). The imposition of ashes has been practiced on Ash Wednesday since the ninth century. Bishop Neil Alexander writes: “The first recorded use of ashes is in the tenth century in Germany. In that case, the penitents were sprinkled with ashes, extricated from the assembly to the accompaniment of Genesis 3:19-20 (the exclusion of Adam and Eve from the garden), from which the formula for the imposition of ashes in later centuries was derived. It was in England, in the eleventh century, that we have evidence of the sprinkling of ashes on all of the faithful, noted there in the writings of the Aelfric, the Abbot of Eynsham. By the end of that century, Pope Urban II will make the practice of sprinkling ashes on all of the faithful the practice of the western church. What should be underscored here is that we are talking about sprinkling ashes on the heads of the faithful, not the present practice of the imposition of a cross-of-ashes on the forehead. Although it is difficult to date precisely, the imposition of a cross-of-ashes is first seen in monastic rites and was imposed upon the tonsure of the monks, not upon their foreheads, thus eliminating any difficulty aligning the practice with the Matthean exhortation not to mark-up one’s face as the hypocrites do. What we can say, however, is that even when other sources indicate that the imposition of a cross upon the forehead had become the practice not just of monks but of the whole church, the liturgical books continued to speak of sprinkling the ashes upon the heads of the faithful. So, in this time of pandemic, how does this help us? Many Ash Wednesday sermons have made much of the ritual depth to be found in the parallel between the cross marked upon one’s brow at holy baptism and the cross marked in ashes at the beginning of Lent. Such an approach holds in tension the promises of new life associated with baptism with a reminder of our mortality present not only in a ritual action using ashes, but in the words of the formula of imposition derived from Genesis 3, remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. In like manner, it is abundantly clear that the church’s first ritualization of our mortality was not the imposition of ashes on the forehead, however beautifully that may resonate with chrismation at baptism, but the sprinkling of ashes upon the heads of the faithful while Genesis 3 (remember that you are dust) and Jonah 3 (sackcloth and 4 ashes) echoed through the assembly. That action is powerfully reminiscent of the dirt that is cast upon our mortal remains at the time of our burial.”