Nice Ash

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Growing up, Ash Wednesday meant attending mass and having a priest impress the ashes of palm fronds on my forehead in the shape of a cross. In my northside Chicago neighborhood, where almost everyone who wasn’t black or Jewish was Catholic, walking around with a smudgy cross on your forehead on Ash Wednesday was fairly common and no big deal. But when my family moved up to a small, predominantly Protestant town in Wisconsin, I began to notice that “Christian” and “Catholic” were far from synonymous. I also began to feel a little weird walking around with a dirty forehead on Ash Wednesday.

Our move to Wisconsin coincided with the onset of full-on adolescence and an attendant upspike in my self-consciousness. I began to have very unlentlike feelings as I sat in mass on Ash Wednesday, feelings that would be more accurately described as vain. Please God, let him draw a decent cross on my forehead. Amen. To me, there was something potentially attractive about a thin trace of ashes clearly discernable as a cross. However, most priests and deacons have big thumbs and few seem to have the artistic talent and patience that a really good ash-cross-drawn-on-forehead-with-thumb requires. So rather than a cruciform brushstroke that might make a teenage boy say “Wow, you make devotion look so… attractive,” you get a greasy smudge right in the center of your t-zone that might make a teenage boy say “Hey, dork, you have dirt on your face.”

I didn’t attend mass today. My complex love/hate relationship with Catholicism is something best gone into over a few beers when you have at least a couple hours to spare. But as I walk around, I notice that I’m judging the forehead of the occasional ash-wearer I see on strictly aesthetic grounds. Too bad, kid. That ash looks like the work of a muddy puppy... or Oh, man. You got a nice one. I might’ve gone to mass today if I could've gotten some good ash like that.

And now, I must look heavenward and apologize to both of my beloved grandmothers. I hope they understand. But if not, at least I know they're praying for me.