A solemn day in the ecumenical calendar,
today is the day when
the priest, dipping his thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead -- or in case of clerics upon the place of the tonsure -- of each the sign of the cross, saying the words: "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." The ashes used in this ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year.
From Rock Hill, SC the
Herald reports this is a day when Christians
“...confront our frailness, our failures,” ...“and the ashes symbolize our broken dreams.”
Services will start today around sunrise and will go far past nightfall. It will happen all over the earth. People with ashes on their foreheads dispersing into the day and night to try to make a world of record unemployment, broken dreams, and foreclosures.
The ashes do not always inspire.
“One time, years ago in Rock Hill, so many people left a service at the Oratory on Ash Wednesday and went to the old Revco pharmacy there in the Beatty Plaza on Cherry Road...the clerk thought it was a cult coming in. She called the police.”
The cops came to find people with gray forehead smears in the shape of the cross, hands clasped in prayer. There was no cult.
Just hope.
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