Ash Wednesday: Picking and Choosing our Piety

It's that time of year again: the ancient tradition of Lent, kick-started by Ash Wednesday. It is also the time of year when us confessional types brace ourselves for the annual onslaught of a more recent tradition: that of evangelical pundits, with no affiliation to such branches of the church, writing articles extolling Lent's virtues to their own eclectic constituency.

Liturgical calendars developed in the fourth century and beyond, as Christianity came to dominate the empire. Cultural dominance requires two things: control of time and space. The latter could be achieved through churches and relics. The former was achieved through developing a calendar which gave the rhythm of time a specifically Christian idiom. It remains a key part of Roman, Orthodox and later Anglican church practice.

The rise of Lent in non-Roman, Orthodox or Anglican circles is a fascinating phenomenon. I remember being on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary a few years ago on Ash Wednesday and being greeted by a young man emerging from Miller Chapel with a black smudged cross on his forehead. That the bastion of nineteenth century Old School Presbyterianism had been reduced to this - an eclectic grab-bag of liturgical practices - struck me as sad. Old School Presbyterianism is a rich enough tradition not to need to plunder the Egyptians or even the Anglicans. Keep reading

The imposition of ashes was not reintroduced into the Anglican Church until the mid-nineteenth century and then in Anglo-Catholic parishes.From these parishes the practice would gradually spread to other parts of the Church. The practice had been dropped at the time of English Reformation as unbiblical and superstitious. Letting a priest daub some ashes on one's forehead is not the same thing as repenting in sackcloth and ashes. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer provides for the reading of the Commination on Ash Wednesday after Morning Prayer and the Litany. The 1662 rubrics direct that the Collect for Ash Wednesday should be read throughout Lent after the Collect of the Day.