Remember You Are Dust . . . Or Reject It?

RMJ has posted an excellent Ash Wednesday liturgy, which is better than what I was thinking of posting. 

It might seem morbid to some but I always feel something's  when Lent starts late in the civil calendar.  There seems to be something more suited to late winter in Lent, a season for sober thoughts and experimenting with leaving excess in the past.   Though I've always detested carnival,  the disgusting celebration of excess, mostly among those who have no intention of conducting the experiment with simplicity and non-consuming.  Of course, given what I said a week and more back about America's imperial religious holiday and its commercially encouraged excess, you don't have to wait for Fat Tuesday for that.

The problem with using symbols as sacramentals is that they can be so easily emptied of their meaning as they become a thing in themselves.   Wearing the ashes after Mass as a show is directly contrary to the Gospel for the day - see RMJ's excellent post.

I always thought that the use of the "Remember you are dust. . . " line from Genesis 3 was scandalous because the Gospel of Jesus certainly sees us as far more than dust.  I think it's like the nasty old procedure of Last Rites, designed to scare someone, a form of psychological torture.  Guilt for real wrongdoing, a healthy sense of shame is something I'm all for,  needless morbidity and torture, not so much.   Even as a little kid getting palm ashes rubbed on my forehead that it seemed like a refutation of eternal life and perhaps that was the meaning of whoever put it in that glorious mess of a book.  As someone recently said to me, if there's no afterlife, why would anyone thing anything mattered?   As someone else has pointed out,  if you figure you can eat, drink and be merry, or rule as a totalitarian and murderous dictator and you'll end up in the same oblivion as the most self-denying saint then there's nothing to trouble you as you do what you want to.  

Whatever residual unbelief I may suffer from the generally overwhelming human urge to get away with as much as you figure you can get away with without feeling any consequences is something I not only believe, completely, but know empirically.  It is the history of human depravity expressed aphoristically.  But I'm going to get long if I keep this up.

I'll keep working on what I was working on, maybe it will come more together.