I'm still fuming about the recent WaPo coverage of an Imbolc ritual. Watching people walking around town with ashes on their foreheads today, it occured to me that lots of xian rituals can look pretty creepy if you're not familar with them. But the WaPo would never write:
Wearing the kind of fanciful robes you might have seen on ancient potentates, Smith and other members of the Church of the Sacred Blood greeted Lent this year in a large building decorated with stained-glass depictions of torture and execution that they refer to as "Stations of the Implement of Torture." Under a giant statue of a woman stepping on a snake, her heart visible under her robes and surrounded by plaster flames, was an altar; on the altar were dozens of flaming candles.
Eight women and eight men, mostly middle-aged couples, folded their hands. Following the elaborate directions printed in the black-bound books that they held, they stood, kneeled, and sat in increasingly elaborate repetitions. Next, they passed a large goblet of wine and a loaf of bread, in a pseudo-cannabalistic re-enactment of what they believe to be a mysterious transformation of wine into blood and bread into human flesh.
There was no scourging. No blood. No mention of the devil.
But the congregants each approached the priest who placed ashes on their foreheads and intoned, "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return," even when he was speaking to the women. Additionally there was a ciborium, a monstrance, and a custodia, burning incense, and a 35-minute service full of abstruse allusions to various angels and saints. The part assigned to Smith included such lines as: "Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, God of power and might. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest. "
For purposes of comparison and contrast, here's the actual paragraph that WaPo wrote about a recent Imbolc ritual.
3 comments:
You want to see sheer unadulterated scorn, I once saw that smudged forehead on some one and didn't think about Lent and Ashes, just dirt, reached to wipe it off for them, never saw such a look. De debil wit horns.
from Ruth
nice post.
I have bangs, so I don't really get to proclaim to everybody what a good Christian I am.
Thank God my new priest (1st year at college) has enough honesty to point out the irony of the ritual and the Scripture reading that we had (along the lines of: when you fast, you shouldn't smear your face with dirt. It also focuses on how one shouldn't exploit your faith for personal gain. Few politicians ever read it, I guess).
My daughter The Spare had Ash Wednesday off school. She said she was walking around town and she saw all these people with dark smudges on their foreheads. She said it really creeped her out until she remembered that it was Ash Wednesday. To quote my 12-year-old Spare: "You know, from the point of view of a Druid, some Christian things are just bizarre."
Post a Comment