Ash Wednesday. Small town South is getting in on the act.

Ash Wednesday. Small town South is getting in on the act.

Ash Wednesday service tonight.

Growing up in the South, seeing people scurrying around with gray smudges on their forehead was to me  terribly exotic.

I didn’t put it together with one denomination (back then most likely Catholic) and there weren’t many Catholics back in Central Florida in 1969.

But we Methodists surely didn’t do such back then.

Poo.

I didn’t understand the gray smudge on the forehead.

But I wanted it.

*    *    *

Now in 2012, we small town Methodists observe the ritual of the gray smudge.

Though it is at night so no one really gets to see your smudge because you go home and wash your face before bed like a good girl and slather on moisturizer like a good middle-aged woman.

My son’s images from tonight.

I’ll spare you the image he took of the back of our pastor Grady Mosley’s head.

And once again, why not perpetuate a Southern stereotype?

Then we learned what I didn’t know as a little girl.

The ashes come from burning the palm fronds from the preceding Palm Sunday (the Sunday before Easter 2011).

The smudge is actually a cross and stands for…

a)  Our mortality. From ashes to ashes — dust to dust.

b)   Penitence. Sorry folks. We are self-centered beings who occasionally act in our own self-centered interest. The turn of the previous century this was known by a term ~ sin. We are called to regret immoral thoughts about our neighbor’s wife, neighbor’s husband and neighbor’s new kitchen remodel.

c)  The cross. The eternal life brought by Jesus’s death.

Wow. It all works symbiotically (or is it symbolically) together.

My son’s cross.

I am still good on the no sweets after one day. Corresponded by e-mail today with a writer friend who said she gave up alcohol.

I did that once but it was before children, before Great Recession and certainly before I was writing for compensation.

What about Ash Wednesday? Did you partake?