Ashes to Ashes…

Q. I go to a normal catholic school and the school chaplain recently upset all of my friends at school when he said that the ashes we receive on Ash Wednesday are just a reminder of death and that we must all die some day and maybe that is sooner than we think, so obviously most of the kids in my class went home quite upset because they did not want to die just yet.

We all went home with tears in our eyes and told the whole story to our parents who also got annoyed with the school chaplain telling us such things.

So in your opinion Fr Youth Chaplain Sir, what is the new deal on Ash Wednesday for you, by your account? My classmates would like to know in our school before we wander like a lonely cloud over the hills and dales. 

A. Poor things. Yes, much reminiscent of the poetry of Wordsworth over there in Grasmere, "I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats above the dales and hills, until I came across a crowd, a host of golden daffodils."

Similarly there are some clergy who produce standard post-conciliar theology of the new kind - holy water applied to the head being say just "a reminder of our baptism into the death of Jesus", and these too can cause upset by wedding a positive spiritual thing like a Sacrament to something deeply negative like the sad fact of death itself, so that such reformers and modernists become agents and harbingers of the Grim Reaper in sensitive schools and the like, worse when they do this theology of the reform in the primary schools themselves - lots of kiddies upset and parents hopping mad and violently furious toward the reform of the reform.

The actual theology of the rituals are not deep down really about something as negative or as black as the theology of the Grim Reaper in a standard rebuke to reformation shibboleths in a Monty Python sketch. The healthy true Brits know this to be a self-evident truth, but rather acts as pointers back to the Genesis account of the creation of humankind - "Memento homo quia pulvis es et ad pulverem reverteris", or literally in English, "remember oh man that thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return."

This is designed to remind each person that comes to the catholic altar rails on Ash Wednesday that God is responsible for the creation of each individual soul, and not some random act of a random stardust guided savage universe a prey to the huge forces of chance and destruction all round in deep space, the theology of creation of the soul of say a Sam Neill or a Neil Grasse de Tyson or a Steven Rose, all prophets of doom in a savage universe conceptualisation of the human being, as Bp Christophe warns in the pages of the New York Times this past year or two - the solemn formula and the solemn chants of Ashen Wednesday like the sombre and sober but beautiful "Attende Domine et Miserere Quia Peccavimus Tibi", or the sweet and sentimental and upbeat sprung rhythms as Arwen and Galadriel recall it of "Jesu Dulcis Memoria", are a reminder of the classico doctrine in the Great Greeks such as Plato of the individual creation of the human soul, that each soul is created unique, and that every person, catholic or Christian or secular or whatever, is asked to kneel at the church altar rails on Ash Wednesday to foreswear fealty and belief in the doctrine of the unicity of each individual soul, never to be repeated again or again in deep space.

This doctrine is so universally denied nowadays by the younger generation that no wonder they often lurch into suicidal thoughts in their perceived meaningless little worlds - an example of the myopia of the grey zones of modern British life.

There is no need to be a catholic to get ashes on the forehead, as this is an ancient ritual available for all believers who wish to remind themselves of their Greek loving souls.