Why Ash Wednesday? Why Ashes?
By Andrea Philips on Return to Order, Ash Wednesday 2019
http://www.returntoorder.org/2018/02/ash-wednesday-ashes/?PKG=RTOE0632
The custom initiated back in the early Middle Ages when repentant public sinners submitted to forty days of penance. The bishop blessed the hairshirts, and the ashes which, after biblical penitential custom, were poured over the sinners’ heads. In time, all Christians whether public or private sinners, wished to benefit from the practice.
OK, you are in school. Teacher tells someone to get into the corner with a dunce's hat on the head.
"Hey, we all want to get into the corner! We want dunce's hat's too!"
Somehow this tells me, the teacher has been a real gentleman about handing out the dunce's hat, and it also tells me, he has been a genius in teaching solidarity and humility.
Obviously, the ashes are not really a dunce's hat - they are something nobler, a sacramental.
You can even eat ashes, they are not poisonous if they are from a fire purely of wood, of a normal wood. Some French eat goat cheese with ashes on them, and yes, it tastes good. You can't do that with a dunce's hat.
And the teacher has no authority to spiritually bless it as a sacramental.
Now compare, how is the dunce's hat used in modern schools? Is the one who is supposed to humble himself sometimes too humiliated by others to not feel resentment and pride instead? I think so. That is part of why the Columbine school shooting happened, with or without physical dunce's hats.
Among pagans, perhaps just Buddhists could pull sth like that off, and even they not really, since they are not quite into what Christians call penance.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Ash Wednesday
6.III.2019
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