Ashes to Go

'The Archbishop of York has pinched your idea!' said Marion the curate in an email to me this Monday. Of course it wasn't my idea: I got it from my friend His Grace of Hoxton and he got it from some Episcopal churches in the USA where it seems to have started. The idea is that you take the ash prepared from last year's palm crosses and used in the Ash Wednesday services out of the church and into the places where people actually find themselves. My Hoxton colleague administered ash to bewildered commuters on the way to Old Street Station. I was going to offer it at the approach to the railway station here in Swanvale Halt, but my chicken heart got the better of me and instead I trialled it in the relatively benign surroundings of the infant school. I got half-a-dozen adult takers in the course of 15 minutes, including one of the staff, which wasn't bad. The children were fascinated. At Church Club in the afternoon the majority positively demanded I do it to them, and their generally boisterous mood, resulting from being kept in all day because of the rain, became positively solemn. I said the traditional words remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return: repent and hear the Gospel and then got them to repeat them over me. It was rather moving really.

The trouble with outreach is that it necessarily involves taking things that are familiar in one context into unexpected places and that always runs the risk of discomfort. My mind goes back to an occasion at Wycombe Museum when we had the bright idea of taking the finds from the local Roman villa down to the meadow east of the town where they were found to celebrate National Archaeology Day. We had some good interpretation, games and activities for children, and a tent we borrowed from the Council. We set up shop next to the main path across the field, and for the next few hours watched everyone crossing the meadow describe an enormous arc as they did their best not to come anywhere near us. 

At least it went better than some other Ash Wednesday efforts ...

(Photo from the Diocese of York website).