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LENT BLOG ASH WEDNESDAY 6 MARCH 2019

LENT BLOG ASH WEDNESDAY 6 MARCH 2019

Ash Wednesday, and things start to get serious. After the fun and feasting of pancakes we are brought down to earth with a bump. And ashes.

My family was pretty ‘low’ church and as a child what I remember most about Lent was the depressing idea of giving things up: going without… denying yourself. That basically meant no chocolate. No wonder children don’t like Lent!

Now I’m grown up it’s less about chocolate and more about preparation and – when I buckle down to it – prayer. I find planned prayer difficult and so the Ash Wednesday service is a good point of focus for me. It comes from the Catholic tradition (but then, we were all Catholics once) and before that from the Jewish observances of penance and fasting. The practice includes the wearing of ashes on the head. Did you know that the ashes are made from blessed palm branches, taken from the previous year’s Palm Sunday service? The ashes symbolise the dust from which God made us. As the priest applies the ashes to a person’s forehead, he speaks the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

I remember being struck by the coverage given in 2017 to the MP who appeared before a Parliamentary Committee with the ash cross still visible on her forehead, presumably having come from a morning service. At the time, a BBC political journalist thought it so odd they actually questioned whether it was ‘appropriate’ for the MP to be seen to be sporting such a symbol as she went about her working day. Our service is at Duddington church, at 7.30pm this evening, so after church no-one will see the ashes smeared on my forehead, and I’ll no doubt wash it off before I go to bed.

I wonder if I would have the guts to go out and about ‘wearing’ the ash cross, if the service had been this morning?

LENT BLOG SHROVE TUESDAY 5 MARCH 2019

LENT BLOG SHROVE TUESDAY 5 MARCH 2019

Welcome to Lent in the Welland Fosse Benefice.

This is the first of the Lent Blog Posts, from Jane Williams. Thankfully, I’ve got the easy part with a general heading of SETTING A COURSE which I am writing from the perspective of a Churchwarden. And as today is Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day – that gives me a good starting point.

I once suggested to our then Priest-in-Charge, Geoff Angell, that we liven up the March Family Service by cooking pancakes in church. “It will be a great way to relate Pancake Day to Lent and stuff,” I said. “And it will be fun.” Always game for a laugh, Geoff agreed at once.

Fun? What was I thinking of? Morcott church is not exactly equipped for catering: we don’t even have hot water: just a cold tap and sink in the space under the tower. And what were we going to cook on? The answer turned out to be a borrowed paella kit, consisting of a gas bottle/burner and a huge steel paella pan – great for kids to drop their individual pancakes onto, so each could cook their own – and no-one would be tempted to toss them! But it was definitely NOT non-stick and I had no idea how hot it could get.

I couldn’t have told you a thing about Geoff’s sermon that day, because I was fiddling with the gas ring and trying not to set fire to any small children, so I couldn’t concentrate. But Geoff and half a dozen brave children (the rest rightly worried about third degree burns) made scotch pancakes from scratch and cooked, or should I say burned, them in front of an on-the-edge-of-their-seats congregation.

Afterwards, everyone stayed for melt-in-the-mouth-still-warm-from-the-Aga pancakes safely made by someone else before church. Pancakes may not be very biblical, but I do think those children remembered what they did in church that day, and I certainly did!