Today is the day practicing Catholics receive ashes. Today I will not
do what I did when my three children were young and still in school.
That is, avoid ashes in the morning when they would have to go to school
so marked.
No, we went for ashes in the evening and then straight home, lest the smudged black on our foreheads be seen as a hostile statement. Hostile to the gay women whose children my children played with and grew up with. Hostile to the gay men in our family who’d been vilified by the Church. Hostile to survivors of life-shattering sex abuse at the hands of priests, one of whom had abused my own childhood friends.
http://www.cruxnow.com/faith/2015/02/18/defending-my-forehead-and-my-faith/
No, we went for ashes in the evening and then straight home, lest the smudged black on our foreheads be seen as a hostile statement. Hostile to the gay women whose children my children played with and grew up with. Hostile to the gay men in our family who’d been vilified by the Church. Hostile to survivors of life-shattering sex abuse at the hands of priests, one of whom had abused my own childhood friends.
http://www.cruxnow.com/faith/2015/02/18/defending-my-forehead-and-my-faith/