Asking the Clergy: How will your congregation celebrate Ash Wednesday?

As COVID-19 pandemic restrictions seem to be subsiding, if only for the time being, Long Island Christian congregations are looking forward to more traditional observances of Ash Wednesday on March 2. This week’s clergy discuss how they will mark the beginning of Lent with services that include the in-person imposition of ashes for the first time since 2020.

The Rev. Adrienne Brewington

Pastor, United Methodist Church of Babylon

Ash Wednesday has not always been a practice in some Protestant denominations — some still don’t celebrate it. Methodists, who come out of the Episcopal movement, are more inclined to celebrate it.

We have been reclaiming our spiritual selves over the past decades, so it has become a more ordinary thing to impose ashes to call to mind our mortality, our complete dependence on God and our need for a relationship with Jesus to put us in a right relationship with God.

This Ash Wednesday service will be very different from last year’s, when we didn’t impose ashes in person but instead prepared individual packets of ashes delivered by myself and others to worshippers' homes and then streamed our service.

This year's service will be hybrid: I’ll be distributing ashes in person from 9 a.m. to noon in the sanctuary, which will be open for individual prayer. At 7 p.m., I’ll offer an in-person service, which will also be livestreamed on Facebook and at BabylonUMC.org. Our choir will still sing with masks on, but worshippers will have the opportunity to receive ashes from their pastor at the service. I’m hopeful this might signal a return to more normal church life.

The Rev. George W. Dietrich

Pastor, Hamptons Lutheran Parish (Incarnation Lutheran Church, Bridgehampton, and St. Michael's Lutheran Church, Amagansett)

Images from last year’s Ash Wednesday are still fresh in my mind. I remember staring at my computer screen as parishioners carefully opened prepackaged baggies of ashes. As I said the familiar words, "You are dust and to dust you shall return," we used our cameras as mirrors to self-impose a cross on our heads.

This year, with great optimism, we will be in-person, with the texture and weight of the ash being placed on our foreheads. Ash Wednesday is a day that holds two big concepts in tension. We will die, and we have the hope of the Resurrection. As valuable and meaningful as we find online worship, which we will continue, there is something powerful in bearing this tension of death and life as a community in-person. We will keep our loving distance and require masks as we bear this tension together.

With the heightened presence of death in a pandemic, this day also reminds us that the promise of the cross is always with us. The same image that was placed on our heads as the newly baptized also always holds the promise of Christ’s Resurrection even in death.

The Rev. Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco

Pastor, St. Thomas the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, West Hempstead

We will celebrate Ash Wednesday with the traditional marking of the forehead with ashes or sprinkling them on the head. This is done at services that include reflection on God's word.

Among the messages that we share: The prophet Joel exhorts us to rend our hearts, not our garments (Joel 2:13) — sorrow for sin must be sincere and not for show. St. Paul’s message is that there is no time like the present to turn to God: "Behold, now is the day of salvation." (2 Corinthians 6:2)

We talk about how Jesus identifies three things his disciples should do: acts of charity, prayer and penance. He warns against doing them to elicit praise from others.

After this reflection, the ashes are distributed with words reminding us that we will return to the dust from which God first created Adam — a call to humility before God’s will.

Another set of words signals the beginning of a time of spiritual rehabilitation — to put off sin and follow Jesus, and by self-denial, prayer and acts of charity to tighten up spiritual muscles that may have become soft.

The whole day is one of renewed dedication on which fasting and abstinence from meat testify to our desire to choose God over the things we are tempted to put in his place.