Just in time for Lent, I've finished reading The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Ronald Hutton's celebrated investigation into the decline of the people's popular festivals and rituals with the religious pressures of the Reformation and the political pressures of the turbulent times which followed. One of the many impressions this excellent survey leaves me with, is of the place of Ash Wednesday in the struggles which took place. Henry VII (who wasn't as tough on the traditions as is sometimes assumed) supported the blessing of the Ash Wednesday ashes, against Protestant criticism, but Edward toughened things up and outlawed this and three other major ceremonies of the religious year: the blessing of candles at Candlemas, foliage on Palm Sunday and 'Creeping to the Cross' on Good Friday. Edward's sister Mary, who succeeded him, brought these things back. And though it seems that England was never quite so merry after Edward, that's not really the point on a day like today, when we are nevertheless still able to 'remember that we are but dust, and to dust we shall return'; to 'turn away from sin, and turn to Christ', in that ancient hallowed way.
My Lent reading is going to be S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross, whose title speaks for its intention, to unmask the sacrificial violence in the biblical witness - scripture's repetition of the deadly cycle of sacrifice present in all human societies and in all religious ritual and myth - and using the approach of Rene Girard, to offer a new theology of the cross. I've been preaching a lot on this perspective lately (see for instance, today's talk, on the woman caught in adultery, Why am I carrying a stone?). Heim's work should help deepen my thinking on it all.
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