An editor's notebook
Baumann, Paul
AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK LITURGICAL GRIDLOCK LENT BEGINS IN MANHATTAN New York City on Ash Wednesday is a bit like a funeral in a fractious family—even the most estranged relatives are eager to put...
...Half-way to the altar my companion stopped, as if halted by an apparition...
...Fidgeting, he craned his neck to see what our prospects were for getting inside the church...
...It was near noon, and I had failed to fully anticipate the bull market for penitential services...
...PAUL BAUMANN Commonweal 24 April 1992: 5...
...AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK LITURGICAL GRIDLOCK LENT BEGINS IN MANHATTAN New York City on Ash Wednesday is a bit like a funeral in a fractious family—even the most estranged relatives are eager to put in an appearance...
...At some point, the line I was in began to move quickly, and rather inexplicably, into the building...
...Peter's portico, I was joined by an older man, diminutive but brusque...
...Indeed, the whole madhouse of Ash Wednesday had the reassuring feel of a mundane but tenacious domestic piety...
...Lines from the basement chapel service snaked out the doors on both sides of the building...
...While barely acknowledging each other, we edged toward the door...
...This past Ash Wednesday I scurried over to St...
...Peter's main church, and the crowd spread higgledy-piggledy across the steep but broad steps descending to the street...
...Threading my way through the dense lunchtime crowds on lower Broadway, I look up and see wave after wave of blotched foreheads bearing down on me in some vague evangelical assault...
...This must be our way of acknowledging the truth lived by the Amish or the Hasidim, whose anachronistic dress reminds us that the God of the Bible marks visible lives and not merely immaterial ambitions...
...It was something more than metaphor...
...But I found the whole riotous opera—right down to the pasty-faced Dunwoodie seminarian who finally daubed me with ashes and admonished me to follow the gospel—reinvigorating...
...I made a hasty decision to race back ten short blocks or so to Our Lady of Victory near Wall Street...
...With such military encouragement in mind, into the fray I plunged...
...I must have looked rather confused myself, for he nodded his head conspiratorially toward the back of the church...
...Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow...
...Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed," the psalm reads...
...But the afternoon was as bright and clean as a First Communion dress, putting me in an ecclesial mood...
...Danks," he said...
...Maybe this was the proper way to observe Ash Wednesday after all, for the origin of the practice lies in the ancient rite of physical expulsion from the church for those guilty of serious sin...
...I nodded for my companion to go through the door first...
...surely it is good ascetic discipline to go forth into the world stigmatized at least once a year...
...Peter always tickles my fancy...
...Could there really be so many covert ritualists in Manhattan...
...Peter's, where the statue of a sword-wielding St...
...I wandered aimlessly for a while, wondering how I had gotten myself into such religious quandaries, and trying out various casuistical excuses for forgoing the whole thing...
...Liturgical gridlock, I can report, had paralyzed lower Manhattan...
...By now a Mass was being said upstairs in St...
...New York speaks so remorselessly of achievement—both material and spiritual—that it is humbling in the best sense of the word to bend a knee in the company of less ambitious sinners...
...He shrugged his shoulders and complied...
...Perhaps I had been sprinkled with hyssop, and even summoned to greater things...
...People yacked and joked, murmuring about the gentle absurdity of standing in the street waiting for ashes...
...With his worn face and hard eyes, my companion was an identifiable New York type—I cast him as a character out of Damon Runyon—and one of the reasons churchgoing in New York, despite its liturgical blandness, has unexpected rewards...
...Aaarrrrrrggggghhhh," he lamented, "it's Communion...
...Ash-smeared legions materialize on the sidewalks, as if called from the anonymity of office towers, stores, and subways by some hidden power...
...Peter's Church on Barclay Street, which is just north of the World Trade Center...
...As I stood on the porch under the massive columns of St...
...I joined what I hoped was a line...
...Whaaaaat, no ashes...
...Or have the tourists been sneaking into the churches just for the fun of it...
...Taking the exercise in the proper spirit of fleshly mortification, I arrived 4: 24 April 1992 Commonweal short of breath only to find long lines curling out of Our Lady of Victory...
...Seeing a situation ripe with spiritual paradox, some of the neighborhood's more entrepreneurial beggars canvassed the lines for loose change...
...Religion is customarily such a private matter for Americans...
...Concede nobis, Domine, praesidia militiae christianae sanctis inchoare jejuniis—Grant us, 0 Lord, to begin our Christian warfare with holy fasts—concluded the old blessing of the ashes...
...he exclaimed under his breath...
...Back I went to St...
...Before us the packed crowd at the back of the church parted as mysteriously as the Red Sea, and we found ourselves headed down one of the side aisles toward the sanctuary at a very brisk clip...
...Turning on his heels, he looked at me with an expression of panic...
...Dressed in sackcloth and sprinkled with ashes, transgressors were exiled from the community and required to do public penance until Easter...
...Impatience, and not scrupulosity, probably kept my acquaintance from Communion that day...
Vol. 119 • April 1992 • No. 8
