Rotund plebian Peter Kay once observed that on some days, you see loads of people on crutches. This is true, in the sense that it tells you something about the threshold for novelty in your brain, and how everything below that threshold becomes background noise.
The same thing happened to me today, except today I noticed loads of people with birthmarks on their heads. Some of the marks were quite intense, almost black. In fact some of them were shaped like – oh, I see. Walking down Fifth Avenue towards St Patrick’s cathedral, 1 in every 10 pedestrians has the black spot in the middle of their dish – a startling number, given the shopping horde. A fair cross-section of gender and ethnicities.
This visual impression of Ash Wednesday – the mass tattooing, the negativity of guilt and penance – is one of crudeness, of religious cross-pollination and paganism.
At the cathedral itself, lines of bowed citizens wait for the local paedophile to daub the icon of torture on their eagerly pious heids.
Then the rain started to come down. Not as though to wash our sins away; but rather as if the clouds were anxious to wash away the evidence of our failure to move on, to better and less easily corrupted ideas.
07-Feb-08 at 2:31 pm | Permalink
I don’t think I could live in the US – no offence meant to anyone – but seeing I can’t be in the same room as lifeless Christian religious icons because they freak me out, I don’t think I’d react very well to an army of walking Christian icons.
08-Feb-08 at 4:31 pm | Permalink
> army of icons
Exactly. There was something really They Live about it.
17-Feb-08 at 4:35 am | Permalink
the catholics are coming to get you.
17-Feb-08 at 4:47 pm | Permalink
I don’t believe it’s a Catholic rite particularly – I think I probably had my heid daubed at some stage. Back when I was a child, and hence too young to realise that what was being drilled into me was tired and pointless fiction.
18-Feb-08 at 3:18 pm | Permalink
You did indeed have your heid daubed. It was with water though, not ash. It wasn’t any old water though – oh no no no! It had been blessed you know, by a very nice minister whose details, other than his sex, I completely forget. Whether or not he was a paedophile I thankfully have absolutely no idea.
Personally I am an atheist and have been for some years.
18-Feb-08 at 6:14 pm | Permalink
My parents are atheists too but still had me “named and blessed”. Allegedly when the vicar asked Jesus to take me into his arms, I stopped breathing.
20-Feb-08 at 10:59 pm | Permalink
My parents are atheists but still dragged me kicking and screaming to be baptised (aged about 10 *cringe*).. followed shortly afterwards by confirmation against my will.
22-Feb-08 at 2:26 pm | Permalink
My parents are atheists too and weren’t planning on having me baptised, but I asked to be at the ripe old age of 7.
I blame two incidents, one is the brainwash I went through at the hands of my dad’s cousin who never married for religious reasons. The second is that all my friends were getting religious education at church and the conversations at school suddenly became focused on what had happened there. So feeling left out, I asked my mum if I could join, and shortly after joining I declared I wanted to be baptised.
Now I have seen the light again, and should really get struck off the registrar, which apparently sits at the Vatican. One has to write a letter to one’s vicar asking to be struck off, but I have no idea who my vicar is. I shall look into it one of these days though.