Dust thou art

..... and to dust thou shalt return. Ash Wednesday today. I should have been prepared for what happened when key members of the congregation asked me if there was a service. Sixteen turned up tonight. Our regular Sunday congregation is around 60. I’m old-fashioned enough to still think of such occasions as “days of obligation”; in other words, you turn up. I can see that contemplating one’s mortality and sinfulness might not be everyone’s idea of a Wednesday night entertainment, particularly when there is competition from England v Switzerland footy on the telly, the youth club and the pantomime rehearsal. The pantomime producer put a three-line whip on which was much more successful than my injunctions, but then he is facing a crisis as the performances are next week, and the leading characters apparently know less of their lines now than they did when they started back in October. There may not have been many of us in church, but we all knew our lines. And at least we didn’t have the usual business where a crowd turn up on Shrove Tuesday and scoff plates and plates of pancakes and then don’t turn up on the Wednesday. No-one thought of organizing pancakes this year, so it didn’t happen. So Lent has started without us.