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The Wave of Peace

By Cullen Murphy
Posted Thursday, Feb. 18, 1999, at 12:41 PM ET

I noticed the same phenomenon all over town yesterday that you noticed at the ballet--cinder sprawl. It used to be that the ashes were applied in a discreet smudge, but this has now given way to something bolder. The kind I've been seeing has more of a brute, Southwestern character. You probably have a choice of pinyon or mesquite.

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No, you didn't tell me what you're doing for Lent, and I'd like to hear. Sounds like it's time to fess up myself. The tradition in my family when I was growing up was to try to do something extra rather than to attempt new forays in denial. Last year I tried to get to Mass on several weekday mornings at the North End church nearby--an enterprise that became nearly unbearable for a shameful reason. St. Stephen's is a beautiful old church on Hanover Street--it's actually the oldest Bullfinch church in Boston--but the morning attendance is sparse. It is so sparse that when the time comes for the "sign of peace"--when congregants are supposed to shake hands with the people around them--there is no one nearby to shake hands with. So what has developed at St. Stephen's is the "wave of peace": the congregants hail one another silently with a wave of the hand across acres of empty pews. In practice, the wave has evolved into a sort of limp, stylized rotation of the hand, which turns all the old men into the Ayatollah Khomeini and all the old women into the Queen Mum.

This year I thought I'd attack the Shelf of Reproach and read Karl Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith, a book that various friends have been pushing at me for years. And probably I still will. But on your advice I think I'll push Murdoch to the front. So thanks.

Pax tibi, Peggy. (Your imagination can supply the wave.)