As the priest traced a cross on my forehead with ashes during the Ash Wednesday service at Buckfast Abbey, he said “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return”. As every Ash Wednesday, these words provoked an empty feeling inside me, or rather a deep sensation of humility. The ashes are the result of burning palm crosses or branches distributed in Catholic churches on Palm Sunday the previous year: the very palms which signify the glory of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
The burning of the palms reminds me that triumph is hollow, the resultant ashes are like the only physical remains of every human being after death. Hence the sense of humility resulting from this simple ceremony, and the chilling words which accompany the imposition of the ash cross on one’s forehead.
This sense of humility provides such a contrast with the arrogance, amorality and overbearing vanity demonstrated a few days ago by a politician who, like so many others, has commandeered Christianity – or rather a very strange version of it – as one of his convenient cloaks of political respectability. How does such a man, known for his sexual and marital misbehaviour, for his cheating and lying about his wealth, for his utter lack of humanity towards the weakest in society, to migrants and to anyone guilty of ‘otherness’, dare to associate with a religion which, to most of us who are its genuine adherents, requires love of all fellow humans and the practice of charity to the needy? The examples of his complete lack of Christian attitudes, behaviour and integrity are too many to list here, but I suspect that most British people’s sense of decency and what is right and wrong mean that they will already be only too aware of them.
Equally, how do so many of his supporters claim to be ‘Christian’, yet demonstrate the opposite to what this epithet implies? The word hypocrisy occurs to me again and again, just as it did when I wrote about an admirer of Trump, whose amoral character and behaviour was so similar. Fortunately, that man’s negative impact on our country has dissipated, though we have been left with Brexit, defined by so many as ‘the greatest act of self-harm in the history of our country. Like Trump, Johnson was driven by sociopathic egocentricity, even megalomania.
So, is Trump a Christian or a hypocrite? It seems that there is only one Christian principle he has demonstrated in the last few days: ‘Love your enemy’… that enemy being another despot who claims to adhere to a religion when it suits him. Neither of these seems aware of the message of Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
Marco Rubio, Trump’s foreign secretary, was called out for his hypocritical behaviour in El Mundo.
