"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP! 2025 #7

Last year, every Saturday I featured a post called "Wisdom for 2024"

This year, every Saturday, I will post a series of unusual personal experiences

from the past under the title "You Can't Make This Stuff Up."

Sometimes, names or locations will be changed or disguised to protect the guilty!

Besides, I am retired! What can they do, fire me?

IN A PINCH, YOU JUST HAVE TO MAKE-DO

One of the requirements for working in "the missions" is to be quick-thinking on your feet in a crisis combined with the ability to keep your mouth shut so no one will know! 

When I was working in the "home missions" of our diocese, down along the Tennessee border and miles away from a "church goods store," I found myself facing a minor shortage. I forgot to get ashes for "Ash Wednesday." I didn't realize it until a half-hour before the service was scheduled to start. This required using my imagination and my ability to keep a secret at the same time. 

I was smoking cheap King Edward cigars at the time and the only alternative I could come up with on the spot was to use the ashes I found in one of the ashtrays from the day before. The ashes were supposed to be the ashes coming from the burnt palm from last year's Palm Sunday service, but palm was nowhere to be found!  

In my panic, I remembered that Canon Law 144.1 says "ecclesia supplet" ("the church supplies") for occasions like this. Since both palm ashes and tobacco ashes come from plants, and neither involved the validity of any of the Sacraments and this being a minor emergency, I concluded that I could proceed. 

Nobody knew about the source of the ashes, but me! That Ash Wednesday went off with neither a hitch nor a suspicion, but in the years that followed, I was definitely prepared!