Basically, what I've noticed is a clash between how we experience time in Catholic versus Protestant spaces. Specifically, the experience of Catholic time is cyclical whereas Protestant time is linear. I'm sure some historian has worked out the origins of this contrast. If I were to hazard a guess I'd assume that the cyclical experience of time in the Catholic experience is rooted in our agrarian past, with its cycle of seasons, along with some Catholic/pagan syncretism as the church absorbed pagan celebrations and festivals associated with seasonal, lunar, and astronomical cycles. By contrast, to continue my guessing, the Protestant experience of time is associated with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, which broke with the agricultural seasons, along with Enlightenment notions of "progress," where we march forward in time toward a better future.
Maybe I'm the only one who has experienced this, but I've felt some temporal friction introducing the liturgical calendar into low-church, congregational Protestant spaces. For example, I've found some in these churches a bit confused during Advent that we are "waiting" for the birth of the Christ Child. Since the birth of Jesus happened over two-thousand years ago how, exactly, are we "waiting" for it? The event has already happened.
I don't think this is a failure of abstraction, an inability to "get" Advent, but is, rather, a clash of temporal imaginations. It takes some explaining to describe how the liturgical season is cyclical, that we are always going back in time to stand, over and over again, at a point in the past. We aren't moving forward year after year, but always cycling backward.
A similar temporal friction happens during Lent. For low-church, congregational Protestants their personal moment of confession, repentance, and salvation is an event in their biographical past. So on Ash Wednesday it is strange to hear that you, as a sinner, stand under the curse of death with the words, "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." And what does it means to penitentially wait for forty days for a salvation that has already occurred in your life?
You see this tension in how many low-church, congregational Protestants shift the emphasis of Ash Wednesday and Lent away from sin and penitence. For example, you commonly hear that Ash Wednesday is about "contemplating your mortality." Well, that's not exactly correct. The words "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return" are the curse upon Adam's sin. Like Advent, Ash Wednesday is going back in time to stand condemned--again--under Sin's Curse as we walk forward toward Good Friday and Easter. In a time-traveling cycle we repeat every Lent, the cross is placed in our future rather than in our past.
Which can be temporally confusing if you've already been forgiven, to stand back under the curse "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." I've seen low-church Protestants chaff at those words, feeling like something secure is being stripped away. But what doesn't make sense when time is linear, makes total sense when time is cyclical. This is why I've seen the words of Ash Wednesday changed in some low-church, congregational spaces, words that keep the cross in the past, thereby making the imposition of ashes fit better with linear, Protestant time. For example, I've heard the words "Jesus died for you sins" used at the imposition of ashes. Those words create less temporal friction because Jesus did, in the past, die for your sins. Words on Ash Wednesday invoking history and memory better fit Protestant time.
Words, however, that cycle backwards in time, returning you to the Curse and which move the cross into your future, can create friction as a cyclical temporal imagination is being imposed upon a linear temporal imagination.
