Lent is a season of fasting, prayer, repentance, and contemplation that seeks to nourish and grow our faith as the community of faith approaches the celebration of Easter. And every year faithful people of all sorts of theological traditions and denominations set aside Lent as a time to pray more, read scripture more, and give up chocolate or alcohol or fast food or meat. This ends up looking – at least at a surface level – like a real focus on behavior, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing for us, but without the spiritual foundation of understanding what repentance really is, it can seem like we’re trying to make ourselves better in order to get God to like us – which is just not it… in fact, quite the opposite. Maybe Richard Rohr said it best. He said, essentially, maybe you were taught that you had to get yourself right before God would love you, but in fact it’s the opposite. It’s God’s love that inspires us to get right. “What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.” Are you with me? 

But how each of us approaches that change – that sanctification, to use a theological term – it’s different for every person. We each come to this Ash Wednesday with our own set of emotions, experiences, and needs.

For me, having grown up in a less liturgical tradition, I think that when I began to engage and practice the season of Lent, my spiritual life was deeply nourished… Lent definitely became my favorite season of the church year… and also, I can acknowledge that for other folks it’s helpful, but maybe not as earth shattering as it was for me. 

I came across a post today that was written by someone who is entering this Lent after battling multiple health crises and surgeries… she wrote (something to the effect of): ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I need any dirt on my head to remind me of my mortality this year… I’m as close as I’ve ever been.’ And maybe that’s you this year as well. Maybe your regular life has been such a steady reminder of your finitude and your limits and your normal, human neediness that our blessing of the ashes today could feel redundant. I pray God meets you mightily in this season anyway, and in the way that you need most. I pray that Lent, for you, might reveal as the prophet Isaiah writes: that you will experience beauty for ashes, and the oil of joy for all your mourning. 

And yet… perhaps you are like many others who through the relentlessness of work, or the constant maintenance of an online persona, or the constant sirens of a culture of self-improvement, self-help, and self-actualization… perhaps you have bought into the lie that you don’t need anyone or anything else… maybe you think that you can do it all yourself… if you can just find the right balance of productivity, household maintenance, and self-care then the life-long project of Self will finally reach some sort of homeostasis. Maybe you – like me, at times – have been so deeply ingrained with the myth of the self-made person that an annual reminder that “you are dust and to dust you will return” is just the splash of cold Truth to the sleepy face of our Egos that we might wake up to the reality of our beloved humanity. 

You see, God did not make us as humans and then declare us bad, and then task us to make ourselves good or else… No… God took the dust of the earth and breathed the divine breath within it and called us very good. And part of that very-goodness is our interdependence on God and on one anther… from our very formation, our existence is relational. And our relationships evolve and change, we cross paths with each other… for seconds or for years… and then we die, and we are returned to the One from whom we came, and whose breath carries us through all of our days. But, of course, we just don’t love the idea that we’ll die at all – even if we have deep faith, our brains just can’t quite let us remember the fact of our own mortality. We just can’t stomach the reality of the shortness of this life, and so we give away our hearts to all sorts of things that promise to ‘fix’ us and to make us live forever… a bit of our heart to the gym, and a bit to the office, and a bit to the church, and a bit to our kids, and a bit to whichever chemical dependancies might help to numb us from the reality of our finitude. 

We pass out little pieces of our hearts like little Harry-Potter-horcruxes all over the place to all the things we think might make us live forever – not realizing that we end up living half-heartedly and still full of the very anxiety we were trying to avoid; the anxiety that our culture needs us to feel in order to keep us being productive. 

That’s why, I think, that Joel names repentance not as feeling bad about doing bad and then trying to not do bad anymore… but as ‘returning to God with your whole heart’. I think that may actually be the harder thing. Harder than any guilt induced habit-changing is the spiritual work of recovering the broken pieces of our identities and placing our whole hearts in the loving embrace of God.¹

So… 

This lenten season, whatever fast you choose, I pray that you don’t get caught up in the guilt, shame, and blame game… a fast is not a diet, it’s not about self improvement, it’s not about forcing ourselves to be something we’re not… it’s about creating opportunities to reconnect to God and to regather our hearts, that we might live more whole and beautiful and free lives as God’s beloved children.  

So this mark on our foreheads, that we will share in a few moments, this cross of dust on our heads is a complex symbol we will share. It stands for the things we mourn, the people we mourn, and the path of repentance – that path of returning to God that we all must take. And also… and also that same mark of dust stands as a reminder of our anointing as God’s children from the foundations of time when God breathed life into matter – giving us this gift, and reminding us that we are not merely matter ourselves, but we are cherished ones who carry in our lungs the very love and breath of the source of all things. 

So, friend.. I invite you, in the name of Christ, to observe a holy Lent by self-examination and penitence, by prayer and fasting, by works of love, and by meditating on God’s Word. 

Unless you’ll only be doing that to earn God’s love, or to prove something to yourself, or to be holier… then just don’t. Remember you are loved and to Love you will return. 

Grace and Peace to you. 

1. this concept here, and really the inspiration for this reflection as a whole is deeply indebted to the writing of Nadia Bolz Weber on Ash Wednesday in 2022, which she shared again recently in her blog ‘The Corners’. I’ve never had an original idea in my life and can take zero credit for this reading of Joel and the metaphor of piecing out our hearts. ↩︎