Ash Wednesday, Year C

It’s a season of unmasking, of veils lifted. We are seeing our collective soul with a clarity that is disorienting. Listen for the apathy, the cruelty, and neglect. Then listen closely for all who dare resist.
~Cole Arthur Riley
 
“Thus it is written, ‘The first human, Adam, became a living soul’; the last Adam became a spirit that gives life.”
~1 Corinthians 15:45
 
 
We speak of Lent as a time of testing, but what kind? Surely we can understand this wilderness not only as suffering and endurance, but testing of another kind—testing that seeks to clarify what is true and what is fake, what endures amidst hardship and unsettledness, and what does not endure. A refiner’s fire. The world as it is and the world as it could be.
 
Bulls batter china shops; the vulnerable are dispatched with glee; norms dissipate like mist. We watch, and wonder what we are to do. We may doubt that our small actions could make any difference at all against a rising tide of intolerance or a tsunami of climate change. We might even wonder if peace can break out closer to home—in our families, in our children, in me. What do we truly believe in? Lent means to lengthen. What hope might bud in us in these growing days?
 
Let Lent be a gift, then: 40 days, a season, to suspend belief and test, to be curious, to be courageous, to discover, to dream, to chance. A litmus test. What have we to lose save that which might save us? Surely we are dust, but we are more: The Spirit that gives Life—she lives on in us and with us as the Spirit of Truth.
 
Enter into worship. Enter into Lent.
 
Readings: Joel 2:1, 12-17, 21-22 † Psalm 90:1-10, 12 † 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 † Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
 
About the Art: Friedrich, Caspar David, 1774-1840. Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun), from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55528 [retrieved February 24, 2025]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_019.jpg.

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