As we mark the beginning of the season of Lent this year with the observance of Ash Wednesday, we find a peculiar intersection of the secular calendar with the Church’s calendar. Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day. Ash Wednesday is a day of fasting and self-denial by the Church’s reckoning; Valentine’s Day is a day for chocolates and fancy meals with those we love. We are faced with a choice on February 14. Can we honor both? Or is this odd calendrical moment an opportunity to embrace some of the depth of Lent?
It’s easy to blindly associate Lent with self-examination, penitence, and repentance. And while such themes are prominent ones during Lent, they don’t offer, alone, the fullest picture of Lent. The Book of Common Prayer liturgy for Ash Wednesday contains a bidding that the priest says to the congregation, which is known as “An Invitation to a Holy Lent.” The bidding explains the traditional purpose of Lent, and while penitence, fasting, and self-discipline figure into it, they are not ends in themselves. They are practices by which the soul is opened up to God’s abundant grace that enables us to be reconciled with God and one another. Historically, during Lent, catechumens were prepared for baptism at the Great Vigil of Easter. And notorious sinners who had been separated from the Body of Christ were again reconciled to the Church.
I’m suggesting that Lent is not only about sin; it’s about love, too. It’s about the infinite, incomprehensible love of our God, who looks with great delight on a Church that, year after year, shows up on Ash Wednesday to say, “we’ve messed up. . .again. But we long to be in right relationship. . . again.” On Ash Wednesday, several of the appointed readings will remind us of a stubborn Scriptural refrain: “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness” (Psalm 103:8). This is how God’s love manifests itself. Lent is all about love, not greeting cards or emojis or balloons, but Love itself, who never gives up on us.
The great paradox of Lent is that in temporarily parting with things that are dear to us, we understand what should be dear to us. In meditating on the cost of the greatest act of love the world has ever known, we find the cross-shaped freedom of life in Christ, which alone can bring us fullness of life. On Ash Wednesday, we’re also reminded that from dust we came and unto dust we shall return. Oddly enough, this is both a recognition of our mortality and also a reminder that God “hate[s] nothing [he] has made,” as the Ash Wednesday collect tells us. We are dust and more than just dust, because God will one day raise that dust to new life in Christ.
I encourage you to embrace this Lent as an extraordinary gift. It’s a period of time in which we can reevaluate what rules us: our “loves” or true Love itself. It’s a season to put aside estrangements of any sort and find reconciliation. It’s a time not to take ourselves too seriously and yet to savor how seriously God is invested in our well-being. It’s a time to find the joy of our baptismal call to life in Christ, which can only be found—again, paradoxically—by dying to self.
If I could make one gentle suggestion, it would be this: a nice dinner out is a feast that can be easily transferred, but Ash Wednesday comes once a year. We live in a chaotic world, but the Church’s calendar gives us helpful markers to order our lives. Observing Ash Wednesday is such a marker that gives definition and solidity to our Lenten intentions. Whatever your plans may be on Ash Wednesday, you will have two opportunities to mark the beginning of a holy Lent at Good Shepherd: 8 a.m. Low (Said) Mass and 7 p.m. Sung Mass. If neither of those works for you, please find a church near your office or somewhere else that has a scheduled Ash Wednesday service that you can attend. We lose much of the richness of the salvific nature of the Church’s liturgies if we only confine our attendance to Sundays.
I suspect that most of us are painfully aware of our shortcomings, although a purposeful self-examination is crucial to being fully honest with ourselves and God. But I suspect that many of us struggle with accepting God’s infinite love for us. This may very well be the best reason to attend Mass on Ash Wednesday: to be reminded, amid our acknowledged frailty, that God desires nothing less for us than to be reconciled with him and all of creation. For God is the one who is perfectly compassionate and merciful, and infinitely patient. And Lent is all about love.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle