Imagine you come to my house and I greet you at the door by saying, “I don’t hate you.” 

What would you think of that? What feelings might it bring up? What tone would it set for our time together? 

Maybe it’s just me but that’s how I hear the beginning of the Proper Liturgy for Ash Wednesday (Book of Common Prayer, 264) The very first thing we pray is this:

“Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made…”

That we are not hated is our entrance into Lent. I suppose it’s good news that we are not hated but what if there was a different starting point? 

For more than twenty years I prayed that prayer every year on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and every year I flinched as I did, especially when I got to the part about “worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness.” 

This year I did not pray those words as the celebrant at the Ash Wednesday liturgy. I heard them as a retired priest sitting in the pew. And I did not offer my amen. I couldn’t. No, I said to myself, that’s not right. That’s not the the way I want to begin Lent. There has to be another way.

I don’t want to be naive about the potential and sometimes the actualization of evil that lives within me and all of humanity but neither do I want that to set my course for Lent this year. 

I didn’t hear most of the scripture readings or the sermon today because I was thinking about how I want to begin Lent this year. What if it was more like this? 

God of compassion and welcome, you love, value, and delight in what you have made; healing the wounded and giving life to the dead: Let us take heart in you so that with courage and honesty we may name where in our lives and world it hurts, with strength and perseverance we may transform rather than transmit our pain, and with steadfast faith and hope we may resist the forces of death until there is life and life abundant for all people. All this we pray in the name of your Son Jesus who gives us the way, the truth, and the life. Amen.

What if that was our entry into Lent? What if we let that prayer open our eyes, our hearts, and our hands? What if we wrestled with the questions that live in that prayer?

• Where does it hurt in your life today? Where do you see hurt in the lives of others?
• In what ways are you dealing with the pain in your life? How are you reaching out to care for the needs of others in pain? And in what ways are you transmitting your pain onto others? 
• What if Lent is a resistance against the forces of death? How are you resisting those forces in your life and relationships? How are you contributing to the forces of death in the world and the lives of others?

Those aren’t just questions for you. They are questions I am asking myself. 

I don’t want to begin Lent with “purging or purification.” I want to back up a bit and begin with “the beauty and goodness of creation,” of you and me. (Dorothee Soelle, Essential Writings, selected and introduced by Dianne L. Oliver, 61).

Maybe that’s what today’s ashes are really about. They take us back to “the blessing of the beginning, that is, not to original sin but to original blessing.” (Ibid.) We are marked with the ashes of our mortality as a sign and reminder that life is fragile and life is holy. 

“This holiness has to be dramatized again and again, so that we do not forget it or consider it superfluous.” (Ibid., 177) Every time we resist the forces of death in our life and world we dramatize the holiness of life. I wonder what that will look like and mean in each of our lives.

____________________
Image Credit: Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash.