Dear Friends,
This year, our liturgical calendar and our event calendar blend to offer us a unique opportunity to observe Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day together.
God is in the ashes. No question about that. Is God in our hearts as well? Receiving ashes on our foreheads is another way of saying to God, “Yes. I will follow you with my feet, my hands, my mind and my heart, with everything I am and have.”
Will you say that? Will I say that?
The imposition of ashes on our foreheads means nothing unless that action touches our hearts and lasts.
Great spiritual practices have been given to us. We can relish them and amplify them during Lent through core practices which are thousands of years old:
prayer that opens our hearts to God’s grace,
fasting that makes us understand the hungers that really matter and
giving alms from what we need and not just from our overage.
Let’s be imaginative about what these practices mean. One Latin American Bishop, recognizing that in his poor country most people had little to eat, told them to find new ways to fast in their words and their actions. If you know how to read, he told them, take time to teach someone else to read.
On this Valentine/Ash Wednesday, let us be brave-hearted and heart-whole as we deepen our faith. In these times when the practice of faith seems too unimportant to many people or at least not obvious, let the faith that is in us shine before others, so that they may be warmed and blessed by it.
God’s deepest desire for us is that we have a wide embrace, enveloping God, the stranger, the family member and friend and the world in which we live. That can only happen when we love the Lord with our whole heart (Matthew 22.37), when we pray with a steadfast heart (Psalm 57.8).
This Lent, will we count ourselves among the believers in the early Church who were of one mind and one heart (Acts 4.32) and be gentle and humble of heart as Jesus was (Matthew 11.29)?
With you, I pray that this will be so. May what we have heard from the beginning remain in our hearts (John2.24).
~ Sister Joan Sobala
