Ash Wednesday: the invitation of Lent

"Holy God, our lives are laid open before you:
rescue us from the chaos of sin
and through the death of your Son
bring us healing and make us whole
in Jesus Christ our Lord."
---Common Worship, the Church of England

"Turn away from sin and believe the Gospel."
---from the contemporary Roman Catholic Ash Wednesday service

"Did you ever look inside yourself and see what you are not?"
---Flannery O'Connor

"No one wants to take the descending path to that naked, unvarnished truth, with all its unacceptable humiliations. It is much more comfortable to stay on the level of the plain and ordinary, to go on just being plain and ordinary. Yet it is to this path that Lent invites us.

The reason Lent is so long is that this path to the truth of oneself is long and snagged with thorns, and at the very end one stands alone before the broken body crowned with thorns upon the cross. All alone--with not one illusion or self-delusion to prop one up. Yet not alone, for the Spirit of Holiness, who is also the Spirit of Helpfulness, is beside you and me. Indeed, this Spirit has helped to manuever you and me down that dark, steep path to this crucial spot....

The spirit of truth does not seek comfort. The purpose of Lent is not to escape the conscience, but to create a healthy hatred for evil, a heartfelt contrition for sin, and a passionately felt need for grace. This continuous movement of faith from a sense of sin to grace and forgiveness ends only when the spirit is ultimately released....

Forgiveness of sins is what the gospel is all about. Forgiveness of sins is what Christ's death on the cross is all about. The purpose of Lent is to arouse. To arouse the sense of sin. to arouse a sense of guilt for sin. To arouse the humble contrition for the guilt of sin that makes forgiveness possible. To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To arouse or to motivate works of love and the work for justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one's sins....

Lent is not a tediously long brooding over sin. Lent is a journey that could be called an upward descent, but I prefer to call it a downward ascent. It ends before the cross, where we stand in the white light of a new beginning."

---from Upward Ascent by Edna Hong (1913--, American Lutheran, poet, writer & translator)

Your responses are most welcome! Click on "comments" below.
Our next reading will be posted on Sunday 25. February, the First Sunday in Lent