Lent, traditionally, is a time of discerning life, of reflection, of repentance, where for forty days, before our Easter Joy, we prepare our hearts for that joy that is Easter.  Again traditionally, each year, we are to live out our Lenten Pillars of praying, of fasting, of giving alms.  And so, we pray, we fast, we give our alms, we do our give ups, we receive the ashes, and we think that just by following these traditions, we are good Christian people fulfilling our Lenten obligation.   That’s the danger – because we go through these liturgical seasons, like Lent, year after year after year, we can become stuck with attitudes of living them with this attitude that this is the same old thing that we do every year.  

Yet, in these seasons, like Lent there is always a call to something more about our faith, of a divine invitation to commend all of our life, as Jesus commended all of his, for the sake of making God’s love have more life in our lives.  It is a time to go deeper, to re-envision, to transform, during these liturgical seasons, like Lent, and grow deeper in love with our God and the life, the full and rich and wonderful and awesome life, that this Compassionate One calls us to live.  

Our reading and our Gospel for today, March 7, is all about fasting.   Going more deeply into our Lenten fast however is a call that in a lot of ways is much more than just fasting from food, it is about fasting from sentiments and actions that keep us from truly embracing God’s love for us, and from the many ways we withhold and destroy love for our sisters and brothers.  Lent is a time that asks us to accept the responsibilities of being an assembly of human beings, called to love ourselves and others divinely, with that same spirit of love and merciful justice that is of God.  

One of the truths of our human existence is that despite our human propensity to make mistakes, fail, sin, our God loves us no matter what.  We are loved sinners.  Too often though, our pride and hubris keeps us from being humble before God.  We can feel that God made this huge mistake and we are not loveable.  Or we think we are SO loveable, so perfect, that our ego has deemed equality with God something indeed we can grasp at.  Either position we put our will before God for they push God out of the equation.  First, being unlovable, God is wrong.  Second, being so great, there is no need for God. 

The elemental of ash, for us Christian pilgrims, which priests and ministers put on our heads on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, becomes a powerful symbol of what is elemental of our faith.  It speaks to us of a God who created us out of nothing and created us solely out of love from the dust of the earth.  It brings us back to the basic relationship of the God who is with us, whose ‘ruah’ breathed life in us so that in God’s image, we and our creator, become one.