God sits with us
During yesterday’s early morning Ash Wednesday service, I found myself thinking about my mother, especially during the ritual of the imposition of ashes. Thinking of her led me to my father and then to my aunts and uncles, an entire generation of elders who are now gone. After the service, I remembered parishioners at whose bedsides I’ve prayed and at whose funerals I’ve presided.
The Ash Wednesday service in the Prayer Book uses words which influence our most common understanding of the season of Lent. Lent is a “season of penitence and fasting” marked “by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial.” In Psalm 51 we ask God to “create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” We “kneel before the Lord, our maker and redeemer” as we plead with God to “accept our repentance.” We hear words of comfort in the promise that God “pardons and absolves all those who truly repent.”
But the Prayer Book also tells us Lent is a season in which we “mark our mortal nature.” In her 2023 daily guide for Lent, Bless the Lent We Actually Have, Kate Bowler writes, “During Lent, we ask God to show us the world as it is. We begin with the reality of our finitude rubbed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday — from dust we are made, to dust we shall return. Then, we walk through the reality in a kind of dress rehearsal. It’s the downward slope of God — the Great Descent, where the whole Church walks toward the cross.”
Lent, she continues, is “this season of grief carved out to acknowledge the reality of Christ’s sacrifice. And the reality of suffering that so many of our circumstances reflect too — our own pain and grief and despair. Easter is coming, yes. But for now, we sit in the ashes of our broken dreams and broken hearts, knowing that God sits here with us.”
We live in a society that pushes away the “reality of our finitude” as much as possible. In that sense, then, Lent is counter cultural. During this season we proclaim that it’s by accepting our mortality, not by rejecting it, that we are awakened to the gift of the life we are blessed to live for however long we have to live it. Knowing we will someday die means each day becomes its own blessing.
Whether you are beginning your Lenten journey in a time of hope or despair, of joy or sorrow, of healing or suffering, of wholeness or brokenness, remember this: God sits here — wherever “here” is right now — with you. And when your “here” changes, God will be there, too.
Whatever else you may be doing (or not doing) for Lent, how about adding this to your daily routine? Three times a day — morning, midday, evening or whenever it works for you — take a deep breath and say a short prayer. “Thank you, Jesus, for being here.” It won’t change whatever is going on in your life, but it just might awaken you to the abiding presence of the God who always chooses to sit with you.