Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a season of reflection and preparation before the celebrations of Easter. An intentional season of prayer, fasting and generosity.
Deploying and exercising some of the spiritual disciplines, this season provides us with an opportunity to be more open to God, ourselves and others. A time to reflect, refocus and re-centre ourselves.
I’m mindful of that image in Luke 15 of the Prodigal Son returning home to be welcomed by his Watching Father. An image that challenges and speaks into the busyness of our lives, of the “far country” that has taken us into a world of constantly doing and the drivenness of activism. Doing that has led us away from being held in the arms of God, we’ve wandered off into a world of frenetic activity and Lent reminds us to return home, to respond to the invitation of a watching, loving, forgiving God who longs for us to know what it is to be with him.
Lent is an invitation to come home; home to God, to ourselves and others. A time to reorder, to clean up, not just the house and exterior matters but the interior of our hearts and lives.
I appreciate symbolism and the powerful marking of the cross with ashes on the forehead as part of today’s Ash Wednesday liturgy, accompanied by the words ”remember that you are guest and to dust you shall return”, a vivid reminder of our mortality and a perspective on our life and purpose in the world.
Lent is a period of abstinence. For some, the pancakes are been consumed, the festivities of Mardi Gras are over. It’s a season to renounce, to repent – to turn around, think, feel and act differently.
I enter Lent, surveying the landscape of my own heart, seeking God with a desire to re-orientate those areas of my life where I have drifted off, been distracted or side-tracked from my true hearts bearing and calling by God. I am mindful too of the gathering storm clouds across Europe, which way heavily on my heart and am conscious of the political, economic and social chaos that threatens our own British society at this time. The European Union and the Referendum are not the causes of broken Britain; they have merely brought to the surface the underlying conflicts, inequalities, injustice, prejudices, fears, racism, increase in violence, hate and knife crimes, bigotry and other evils that have been simmering away for a long time. The Referendum and its dire consequences have only brought to the surface the brokenness of our society. I believe we are seeing in our contemporary society the first fruits of a post-Christendom culture, a society that is increasingly abandoning the Judaeo-Christian narrative that has shaped and undergirded civic society, holding it together and providing values that have informed the public domain. Education, welfare, health care, justice, work and governance, religious tolerance and race relations, all influenced by underlying Judaeo-Christian values that held things together for the common good. The longest-serving MP and ’Father of the house’ said recently that Britain is facing the worst political crisis since 1938 with the Government and Opposition parties divided and ruling over a fragmented and divided nation. Using my Voice Recognition Software, I had to train it to recognise the word ‘Brexit’. Before introducing the word to the software vocabulary it thought I was saying either ‘wrecks it’ or ‘breaks it’! Whatever side of the divide we may be on when it comes to the issue, no one can deny the wreckage and breakage we are seeing in a divided Britain.

So on this Ash Wednesday we cry out to God to show us His mercy and to lead us individually back to him and to lead us out of the dis-ease and fragmentation and all that threatens to trigger further trouble in our own and others societies.
Lord in your mercy… hear our prayer.