random thoughts on ash wednesday 2026...

I did not grow up observing Ash Wednesday. As a middle-class, white Protestant child of New England in the 50s and 60s, it was just my Roman Catholic friends who wore the ashen sign of the Cross on this strange day. If memory serves, my uber-Congregational church in both Connecticut and Massachusetts barely mentioned Lent, let alone practiced a sacramental spirituality grounded in liturgy and the seasonal cycles of life. It was well after seminary and ordination that my tradition published the 1986 United Church of Christ Book of Worship, which included an order of worship for... ASH WEDNESDAY! 

By then, however, I'd been smitten by both Gertrud Mueller-Nelson's liturgical masterpiece, To Dance with God, and the folk-music innovations being crafted by the Community of Celebration in Aliquippa, PA, who linked the poetry of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer with a tender-hearted, charismatic creativity. I made a host of pilgrimages to that sacred co-ed monastery just outside of Pittsburgh and beat cheeks to the high church, smells-and-bells observances of Lent celebrated at the Anglican Cathedral in Cleveland, OH, too. By the late 1980s, I'd drawn on the insights Kathleen Norris shared in Dakota and The Cloister Walk, along with my encounters with Eastern Orthodox chant and iconography, and had become a born-again sacramentalist serving low-church congregations. Beauty, ritual, well-written liturgy, poetry, silence, and a deep reverence for new/old ways of praying with all our senses became foundational for me. I chaffed at the studied sloppiness of most Protestant worship. I came to despise the wordy pseudo-intellectualism of so many so-called social justice sermons. And found myself fleeing from the clutter and trinkets that too often adorned so many chancels in their sad attempt at religious art.

Forty years later, I still honor the texts that friends and colleagues created for The UCC Book of Worship. And I am still trusting it to guide our small circle of friends as we gather for Ash Wednesday this year. The Community of Celebration used to sing, "We have another world in view," and now, more than ever, as a pastor and a believer, I find myself clinging to that upside-down, counter-cultural alternative vision of life that Jesus proclaims. Our current culture of anxiety, chaos, cruelty, and greed idolizes our obsessions, sanctifies our addictions, denigrates every pursuit except short-term material conquests, and shames and/or defames those who pursue solidarity and compassion. Thank God for Ash Wednesday! It reminds me that we all lack something. It shows me how to relinquish what is broken by trusting a love that not only leads me through the wilderness but also incrementally and quietly fills me with a gratitude that evokes space for everyone who wants to join the party.  

A Franciscan teacher recently wrote that Ash Wednesday invites us to practice giving up, giving in, and giving to. Giving up is about fasting - letting go in a conscious act of relinquishment - a practice that illuminates what is truly essential while helping us let go of our ego, our habits, and our oh so inflated and self-important opinions. Fasting is a physical and spiritual discipline that helps me listen more, speak less, and hold on to only that which is a foundation. It is an embodied prayer that nourishes both vulnerability and patience. And patience, I am learning, is essential for my faith and any act of ministry. Giving to, as the Franciscans tell us, is sharing resources and love, while giving in is what we might all prayer. I know that as I strive to be grounded in these unsettling times, the tender initiation to give up, to, and in redirects my anxieties towards trust and shows me why patience is salvific.