9.  Friday after Ash Wednesday

Today is a day of the Cross.  It is good to set down my travel gear and just rest my ashened head a while in the hope the Cross gives.  

The Lord Jesus was pilgrim long before me and all of us.  He left his Father's side and journeyed--in the dark of night, Isaiah tells--into the human world. Flesh covered, he began the pilgrimage to the Cross, passing through family life in Nazareth and venturing out into a world that knew him not.  He walked among the crowds whose sufferings impelled him to his destiny.  He saw, was touched, and he touched back.  He made pilgrimage through the rubble of broken ancestral traditions, up and down the mounds of despair over health and relief, over new beginnings and sense of well-being.   Often weary himself, he walked on, even with blessing for those who cursed his way.  He found walk-mates and mentored their pilgrim steps.  How could he not stumble when they bretrayingly abandoned him in the darkest hour of his Via? 

His pilgrimage brought him to the Wood and propelled him beyond.  It is in that "beyond" that I rest.  Christ Jesus now walks toward me, toward all of us.  He journeys, back-packed with glory.  He is pilgrim anew, halleluya!  

Will we meet in the sunlight or in a night of darkness on the way?  It doesn't matter.  Staying the course matters, the course toward the uplift of all things.  We are pilgrims for that.  It is the thought of that that allows the pilgrim to rest a while before the next step.

8. Thursday after Ash Wednesday

How do I see the sinful weaknesses I am personally focusing on this Lent?   They have to do with desire and anxiousness.  Both are rooted in my inability (unwillingness?)  to trust God.  Is that not the ultimate conversion? 

I am duped by desire’s “promise” to fill me—and it will, I think,  but only superficially and temporarily.  What does Augustine say, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You”?  Desire is more urgent in me and quite impatient with the contemplation of God and the story of God’s great love in Jesus Christ.  That story is the story of present consolation challenged by delay until he comes again.  “Already but not yet fully,” we, the Church, say.  And I am not the only one groaning about that.  All of creation is, all the brothers and sisters around me as well.  Nonetheless, we, the Church, are tempted to change the capital “E” of the Blessed Eschaton into the small “e” of an eschaton of delusion in the here and now.

Resisting that temptation takes the discipline of a trusting pilgrim.  Part of our Christian challenge is to wait while walking. There is celebration, yes, but not yet ecstasy.  The great calming is on its way.  If I do not trust God and God’s great plan for me and for all so clearly revealed in the Scriptures, I will—and do—let the immediacy of desire overshadow the delayed, but greater grace of the Eschaton at his return.  I sin.

On my penitential way this Lent, I shall pray the Psalms of trust.

7. Ash Wednesday 2024

 I could not help but wonder how many of us in line for ashes today were aware that Lent goes beyond a personal agenda of reconciliation.  Did we know, as we moved forward to receive the ashes, that we were participating in the Great Reconciliation to arrive with the Eschaton?

My Lenten program of recovery is a part of my responsibility for the ultimate recovery of all humanity at the Second Coming of Christ.  Today again, as I welcomed again the imposition of ashes on my head, I was pledging to reform sinful behavior that I was once saved from by my Baptism.  By my Baptismal vows I once swore to align myself completely with the Gospel that is saving the world.  I have been unfaithful to that solemn pledge, deliberately allowing myself to step out of or, at least, step aside from the transformational power of the Paschal Mystery of Jesus in our world.  I lost heart for the event of the Eschaton.  I diminished its witness, and in some way, its saving effect on others in the Church and world.  I stopped being part of the grand solution.

In effect, Lent is a journey of return to being the New Humanity in Christ.  It involves all of us who have chosen against it by our sin.  Today I join with fellow penitents to correct the course of our lives toward the Eschaton, allowing baptismal grace to renew us after an unfaithful fall, reconcile us to God and one another and redirect our steps in the  pilgrimage.