Ash Wednesday

Wednesday 17th February, 2021

Today is designated Ash Wednesday when Christians recall the time when Jesus went in to the wilderness to prepare Himself for his Ministry. He was 'tempted in the desert' after 40 days. So Lent begins, a period of 40 days preparing for the Triduum of Easter, the trial, death and Resurrection of Jesus. Ash Wednesday is the day Christians acknowledge their sinfulness and recognise that 'they are dust and unto dust they will return'. We utterly depend on the mercy of God, on the sacrifice of love Jesus gave through His Incarnation, Ministry and death. We acknowledge our faults and try to rectify our wayward life with the help of Grace. Trying to show our love we deny ourselves in some way. It is a powerful ritual. Sadly with closed Churches the service was streamed not experienced. A friend sent me a link to the BBC's recording of St John's College Cambridge Choir's Ash Wednesday's Choral Evensong of 6th March 2019. Such a powerful service filled with the emotion and the words of the whole purpose of this particular celebration. I sat and marvelled, cried and rejoiced, prayed and remembered.

So a strange day as I have never missed an actual live service of ashes.

I hurried at 11am to the village to pick up bread but the bread had gone.

The snow had also gone and the sun had come out.

Returning home I had an email concerning the death of a friend. So I spent some time recalling, pondering, being grateful and praying for that friend. I poured myself in to a letter to his widow. May he rest in peace.

I also did my laundry and hung it out to dry. The sun and strong wind dried it within five hours....it smells delicious and aired and fresh.

Spring may be here. My walk revealed much bird life activity...flirting robins, amorous pigeons and a feel that things are renewing. I saw two magnificent flying swans as well as a murmuration of starlings this evening circling their roosting place under the Tay road bridge.

I read about 'religion and the imagination', about the vital role of story telling in the Christian tradition and Bible. A serious look at the place of story from the Bible to the early martyrs, to the Desert Fathers, to the Mediaeval ages and on ending with the inklings of C.S.Lewis and J.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.

My Mother was a brilliant story teller. She wove threads through incidents which dramatised the events and made the imagination race and the symbols come alive. There is little doubt in my mind that fact, science and what passes for reason is insufficient for the human soul and the feeding of the human heart. We need the story, we need wonder, we need awe and we need to know we are not gods.

So Ash Wednesday.....that tempting by Jesus in the wilderness. Literal? Symbolic? Real? True? Fact? Fiction? Myth? Story? My sense of humanness in myself responses by embracing all those epithets and more. Now for forty days of Lent....what a feast.