It’s very infrequent that Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day fall on the same day. It makes for some inconvenient conflicts, like trying to take someone out for a romantic dinner on a day of fasting and abstinence. I hope you all found your own solution to that problem. But in one way, there is a connection. Because really, Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent we are beginning today, they are all about something that we sometimes don’t pay enough attention to, and that something is the state of our heart.
That unforgettable image we heard in the first reading, tells us that the old custom in the Old Testament of tearing up your own garments as a public sign of your repentance, making yourself look miserable and being miserable, isn’t what we want. Instead it says we should tear open our hearts and find out what is there right now, and today we start a period of honesty with ourselves about the real condition of our hearts.
It’s possible that what you are really feeling in there, if you are honest about it, is something that is giving you pain, some loss or frustration or sadness or regret that you can’t get over as much as you try to distract yourself or power through it, and in there is a weight on your life that you want God to lift from your shoulders.
Or, maybe your heart is urging you towards something new, there is a restlessness, a something more that you want from life, or that you want to expect from yourself. It might be time to listen, day after day, to what your heart has been trying to tell you.
Or just maybe, as happens with all of us, perhaps your heart has become hardened, that you feel you have become too inflexible, too judgmental, that you realize you might be generous but very selectively so, that all sorts of people are excluded from your compassion. It is hard to see this kind of thing clearly in ourselves, especially if we are going to turn a vague sense of guilt into real change. And yet, with God’s help, hearts do change.
All the traditional practices of this season, the fasting, the generosity, the prayer and meditation, they are all intended to help us see what is truly there in our heart, and ask God to shine a light where there is darkness, to give us strength when we feel too weak for the job at hand, and to give us a new heart, not just patch up our old one for another year.
God wants us to begin to imagine what our lives would feel like if we really believed that God is with us and loves us unconditionally, right now, not in the future. What would life be like if we forgave other people, if we forgave ourselves, what would life be like if we could act with the supreme confidence of knowing that God loves us? That is what Lent is about, a season of holy relief and renewal. The way we have been is not the way we need to be. We consider the past but ultimately put the past aside, we make ourselves ready for a new life. What could that life be like for us? What desire is in our heart? Why did God call us here tonight? That’s what Lent wants us to ask, every day.
In a moment one of the ministers will touch you with these words: repent and believe in the gospel. For Lent, repenting, turning around, is our project, facing in a direction we haven’t seen for a while, the direction where God is trying to call our heart.