Ash Wednesday 2020

Remember you are dust.

It's a practice of humility, this receiving of ashes. Humility, said the Abbas and Ammas of the African desert, is key to following God. I love the Abbas and Ammas but their teaching is hard, even though it is the way to love.

The world is hard, too, and can be a way to love if it breaks the heart in all the right places, but it can also lead us to hate if callouses form in the wrong places.

I fear the latter. I see it happening. I feel it happening.

And so I'm reviving this blog for lent this year, as a tool for confession and an attempt at--at least an exploration of--humility. If one can humbly publish one's thoughts. The Abbas and Ammas would have something to say about that, I'm sure.

I've said that a calling doesn't need to make sense. The point of the calling is to follow. So that's what I'm doing here, following a calling I feel to work out some thoughts and feelings.

Not coincidentally, vocation will likely come up in the next forty days.

I don't expect to write forty posts, by the way. My daily life is very full these days and obligations would not be met if I tried to do that. I'm hoping for at least 3 times a week.

I figure this will be time better spent than craving chocolate until Easter. I hope so.

So . . . into my heart---calloused, broken, tender, and hard. Let's see what I find in there.

Remembering, in the end, it is dust.