Dear Friends,

By now most of you know that the word “Lent” is derived from the old English word lencton, meaning ‘spring.' It is is not only a reference to the season before Easter, but also an invitation to a springtime of the soul. In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “Forty days to cleanse the system and open the eyes to what remains when all comfort is gone. Forty days to remember what it is like to live by the grace of God alone and not by what we can supply for ourselves.”

Here on the threshold of Lent, with the emergence of warmer weather and budding plants alongside a war in Europe that burns and breaks our hearts, we are given a vivid point of entry into the coming season. More than any other season of the liturgical year, Lent draws us into a landscape that is distinctive for the ways that it intertwines extremes and calls our attention to how brokenness and beauty, hardship and hope, dwell intimately together. We will see this exemplified in this coming Sunday’s gospel reading, which takes Jesus--and us--into a stark wilderness where Satan comes to visit, but where angels do, too.

Our Ash Wednesday services yesterday marked the beginning of this bittersweet season. As the sign of the cross was traced on our foreheads in ash, we bore the mark of what has been left behind from a burning, a reminder of the dust and earth from which we rise and to which we will return. Yet even the ash--which in many churches comes from burning the Palm Sunday branches of the previous year--has a memory of its own. Deep within its darkness and dust lies the imprint of green, the memory of life, the awareness of what has gone before and of what may yet be.

Ash Wednesday propels us into a season that inspires us to learn once again that what God creates and graces and blesses may be beset and broken but not destroyed. Life finds its way and inscribes itself anew, beauty blazing from the wreck and ruin. “We are treated…as dying,” Paul writes in the Ash Wednesday lection from the Epistles, “and see—we are alive; as punished and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

And how about you? Here on the threshold of Lent, amid the ashes, what do you possess? As we enter this season that pares our lives down to what is absolutely essential and basic and elemental, what do you hold as most important? Is there anything you need to allow to become ash, that it may be transformed into something new? Beneath what seems dying or destroyed, what new life might yet take hold?

These are the questions I will be asking myself, as well. Not only as they relate to my personal life, but to the life of our beloved community. Thank you for the honor of walking alongside you during this Holy Season of Lent.

In Christ,

Amelie+