Ash Wednesday Meditations

Sacred Lessons

Joel 2: 12-13

“Yet, even now,” says God, “return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” Return to your God, for God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repents of evil.

Psalm 103 by Walker Percy

Repeat. Do you read? Do you read?
Are you in trouble?
How did you get in trouble?
If you are in trouble, have you sought help?
If you did, did help come?
If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble?
What is the character of your consciousness?
Do you have a self?
Do you know who you are?
Do you know what you are doing?
Do you love?
Do you know how to love?
Are you loved? Do you hate?
Do you read me?
Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.

2 Corinthians 6: 2-3

For God says, “At an acceptable time I have listened to you, and on a day of salvation I have helped you.” See, now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation! 3We are putting no obstacle in anyone’s way, so that no fault may be found with our ministry.

Come, Come Whoever You Are by Mevlana Jelaluddin Runi

Come, come, whoever you are,
Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn't matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times
Come, yet again, come, come.

A Prayer for the Day

Come, O Life-Giving Creator and rattle the door latch of our slumbering hearts.

Awaken us as you breathe upon a winter wrapped earth, gently calling to life the coming Spring.
Awaken in these fortified days of Lenten prayer and discipline our youthful dream of holiness and justice.

Call us forth from the prison camp of our numerous past defeats and our narrow patterns of being to make our ordinary lives extra-ordinarily alive.

Show to us during these Lenten days how to take daily things of life and by submerging them in the sacred, to infuse them with a great love for you and for others.

Guide us to perform simple acts of love and prayer, the real works of reform and renewal of this overture to the spring of the Spirit. Help us not waste these precious Lenten days of our souls' spiritual springtime.