Scheduled Maintenance: A Reflection for Ash Wednesday 2024

As I like to say, the weeks surrounding Epiphany are all about celebrating the different ways the Divine Light has shone out into all the world. But Ash Wednesday marks a big shift in focus, for it is the start of Lent, that season when we turn that same Divine Light inward, shining it into every dark corner of our hearts and minds and lives to reveal to us what is really there. It’s a helpful and needful season in the Church calendar, and an opportunity for some self care and spiritual maintenance that none of us should ignore.

This season starts, of course, with the rite of the imposition of ashes, a humbling reminder of mortality. We only have one life to live here on Earth, the rite tells us, so we’d better make the most of it. To paraphrase Ken Wilber, it’s time to wake up and clean up so that we may better grow up and show up in the world. Only then can we really get on with the business of living as Christ in the world (which ironically always leads us to grow more fully into ourselves as individuals).

While this is a process we must all undertake for ourselves, we never do it alone. We have companions on our journeys, not just in our fellow Christians in our church communities and friend groups, but also but also in all those who have gone before us, that “great cloud of witnesses” as Hebrews puts it. Last year, our traveling companion here on the blog was Julian of Norwich. This year, we’ll be joined by the Desert Fathers, a group of enigmatic monastics in the fourth through sixth centuries whose radical lives of self-examination inspired the Lenten practices of prayer and fasting we know so well.

As radical and at times confounding as their example was and is, their witness is an important one. For at a time when Christianity was coming to power in the Roman Empire — what many saw as its great triumph in the world — these men and women were having none of it. They saw through the pretense of the ‘Christian society’ and false promises of packed churches, and chose to flee such earthly temptations for a life of austerity in the deserts. And since we are once again living in a time of an insurgent, power-hungry form of Christianity, their example about what is truly important is more important for us than ever.

Over the course of Lent, my goal is to post short daily reflections on one of the ‘sayings’ of the Desert Fathers. The series will be loosely divided into three major themes: Sacred Practices, Relationships, and Interiority. I think it will be a challenging few weeks (in all the best ways), and hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Wishing you all a blessed, meaningful, and transformative Lent.