Dear believing, doubting and non-believing friends,

     Hearts, hearts and more hearts are everywhere you look these days, so if you got ashes today don’t let them float down and blind your eyes to Valentine’s Day, only days away. Valentine’s Feast of Lovers and Friends is an ideal companion to Ash Wednesday’s annual launching of Lent’s season of reform. But why do I need to be reformed? “I go to church every Sunday, leaving an offering of 10% of my income; I pray before meals and twice daily, read scripture every morning and am a volunteer at the soup kitchen—and I keep all the commandments!

     Really, you keep “all” the commandments? For Jews and for Jesus, the Great Commandment isn’t one of the famous Ten, rather “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength.” (Deut: 6, 5; Matt. 22:37) To test if we keep that commandment you and I need the Italian Dr. Santorio’s 1602 invention of the thermoscope, what we call a thermometer. We each need a heart-thermometer to give us the degree of our love’s fervor for our Beloved Creator and to measure the degree of the heat of our love for those dearest to us. If your thermometer numbers feel off a degree or two, you’re fortunate that the annual season of reform that begins today provides you with 40 days to rekindle and stoke up the fires of your love.

     After recovering from falling in love we all tend to love moderately within limits, not with great passion. We do so logically to insure our beloved’s death will not drive us mad. Marriage with its routine and sameness also lessens the once explosive fires of love and causes a lack of frequent gratitude and loving gestures and expressions. Marriage vows are necessary since we physically quickly change, and our once passionate love over time cools down until it is as lukewarm as today’s ashes. In the case of seniors, their once fascinating youthful love over the decades matures into an infallible ironclad companionship. Older lovers of God, after years of intimacy, experience that same confident calm love of companionship with their Beloved Lord.

     Unfortunately, believers deceive themselves that fidelity to the laws of God and the church, along with Sunday worship, suffices for love. Non-believers and halfhearted ones don’t hate God but experience the opposite of love which isn’t hate, but apathy. When it comes to Divine matters they are indifferent, uninterested and, when forced to attend church, are bored. The temperature of their relationship with God is lukewarm. Also in failing marriages and love affairs any love left is likewise lukewarm.
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     If fifty percent of American marriages end up dead in divorce, one wonders what percentage of God-human love relationships end up the same way? The Good News is if your heart thermometer measures your love of God as tepid, even if you are a doubter it can be re-enkindled. Surprisingly, enkindled love is conducive to enkindling belief, which is really Good News since it is healthy to deny the existence of some Gods we were taught existed.

     One answer to how God looks upon the degree of your love is found in the book of Revelation 3: 15: “I know that you are neither cold nor hot…So because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Those are the acidic hateful words of a god of whom you should be an atheist! It is healthy and holy to be a non-believer of that Revelation spokesperson, like several other false gods who are found in the “Good Book”…but who don’t really exist!

     For half-hearted or devout believers, here are some suggestions. Begin to say aloud frequently throughout the day, “I love you, God.” When you experience a love gift from the Divine One like escaping some accident or finding some forgotten hidden money, say, “Thank you. I love you, God.” As you drift off to sleep as a final prayer of the day, “I love you, God…or Lord…or my Beloved.” Review your life and your talents, personal gifts you’ve been given, or a marriage partner or children, and see them all as individual love gifts to you from your Beloved God.

     Regardless what you may hear from the pulpit or read in the Bible, God believes in you, even if you don’t believe in him/her. God’s love for you is always unconditional, more passionate than any human love; no matter if your love is nonexistent or only lukewarm.

                   Happy romancing your Valentine lover and your Divine Beloved!

Dear old and new friends,

    Today’s Ash Wednesday begins Lent, that annual, marvelous opportunity for spirit/soul growth regardless of your religious affiliation…or lack of it. This Wednesday’s name comes from the ancient practice of tracing a cross of ashes on the forehead of public sinners as they began their Lenten forty days of penance. This reception of ashes was by the eleventh century the norm for all Christians.

    Old time Catholics who prefer the antique Latin Mass also would love a return to Lent’s former strictness. Such a revival of the former harsh Lent would mean 40 days of strict fasting, abstinence of meat, milk products, cheese and eggs, along with the self-punishments of going barefoot, sleeping on the floor and not cutting one’s hair or bathing! Imagine having to work beside (or live with) a devout old Lenten observer who abstained from bathing for 40 days!

    That old grim Lent is still alive and with us today in churches dominated by a large cross draped in a penitential purple cloth. There the clergy admonished the faithful to recall their former sinfulness, go to confession and do penance. Do you think God desires such a forty day guilt trip? Or shouldn’t its purpose be the same as that of life, only intensified: growth in love of God and one another? Kneeing in guilt begging contritely for pardon isn’t the stance of a lover. So open your heart and arms to God and instead of dredging up your old sins—forget them!

    The saintly Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), a Ukrainian Hasidic mystic, taught that “...most people think of forgetting as a defect, but I consider it a great benefit. Unless you forget your past sinfulness it will be utterly impossible to serve God because surfacing memories of your old sins only disturbs your abilities today to love with unbounded affection.” I think we should rename Ash Wednesday as Alzheimer’s Wednesday! I know the very mention of the “A” word causes shivers. Forgetfulness creates regrets and, if you’re middle-aged or older, the dreaded fear of the possible onslaught of that life-stealing disease.

    Yet, to intentionally forget is essential not only to be a better lover of God but also in daily life. Unless you wipe clean your memory of where you parked at the grocery store two days ago, you won’t recall where you parked today. Having holy dementia about the old mishaps of your marriage partner or wrongs done to you in the past by others makes lovingly pardoning them as easy as—Lenten pie.

    Jesus at the Last Supper initiated a New Covenant, and among its conditions the prophet Jeremiah quotes God saying, “I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more!” (Jer.31, 34) When the clergy urge you to scour your soul for past sinfulness and repent, recall the words of your Alzheimer Lord and those of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.  Have a Revolutionary Romantic and Merry Lent.

Dear old and new friends,

    Today, Ash Wednesday, in past centuries repentant sinners guilty of serious public sins and scandal were marked with the sign of an ashen cross as they began their forty harsh days of public penance. If you don’t fall into that category, Lent can be a season of spiritual renewal of prayer and works of charity. Another choice is forty days of preparation for Easter. Regardless which you choose, across it likely will fall the dark shadow of the cross of ascetic, self-inflicted denials of bygone gloomy Lenten days. This old negative spirit still influences how Christians spend Lent, even those who no longer attend church.

If you choose a Lent of spiritual rejuvenation of your prayer and acts of charity, then engage in them daily with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. If your choice is forty days of Easter training, then daily deepen your belief in the resurrection by practicing joyfulness and cheerful playfulness—especially dealing with evil.

The following is a true story, a Lenten parable for confronting evil. Leo Alard became the first Hispanic Episcopal bishop in the United States. In the 1960’s he was a young priest and pastor of a racially integrated parish in Chattahoochee, Florida. The local Ku Klux Klan detested this racially mixed church and one night the white-hooded Klan’s men erected a fiery cross on the church lawn. Inside the church, its youth group was meeting with Father Alard whose reaction to the racist burning cross was not with prayer—but play. In prophetic playfulness he led his youth group outside to roast marshmallows at the flaming cross!

Lent leads to Easter Sunday, the joyous festival of Jesus being raised from the dead, and also that same triumph for us, his disciples. Yet life after death for many, if not most, is only a wish, a hesitating hope, instead of a core religious belief. Easter fuses with joyfulness for those convinced death cannot rob them of life and so say, “I am, I shall be and I shall continue to be!” Those who profess this as their core Easter belief live joyous lives of impulsive cheerfulness and undefeatable delight.

If heaven sent a drone flying over the world to send back pictures of true believing Christians, it would relay back few images! Become a Credo Christian, a Believer Christian, and by smiling cheerfulness and optimism in a personal Easter have your daily life transformed into an enduring “Merry Easter.”

Dear old and new friends,

    A week from today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent—a springtime retreat of the spirit. Instead of going up in the attic to drag out and dust off some old antique exercises of penance of the past for this year’s spring retreat, consider doing something freshly new. To stimulate your imagination reflect on what Saintly Pope John XXIII said at the start of the Second Vatican Council, “We are not on earth to guard a museum, but to cultivate a flourishing garden of life.”

However, the Vatican elite, along with Pope John Paul II, had not the least desire to be gardeners. They preferred continuing to dress in colorful medieval attire as the guards of the Church as a Holy Museum of Yesteryear. They have continued to resuscitate old dogmas, age-worn rituals and old devotions—all in the name of tradition.

Yet, “Tradition,” said the master composer Gustav Mahler, “is tending the flame; it’s not worshiping the ashes.” While Lent does begin with “Ash” Wednesday, don’t spend the remaining 39 days engaged in worshiping the dead ashes of bygone mortification practices. “Tend the flame,” as Mahler said, by taking some time to create new and different ways to spend these Lenten days of grace…and perhaps find your example in the Shinto monks of Iso, Japan.   

Every twenty years since the year 772 these Shinto monks have painstakingly dismantled their large central shrine and then meticulously rebirth it from the ground up. To us practical westerners this effort seems a waste of both time and energy, but for the monks it contains copious lessons. The young monks, by this ritual of destruction and reconstruction, acquire the ancient building techniques, and all the monks relearn the lesson that life like their temple shrine is fleetingly temporary! Sit on this tradition of the Shinto monks like a patient mother hen on her egg so it can motivate you to hatch something fresh and new for your Lent.  

If by Ash Wednesday your egg hasn’t hatched, you haven’t failed—your church has! Imagination has an indispensable role in the life of a “living” religion, yet it is absent in 99%—if not all—of them. “When imagination fails (is lacking),” says scripture scholar Amos Wilder, “then doctrine ossifies, preaching is wooden, litanies are empty….”   

Let’s say every twenty years you tore down your church or religious tradition and rather than rebuilding it as it had been, you remake it in a wholly new way! In that holy work, what things would you keep and what would you throw away?

   
   
I would like to offer some assistance to you for your Lenten Journey beginning on Ash Wednesday, February 13. You will find here daily Lenten reflection-meditation books…and now art images to ponder (remember a picture is worth a thousand words) for Lent, Easter, Pentecost, as well as for Saint Patrick, Saint Joseph and Irish feast days—all with accompanying verses.

New also are recorded Conferences for Lent and Holy Week that can be listened to online.

All are available for your personal use. If you desire to use any of these, we can become companions on this spring journey of your Easter evolution.