05.03.25
I checked Chat GBT this morning and put in ‘Lent 2025’ … it told me: Lent in 2025 will begin on Wednesday, February 25, 2025, and end on Thursday, April 10, 2025, with Easter Sunday being on April 13, 2025.
Just to clarify today is Wednesday, March 5, Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, which ends on Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday) April 17, with Easter Sunday on April 20! So don’t believe everything on Chat GBT!
Lent traditionally lasts for 40 days (not including Sundays) and is a time of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving leading up to Easter.
It provides an opportunity to begin again. Today is the beginning of a journey which will recall to us the deepest experiences of human life., a six week pilgrimage …. Begin again to pray, to be a friend, to the acceptance that pain is part of life, to the sure hope of resurrection, to walk with Jesus.
Parish Resources – The Tree of Hope (purple ribbons / stones) – the Lenten Box (focus is on Guatemala). As we wear the ashes, may we bring home the Trócaire box.
Seamus Heaney poem ‘Digging’ comes to mind:
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging …”
Lent is a season for digging, for looking that bit deeper, under the bonnet of our lives. What needs changing? What needs addressing? What needs attention? Lent is forty days of dust and ashes
The ashes bring us back to Ash Wednesday. The readings for Ash Wednesday never change. There is a repetition to them. We hear them every year. The themes don’t change, if anything they amplify.
Matthew’s gospel carries that tension between public witness “ambassadors for Christ” (2Cor.5:20) and private prayer. The ashes are our prop for our Lenten journey. Three times we hear the phrase “who sees in secret” (Mt.6:4; 6:6 & 6:18) and the promise of a reward. So we gather on this day of tension, on this day of repetition, on this day of beginning again. Beginning again to build our relationship with Christ. And in doing so strengthen our relationships with one another in a very broken and bruised world. Blessings as we set out on this six week pilgrimage!