Last year, the day before Ash Wednesday, we were planning worship for our staff in the Office of the Bishop when we suddenly realized we had no ashes. I couldn’t quite believe it, because I knew with absolute certainty that I had planned ahead. The previous year, I had put aside palm branches from the Palm Sunday Procession and guarded them carefully in my office for months, in anticipation of this very moment in time. I could close my eyes and see the palms propped up right next to the door, perfectly dried, waiting to become ashes.

But that office was in Jerusalem. And those ashes were for a different place.

And this year, we’re in a different place yet again.

As we enter the season of Lent this Ash Wednesday, I’m mindful of how much can change in a year—and how the reality of change is part of what Ash Wednesday is for. When it feels like the world is whirling, and we are reeling; when we wake up in the morning and remember that the person we love is no longer there; when each day’s news brings fresh heartbreak or worry; we may wonder: what is the solid ground? What is left, amid the ruins of our expectations and our hopes, to offer solace to our weary hearts—and a way forward?

Ash Wednesday does not turn away from these realities. In the center of the maelstrom, in the silence after endings, in the deep breath before the scary new thing, Ash Wednesday meets us and marks us with the honest dust of the earth. The cross on our forehead witnesses to the story of God who so loves this place, this world, this humanity—even knowing the worst we can do to one another, and ourselves—that God chooses us, and loves us, through life and death and beyond. The cross of ashes is a promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus: including our mortality and our fallibility, our doubt and our overwhelm, and all the change that unravels our plans and demands we start again here, now.

Ash Wednesday offers this to us, and more: an invitation not only to a moment but to a season. I am reminded each year that the word “Lent,” which we might suppose has something to do with Jesus’ death and resurrection, or our penitence for sin, in fact is taken from an old English word for “spring.” Lent is the new spring growth, the bud in the branch, the building of birds’ nests and gestation of new life. Lent is the story of life leading inexorably to death, and death turning again to new life.

Dear friends, I pray that this Ash Wednesday and Lenten season offer you, not easy answers or shallow consolations, but profound love that reaches you in the depths of change and uncertainly, fear and grief, and wonder at the ways life continues to show its beauty in the midst of it all. Profound peace, that calms your heart and breath and gives you courage. Profound hope, that there is resurrection on the other side of every death and every dead end. And I give thanks for you, and for the God whose love lives in you, for the sake of the world God so loves.

Blessed Ash Wednesday. Blessed Lent.

+Bishop Meghan