Ash Wednesday 2011 and Links

Most of the web sources speak of Ash Wednesday and Catholics.  But ... how about Lutherans, Episcopalians, and other Christian denominations and their observance of Ash Wednesday?  We observe it with ashes placed on our foreheads, also.

From Pie and Coffee, a thoughtful link with this passage included:

When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you”  –Matthew 6:16-18

from 24 US News:

Traditionally, the ash is a sign of repentance and carry the cross of ashes tell the world that you repent of your sins. The ashes were mixed with holy water burned the remains are made of palm leaves of the state of this year’s Palm Sunday service.

from People for Others:Change and conversion are not the same thing…

Change is required of us all. No one and nothing can stand still, cemented in the place, the work, the era that we had come to take for granted. However comforting the thought, however desirable the situation, what I am now, where I am now, will not always be.

Change will happen. Our only decision is whether to engage it. If we engage change, we can shape it. If we resist it, we run the risk of being shriveled by it into less than we are meant to be.

The not-so-obvious part of change is that change alone cannot define the measure of our growth. Only conversion can do that. Only the willingness to embrace change, to learn from it and to recognize it in the stuff of my own ultimate development can possible give change its coinage.

Conversion requires the humility to look again at what we always knew to be true and see new truth in it.

Conversion requires the willingness to risk. Stepping out into a new universe of grace and gift is the challenge of conversion. It is the ability to admit that there may be more to life than my own small perspective on it.

[Source: Joan Chittister, The Way we Were from A Maryknoll Book of Inspiration, Michael Leach & Doris Goodnough, eds.]

 "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return."