Ash Wednesday, with which Lent begins, this year happens to fall on Valentine’s Day, February 14. Sr Mary Edith Olaguer, Congregational Councilor, shares a reflection as we enter into this period of spiritual preparation.

“The Ashes and the Rose are One: Crumbling obscurity and tingling lushness.

What conversation can start from here?

According to Iris Murdoch: “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Suddenly you stop and silence is all around – you come upon an environment that is both obscure and tingling lushness. She is right. She is speaking the truth. And you go through your mind and heart and soul and ask: Is there someone, something, I regard more important, more real than I regard myself to be? And oh, the difference my answer would make to this world we are in right now. Depending on our answer, the thick loneliness that hold thousands, if not millions in sludges of fear and despair would start to thaw out because we also paid attention to them, for example. That is what Lent is about. It is about the other. And it is difficult. It is difficult to break away from the sludges of sin and indifference.

Lent is to come upon an environment that invites us to slow down and ask the questions that matter and which change us inside out. They make us willing to go through the death-rebirth cycle because we gain the capacity to hope through the night.

Lent is about unselfing. It is finding out that even fragmentation and dust can feed the ground that nourishes the rose whose tingling lushness is far more important than anything I can imagine or even want.

What do you think?”