Turning, turning ...

This Ash Wednesday, I'm reminded of Sara Miles' delicious little book, City of God: Faith in the Streets about living and loving in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood -- and meeting her neighbors while distributing ashes on the streets. Not going to be any of that this pandemic year. Too bad.

Here are some tidbits for the day:

Repentance, in Christian practice, is not a psychological or an emotional process. “Feelings,” [the Rev.] Paul [Fromberg] declared once when I brought him some intractable problem with a troubled parishioner, “are stupid.” I thought he must be joking, but Paul insisted. “Jesus doesn’t care if you feel guilty. Jesus wants you to change.” Neither is repentance about simply saying you’re sorry. “That’s just apology,” explained Paul, “which is about etiquette. Repentance is about rebirth. It means putting on your big-girl panties and facing the world to do things differently.”

Repentance means turning toward other human beings, our own flesh and blood, whenever they’re oppressed, hungry, or imprisoned; it means acting with compassion instead of indifference. It means turning away, “fasting,” from any of the little and big things that can keep us from God—drugs, religion, busy-ness, video games, lies—and accepting the divine embrace with all our hearts. Repentance requires paying attention to others, and learning to love, even a little bit, what God loves so much: the whole screwed-up world, this holy city, the people God created to be his own.

Highly recommended for the Lenten season and cheap too -- my Amazon says the kindle edition is a mere .69. 

I am a fan of the Christian season of Lent, of having a regular annual observance devoted to turning away from hyper-activity and toward Goodness in all its manifestations and forms.

The Episcopal collect (short prayer) we use each Ash Wednesday contains the assertion that is central to all I know of this stuff:

God hates nothing that God has made ...

Here's to a blessed Lent if such is your thing.