Ash Wednesday 2020

It’s Ash Wednesday, little sweetheart. For a couple of reasons, it seems important that I observe it. I didn’t really, until a few years ago.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent which itself is the season of worship just prior to Holy Week concluding with Easter Sunday. The most striking thing in my own life about Ash Wednesday, of course, is that it came the morning after your accident that year.

After spending the whole night awake in the halls of the hospital waiting to see you, the shift changed in the morning and people began coming to work, many of them wearing the black ash mark of the cross on their foreheads. Eerie, surreal and unforgettable, it has stayed with me ever since that terrible terrible day.

It wasn’t until a year or two later when I discovered the little church on West End Avenue that I first attended an Ash Wednesday service (outside of happening into one in London when I visited St Paul’s). It was the first one I’d ever participated in, actually hearing the blessing and receiving the ashes myself. I’ve continued every year since.

Tonight there’s a service at West End but I’m gong instead to the one here at Sacred Heart, which is a bit closer and directly across the street from the rectory where I take cookies and things to Sister Catherine and the nuns. My prayers, as ever, are for you.

May God keep you safe in the Beautiful New Place and help me to hew the path of goodness and kindness and come to you when it is my time. With all my love forever.