Tomorrow we are invited to mark ourselves with ashes and walk with Jesus the Lenten road - through Good Friday - to Easter. If you were in church this past Sunday you know I invited us to try experiment with a new spiritual practice for Lent: to repeat the words, "You are my beloved. In you I am well pleased," at least five times a day from Ash Wednesday to Easter. This is a way to gently uncover our beauty that so easily gets covered over by all the messages that tell us we are not enough. Or as poet Galway Kinnell puts it below, "sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness."

If you were not at church and want to read the sermon that further explains this spiritual practice for Lent, CLICK HERE.

And if you can, please join us for our Ash Wednesday service tomorrow at 7:30 pm (the Sanctuary will be open at 7:00 for quiet prayer). Led by Rebecca Gale, this service has a quiet, reflective nature, with communion and ashes. It is really quite beautiful and a meaningful way to begin this new season.

The bud

stands for all things,

even for those things that don't flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths 

sucking and blowing beneath them: