Ash Wednesday: The Lenten Season Begins

Rt. Rev. Philip Wright

It’s Ash Wednesday and today, many Christians across the country took the time to head to church to receive their ashes – the sign of the cross is placed on their foreheads, as it is a holy day of prayer and fasting in most Christian denominations. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten season which will last forty days and concludes at the end of Holy Week in April. The theme for this Lenten season is “Be Reconciled” and Bishop Philip Wright of the Anglican Diocese of Belize shares the message of what that means.

Rt. Rev. Philip Wright, Bishop, Anglican Diocese of Belize

“Most dictionaries define reconciliation as “the action of reconciling or the state of being reconciled.” Whereby we often speak of reconciliation as that which occurs between individuals, some of the popular synonyms for the word reconciled, such as aligned, resolve, integrate, synthesize, merge, bring together, harmonize, accommodate and patch up, speak to a reality beyond simply the relationships we share. No doubt, the primary relationship that comes to mind is the one we ought to have with God, followed by the ones we share with each other as a reflection of our own internal connections. Yet, the idea of reconciliation in its broader sense, the broader sense of the word, beckons us beyond these familiar affiliations to our dealings with the wider world. In other words, we also need to seek reconciliation with the created order – nature, the environment, with our past and present experiences, with our assumptions and prejudices, our missed opportunities and failures, our losses and disappointments. Lent, my friends, is a season for us to lay all of these on the alter before God with the expressed desire for a deeper sense of who God is and who we truly are. Neither pretence nor fear needs to dominate our interactions with God or each other. We can begin to live in greater freedom because the ultimate goal of all forms of reconciliation is the fullest embrace of love, of divine love of God.”