Song 1: True Love

February 14/Ash Wednesday

Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion, wipe out my offenses. ~ Ps 51.3

It is February 14: Valentine’s Day.  It is February 14: Ash Wednesday.  A day for love, certainly, but not the kind expressed by winged cupids, red roses, and sugary candy hearts that say “LUV YA” and “U R CUTE” and “YOU ROCK.”  It is a day, instead, for us to send God a valentine by heeding his call to repent and reconcile.  For – little pastel hearts notwithstanding – we aren’t always “luvable” or “cute,” and more often than not we do not “rock.” In fact, we are deeply flawed creatures who need God’s forgiveness.  Yet as we embark on this season of prayer and sacrifice, we would do well to remember that it is a time of penitence, not punishment: the opening chord that our psalmist sounds at the beginning of Lent is not sin, but forgiveness.  “Have mercy,” the psalm begins, in Hebrew a single word that occurs nearly thirty times in the Psalms.  Our hearts and minds and souls are full of accreted muck – the strained or broken relationship, the failure of nerve or of generosity, the small or large betrayal of a moral value or a person. Our work this Lent is to submit our failings to God, and to beg for his mercy and love.  We will come to know, if we do not already, that the abundance of God’s mercy will always surpass the magnitude of our sin.  Yes, we must use the weeks ahead to look unsparingly inward, past the polish and the facade that we show the world, to examine the grimy, neglected interior of our souls.  But we do so in the knowledge that God’s goodness and compassion are ever-present.   For on this Ash Wednesday-cum-Valentine’s Day, God looks at his sin-stained creatures, and out of his abundant love and infinite mercy, he gently says:  BE MINE.

Gracious and merciful God, Shower me with your compassionate love throughout the next forty days, unworthy though I am.  Amen.

For today’s readings, click here:  https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/021424.cfm

To hear the Guildford Cathedral Choir under the direction of Barry Rose sing William Byrd’s “Miserere Mei,” click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI1kruXV1X4