Lent starts next week. Ash Wednesday is March 5th. The Collect for Ash Wednesday is one of my favorites. It is too bad we only use it liturgically once a year. The Collect begins: “Almighty and everlasting God, you hate nothing you have made and forgive the sins of all who are penitent.”
To me there is no better way to begin Lent, or any season, than to be reminded that God does not hate. God only loves, and one of the gifts of God’s love is forgiveness. God never acts out of hate.
I wonder sometitmes if God doesn’t hate only loves because God isn’t selfish or have any self-interest. Selfless God seeks only to hold all things together in love.
The world and all of us as part of it are not so selfless. It seems we are well practiced in the art of hate and serving self-interest. So I give thanks for the season of Lent, not as a time for us to earn relief from an angry God filled with the projection of our self-interested hate, but as a season to discover the barriers to God’s love withini us.
I am praying for a season of Lent for this world. May each of us find and cast down barriers to love in our hearts and in our lives. And may we more and more be servants, advocates, and activists of God’s love through acts of mercy, service, and witness.
