And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights.
--Matthew 3:16-4:1
During the Polio epidemic of the 1950s, my father woke up in the middle of the night and had to crawl to the bathroom. The doctors informed him the next day that he had Polio and he spent the remainder of his fifth-grade year in bed.
“As I recovered,” he recalled, “I had to relearn everything: how to walk, how to play sports—everything.”
Ash Wednesday is a time where we are called to relearn and reimagine our connection to God, prayer, the Earth, and ourselves. As we remember that we came from the Earth and shall return to the Earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, our priorities realign and we focus on being present and paying attention to what really matters.
At St. Mark’s, our way of being this year feels a lot like a perpetual Lent, a continual re-imagining of classes, athletics, and community life, as we work to relearn and reclaim what matters most. In the changes we make around health and safety during this pandemic, we strive to put relationships at the center of our decision-making.
Jesus’ journey to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights began with a message at his Baptism that affirmed what all human beings long for: that we belong and we are beloved. As we begin this Lenten journey, let us remember to nurture the sense of belonging and belovedness in our own hearts through the practice of re-imagining and re-learning how to pray, pay attention, and be fully present to the relationships at the center of our lives.
--The Rev. Katie Solter
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