Searching for God # 86

 We are not entering Lent with neat spiritual goals. We are entering Lent with social dis-ease lodged in our chests. With rage we don’t know what to do with. With helplessness that threatens to harden into cynicism. With the terrible knowledge that people are suffering right now, and we are implicated in systems that enable it.

So how do we hold it all at once?

First, we stop pretending that spiritual discipline is separate from public life.

Lent is not about giving up chocolate while ignoring cruelty. It is about examining what has captured our loyalty. It is about asking what we have allowed to anesthetize our conscience. It is about noticing where comfort has made us quiet.

By: alisonburnslagreca@substack.com, blog entitled, Thoughts, Prayers and Art in a piece entitled Ashes in the Time of Disappearance: A Lenten Reckoning On Bearing Witness Without Burning Out by Rev. Allison Burns-LaGreca, Feb. 18, 2026. Reverend Alison Burns Lagreca is an Episcopal priest and spiritual director, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Stone Harbor, New Jersey, stmarysstoneharbor.org.

The ritual of Ash Wednesday, today, has Old Testament roots, and contemporary replication among Christians reminding us of our mortality, (Genesis 3:19 For dust you are and to dust you shall return)and also recognizing the first day of Lent, that period of 40-days of wandering in the wilderness attributed to Jesus immediately prior to his Crucifixion. Traditionally signifying and the frailty of life, and often considered from a personal, private ‘relinquishment of a favourite activity’ as a form of sacrifice, however, Reverend, Burns-Lagreca casts the moment in a collective, shared, communal light, exhorting her readers to examine ‘what has captured our loyalty,’.…‘asking what we have allowed to anesthetize our conscience’.

Envisioning our shared misplaced loyalty, through an anesthetized conscience, the piece challenges us, not to merely give up chocolate, or our favourite food, but to examine what is and has happened to the ‘spiritual discipline that is separate us from public life.’

 Recalling the words from Leonardo Boff, in his Liberation Theology (pps. 283-284):

In his attitudes Jesus incarnates the kingdom and fleshes out the love of the Father. It is not simply a humanitarian spirit that draws his to those who no one else will approach: e.g. public sinners, drunkards, the impure, lepers, prostitutes and all those who are alienated socially and religiously. He draws near to them because he is fleshing out in history the loving attitude of the Father toward the lowly and the sinful. Their present situation is not the last word on their life; is it not their final structure. They are not lost for good. God can liberate them.

Jesus’ praxis is eminently social and public in character. It touches the structure of Essenes, nor an observance of the established order like that of the Pharisees. Instead Jesus presents himself as a prophetic liberator.

Jesus’ activity is inscribed in within the religious realm. But since the religious realm constituted one of the basic pillars of the political realm and its power, any intervention in the religious realm had political consequences.

Jesus praxis vis-à-vis religion,, sacred laws, and tradition is truly liberative rather than merely reformist. ‘You have heard…but I tell you.; He relativizes their alleged absolute value. Human beings are more important than the Sabbath and tradition (Mark 2:23-26); salvation is determined by one’s attitude toward other human beings (Matt. 25: 31-46). Jesus shifts the center of gravity insofar as the criteria for salvation are concerned. It is not orthodoxy (belief or doctrine) but orthopraxis (right practice or correct conduct) that counts. He subjects the Torah and the dogmatics of the Old Testament to the criterion of love, thus liberating human practice from necrophilic (dead) structures.

If ever there were a time when the Cross of Ashes on the forehead could and would call men and women to challenge the necrophilic structures that threaten to many realms, right in our collective faces, that time is now.

If ever there were a time when the incarnation of love for ‘those whom no one else will approach’ that time is now.

And, tokenism, including the tokenism of Ashes on Ash Wednesday can be and even must be called out for the dilettantism of the Essenes and the Pharisees.

Casting her lot with the prophetic voice of Jesus, not from a self-righteous, self-adoring or narcissistic perspective, but rather from the most humble and most challenging, socially risky and personally enlivening identifying with those no one will identify with.

This is no day for ‘out of sight out of mind’ of all those men, women and children whose lives have been taken over by a political regime that imprisons with immunity, that enslaves with impunity and that arrests, charges and kills with equanimity.

Profound thanks to Reverend Burns-Lagreca for her insightful, provocative and penetrating piece. We humbly suggest Leonardo Boff sings in the same choir.