Between Ashes and Alleluias

I spent yesterday morning rummaging through my bookshelf, looking for a particular Lenten devotional I’ve leaned on for years. The spine is creased. The margins are crowded with notes from a different season of my life. For a long time its familiar rhythm felt like a safety net. But as I stood there holding it, I realized something had shifted. The prayers were still good. The theology was still sound. But the terrain has changed. And I cannot keep using an old map simply because it once helped me find my way. So I slid it back into its place and let the space on the shelf remain open.

Perhaps you are feeling something similar. A sense that the old categories don’t quite hold. That the spiritual practices that once steadied you feel thinner in the face of ecological instability, democratic fragility, widening violence, and the quieter griefs we carry in our own homes. We are living in what I can only describe as an “in-between” time — suspended between what is unraveling and what has not yet been born. It is the gap between knowing how much is breaking and knowing how little control we actually have. It is loving a world whose foundations feel fragile and choosing not to look away.

Some call this anticipatory grief. I would simply call it honesty.

In a culture that demands either instant solutions or total distraction, the church has another calling. Lent has never been about fixing ourselves with a spiritual checklist. It has never been about small moral bargains — give up chocolate, try harder, feel bad for six weeks. Lent is about return. Return to the One who is gracious and merciful. Return to the ground of our being. Return to the truth that we are dust animated by breath, finite creatures held in covenant love.

Ash Wednesday 2026

Ashes tell the truth. We are not in control. We cannot save the world through urgency or outrage. We cannot out-argue mortality. But the ash is traced in the shape of a cross. That mark is not despair. It is the sign that God enters fragility rather than standing above it. The Christian story does not begin with triumph. It begins with incarnation — God choosing to dwell inside vulnerability. And it moves, not around suffering, but through it toward resurrection.

This year, I am inviting us to practice what I am calling truthful presence. To resist both denial and frenzy. To learn how to live lovingly when outcomes are unclear. To become people who can stay. Stay with one another. Stay with the pain of the world. Stay with God.

Where does hope reside in such a season?

Not as a finish line we reach on Easter morning. Not as optimism that everything will turn out the way we prefer. Hope, in the Christian imagination, is resurrection trust. It is the stubborn conviction that love is more fundamental than fear, even when fear is loud. It is the quiet light that grows when we refuse to look away from the truth and refuse to let cynicism have the final word.

We glimpse that hope in what Wendell Berry calls “the peace of wild things,” in the tender gravity of kindness Naomi Shihab Nye names, and in what Christian Wiman describes as God belonging “to every riven thing he’s made.” But we do not simply borrow hope from poets. We practice it. We embody it. We locate it in the body of Christ — imperfect, local, gathered.

To help us navigate this season, we are shaping a rhythm for Lent.

On Sundays, we will center ourselves in scripture, exploring what it means to stand on holy ground without illusion. From Jesus in the wilderness to Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, we will not rush past the hard texts. We will ask what faithfulness looks like when power tempts, when breath feels thin, when bones seem dry.

On Monday evenings at 6PM, we will share a simple soup supper and watch films such as Living in the Time of Dying and My Octopus Teacher — not as critics, but as witnesses. We will practice listening more than debating. We will allow silence to be a faithful response.

And in your own daily life, I invite you into a simple ten-minute practice: read a Psalm and a poem each day at the same time. Let the words become companions. Let them interrupt the noise. Let them reveal what is stirring in your own soul. Not to produce insight. Not to fix anything, but to simply to pay attention.

You may engage one of these practices or all three. Each stands on its own. Together they form a quiet resistance to despair.

Summer Lake

We often want to rush past the ashes to get to the Alleluias. But there is grace in the middle. Resurrection does not erase Good Friday; it passes through it. This year, instead of outrunning uncertainty, I am asking us to remain. To breathe. To become steady enough that when the Alleluias return, they are not shallow but seasoned.

I do not know what this year will bring. None of us do. But I do know this: God is not absent from the in-between. The Spirit is still breathing over dry bones. Christ still meets us in wilderness places. And love — stubborn, incarnate love — is still at work in the world.

I will see you in the in-between.

— Pastor Robin