Ecumenical Ash Wednesday at StB

BAS straight up, as usual. Pointed and evocative, as was Padre Mike's sermon: 

For all its strangeness, there is a truthfulness about Ash Wednesday. That honesty is the reason, I think, that the culture avoids Lent like the plague. Christmas and Easter can be co-copted, encrusted in layers of sentimental goo and conscripted to serve profit and self-gratification, but not this day and season. 

The culture doesn't know what to do with Ash Wednesday and Lent. It has no purchase on these ideas, can find no way in to turn and exploit them, and so leaves them to the faithful.

Read it all here.