It’s day eight in the bed with Covid-19. It’s day nine of my ten-day quarantine. It’s Ash Wednesday. It’s Ash Wednesday, and I can’t bring my congregation our ritual of ashes, of applying the cross upon their foreheads as a sign of following Christ. It’s Ash Wednesday, and I won’t join my congregation at the altar on bended knees, with bowed heads and clasped hands, laying down our right to be total dictators of our lives and the things we fill them with. It’s Ash Wednesday, and instead of collecting the ashes from last year’s palms into a shared vessel, we are scattered as shattered vessels dropped on stones. How appropriate.

How appropriate that after this year that has really been like one prolonged season of Lent—time apart, time of solitude, time of reflection, time of sacrifice, time of preparation for a breaking loose—that this first day of Lent is not turning out the way I would prefer. The way I would have controlled it. Nothing about this past year turned out the way any of us would have preferred, and we have all had to give up control. So, I should not be surprised that today isn’t like any other Ash Wednesday.

Traditionally, Lent is the time when Christians take a step back, take stock, and evaluate our lives. It’s a time to step outside of ourselves for an objective examination of our spiritual condition, a time to step out of the shadow of our own ego into the shadow of the cross. It’s a time to set aside things that separate us from our relationship with God, pleasures that are cheap counterfeits of the pleasure of a life in Christ. It’s a journey across difficult spiritual terrain, a journey that is best taken one day at a time. It calls us to give up comforts and routines, plans and predictions. Sound familiar?

We have been in a sort of Lent for the past 317 days since COVID-19 sprung up and shut down our patterns of life. We have sacrificed conveniences and been forced to change habits. We have fasted from our favorite restaurants and been denied our favorite stores. We have suffered and we have endured. We have had more time alone with ourselves and experienced depths of emotion never before tapped. We have watched more, listened more, and thought….more.

But, have we been more holy? Perhaps we should treat the next 47 days as a Lent within a Lent, the difference being shifting our focus to keeping holy Lent. Even in this year of separation and denial, we have blindly walked into the same dead-ends we always have: we just shifted addictions to TV shows and online shopping; we left the pews for politicians and political parties; the dance floor for online chat rooms; wearing “masks” in public to hiding behind social media. Sounds like I’m getting ready to come up with a list of do’s and don’ts. But holiness isn’t about do’s and don’ts, but having a disposition of mind and spirit so that love becomes completely void of self-interest and fully God. When John Wesley talked about Christian “perfection,” he wasn’t talking about living without mistakes, but being so filled with the Holy Spirit we become divorced from the grip of pride, self-will, anger, and disbelief. Holiness, according to John Wesley, is the love of God renewing us inwardly and “expelling the love of the world, the love of pleasure, of ease, of honor, or money…and every other evil temper; in a word, changing the ‘earthly, sensual, devilish mind’ into the ‘mind which was in Christ Jesus’ (Phil 2:5).”

So, while this Ash Wednesday is different, it is still the same. We are still saved by grace, through faith. The Spirit still blows wherever it wishes making us new again, dead to sin and alive to God. For these next six weeks let’s not get tripped up by the inaccessible features of our traditions. Instead, let’s take time to be holy and rediscover the love of God. “I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to observe a holy Lent: by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s Holy Word” (UMC Book of Worship). Let us nurture within us a holiness that is both inward and outward, and is ever increasing our love for God. We can do that from anywhere.