Love and Ashes

I can’t help but register the strange coincidence of today. The peculiar quirk of the year 2018 calendar, when  …

The day that so extravagantly celebrates love in all its delightful forms…

AND

The day that publicly acknowledges our utter inability to love as we ought – 

inability to love God as he so vastly deserves...

inability to love our neighbors as ourselves (being we can't even properly love ourselves as we need to be loved!)

But, today these two strange companions come together in one glorious heartbreaking embrace.

Valentine’s Day.

Ash Wednesday.

Side by side. In each other’s arms. Supreme power and absolute weakness.

Love and grief. Love and loss. Love and heartbreak.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around it.  I want to draw a line and say,

Love, you belong in THIS camp.

Loss, you go over THERE.

I want clean-cut divide that keeps love pure and simple, safely tucked away from the heartbreak, betrayal, hypocrisy and pain that ashes so powerfully symbolize.

I want to separate these unnatural conjoined twins.

But life doesn’t permit.

Of course, I can choose to ignore the facts. I can ‘focus on the positive’. I can even talk myself into believing it's all true. I can put my imaginary VR headset and live in the VR world, believing it’s real…

Some of us do it more than we are willing to admit...

But sooner or later the RL catches up. One way or another, we find ourselves surrounded by ashes… 

It's only then that the RL - the real love and the real loss hand in hand - can finally begin their quiet journey…back to being simply human again.