“Through two millennia of Christian worship, a certain cycle of festivals and seasons has emerged and is now recognized and observed throughout the ecumenical church. …God’s work of redemption in Jesus Christ offers the Church a central pattern for ordering worship in relationship to significant occasions in the life of Jesus and of the people of God.”

–Presbyterian Mission Agency of The PC(USA)

Learn more about the days and seasons that the Church observes during the Christian year by clicking here.

Currently, we are in Lent, a season in which we consider Christ’s sufferings and rethink how we are called to take up our own crosses.  Some of us give up things like chocolate or Facebook or Netflix as a sort of fasting and others try to integrate something new into their lives, like mission work, exercising and praying. It’s a vital time to rethink how we live and to let some things go, or may even develop some new holy habits.

Blessing the Dust 

by Jan Richardson

All those days you felt like dust, like dirt,

as if all you had to do was turn your face toward the wind

and be scattered to the four corners

or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial–

Did you know what the Holy One can do with dust?

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.

This is the hour we are marked by what has made it 

through the burning.

This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives

within the ancient ashes,

that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.

So let us be marked not for sorrow.

And let us be marked not for shame.

Let us be marked not for false humility 

or for thinking we are less than we are

but for claiming what God can do within the dust,

within the dirt, within the stuff of which the world is made,

and the stars that blaze in our bones,

and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.