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Ash Wednesday • Lent
2026 • Year A • Beads of Joy Blog II
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✝️ Today's Mass Readings
First Reading: Joel 2:12-18
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17
Second Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:20–6:2
Gospel: Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
📖 The Gospel - Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Today, Jesus doesn't
open Lent with thunder or a list of rules; He opens it with a whisper about the
heart. He pulls us aside and says: When you pray, when you fast, when you give,
do it for God, not for the crowd.
🙏 Gospel Reflection
Friends, welcome to
Lent. Welcome to these forty sacred days where the Church invites us to slow
down, strip away the noise, and ask ourselves one honest question: Where is my
heart right now?
Jesus is so gentle here in Matthew 6. He
doesn't say if you pray, if you fast, if you give alms, He says when. He
assumes we will do these things. What He's asking us to examine is the why
behind them. Are we doing them to be seen, to be admired, to check a spiritual
box? Or are we doing them in that quiet, secret place where only God can see?
I know something about returning to God, really
returning from the inside out. Back in the spring of 1983, I was a
self-proclaimed atheist. I wasn't looking for God. But God was looking for me.
He found me on the Garden State Parkway in a rolling car, and I felt a set of
hands hold my sister and me in the air while that car destroyed itself around
us. I leaned out the window afterward and yelled up at the sky, 'Why did you
save me???’ Not in gratitude, but in resistance. I still didn't want to
believe. And yet that was the beginning of my return. God doesn't wait for us
to be ready. He just comes and finds us right where we are.
I think Ash Wednesday has a beautiful irony
built right into it. We come to Mass and a priest marks our foreheads with
ashes, right out in public, and then the Gospel tells us not to make a show of
our faith. But those ashes aren't a trophy. They are a confession. They say: I
am dust. I am fragile. I need God. That's not pride, that's surrender. And
surrender, my friends, is exactly how Lent begins. So today, as you carry those
ashes, whether you're heading to work, the grocery store, or just sitting
quietly at home, let them be a reminder not to others, but to you. Forty days
to come back. Forty days to let God close whatever distance life has put
between you and Him. Come back to me with all your heart. That cry from Joel is
still ringing out today, for each one of us.
💭 Reflection Question
When you receive your
ashes today, what is the one honest thing in your heart that you want to bring
back to God this Lent, something you've been carrying alone that you know He's
been waiting to help you with?
📿 Today's Rosary - The Sorrowful Mysteries
Today's Focus
Mystery: The Agony in the
Garden
Just as Jesus knelt
alone in Gethsemane and surrendered His will completely to the Father, Ash
Wednesday calls us to that same interior surrender, not a public performance of
holiness, but a private, honest falling to our knees before God and saying, not
my will, but Yours. That is where Lent truly begins.
🌹 Our Lady of Fatima - Today's Connection
On May 13, 1917, when
Our Lady first appeared to the three children at Fatima, she did not come with
fanfare or spectacle. She came quietly, in a flash of light, to three simple
shepherd children in a remote field. Her message, throughout all six
apparitions, was essentially the same as what Jesus asks of us in today's
Gospel: come to God from the inside out. She asked for prayer from the heart,
for sacrifice offered privately, for penance not as a show but as a sincere
turning back to God. As you begin your Lenten journey today, let Our Lady's
quiet simplicity at Fatima inspire the kind of hidden, heartfelt devotion that
Jesus is asking of you in Matthew 6. And she belongs with us, not up on some
forgotten shelf, but right here in the midst of our prayer.
🕊️ Closing Prayer
Lord, today I wear
these ashes not as a badge, but as a prayer. You found me when I wasn't even
looking for You, and You never stopped. Remind me throughout this Lent that You
see what no one else sees, the longing in my heart to come all the way home to
You. Walk with me these forty days. Amen.
©2026 James Dacey, Jr., OFS
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