Throughout the Lenten season, we will post reflections for holy days and Sundays from this year’s Lenten reflection booklet, Peace compels us, which includes all-new reflections written by Michael Angel Martín (Pax Christi Florida) and Bishop John Stowe, OFM Conv., Pax Christi USA’s bishop president and excerpts from past booklets. Click here to see all reflections as they are posted as well as links to other Lenten resources on our Lent 2026 webpage.
If you are looking for a daily reflection booklet specially curated for Lent, you can still purchase and download this year’s e-booklet, Peace compels us: Reflections for Lent 2026.
REFLECTION FOR ASH WEDNESDAY, February 18, 2026
by Michael Angel Martín
Joel 2:12-18 | Psalm 51 | 2 Corinthians 5:20—6:2 | Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18
Brothers and sisters: We are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us.
The Gospel lesson on Ash Wednesday is a curious choice. Jesus cautions us against the public expression of alms, prayer, and fasting. Our response? Smear ashes on our foreheads, scatter to the rest of our respective days, and announce with these variously shaped blotches just how pious we are. Lived out so differently across cultures, theologies, and even politics, this faith of ours is at least consistent in its irony, the main instance of which is that God became one of us. Strangely, this God suffers and dies. And mysteriously still, this is how, as the St. Francis prayer puts it, “we awaken to eternal life.” And that’s just the creedal stuff. Never mind how mourners are comforted, the hungry are filled, and the least are the greatest.
Indeed, Jesus tells us, our Creator sees and repays in secret. As for me, I’m delighted when I see a stranger with ashes on their forehead at work or on a milk run. Hi, there! I, too, am dust, and to dust I shall return. Sometimes we exchange a glance, sometimes awkwardly wish each other a “happy” Ash Wednesday. Often we’re too self-conscious, so we walk in opposite directions. I like to imagine that person blushing, smiling wryly just like me. Another delight is spotting the diversity of ash-shapes; despite the best efforts of ministers to smudge a tight cross over our brows, not a single one turns out like another, even before the remaining days’ sweat finger-paints on us.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? The particularities of our dust — our unhealthy habits, our infirmities, our failures, the ways we’re trapped in sinful systems, our very deaths — are unique to each one of us. Ironically (again), this reminds me that I, like you, am a thought God has had from all eternity, a God who not only loves humanity in its entirety, but loves each of us entirely, as if each were God’s only child. That means we might recognize one another by our blotches; that while their forms may differ, we’re all marked, whether worn for all to see on our foreheads or not. In that recognition, we find that we’re all in this life together. So we pray for each other, because that’s how we seal bonds of solidarity. So we give alms because what we possess, frankly, belongs to the person who needs it most. And so, we fast, because we must feel at least a fraction of the world’s hunger, one pang at a time.
If, like me, you feel called to promote Gospel nonviolence and work for a just peace in the world, then I pray God uses this season of Lent to draw us to our blotches. We need to rend the violence and warring impulses in our hearts first, lest self-righteousness, unwarranted certitude, and pride mar our witness. What Easter peace dare we boast at the end of these 40 days and nights unless we see that we too need to meet, as St. Paul says, ambassadors of Christ — that God might appeal to us through others, blotches and all? In a way, Lent is the shadowy practice run for Easter. Such is the ironic work of God, who by way of the cross, sheds the light that we — one by one, together — need to trudge this dusty road to peaceful destiny.