Wednesday 18 February 2026
Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the forty-day season of penitence and preparation leading to Holy Week and Easter. It is a time for prayer, self-examination and attentiveness to God and one another.
At the Ash Wednesday Eucharists, ashes are imposed on the forehead in the sign of the cross with the words, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return". This ancient biblical sign calls us to humility, repentance and hope in God's mercy as we journey towards the cross.
All are welcome to join us for one of our Ash Wednesday services:
9am | Morning Prayer
12.30pm | Midday Prayer
12.45pm | Eucharist with the Imposition of Ashes
5pm | Evening Prayer
5.30pm | Choral Eucharist with the Imposition of Ashes
Ashes to Go
In addition, “Ashes to Go” will be available in the Millennium Courtyard at 9.30am, 12pm, 1.30pm and 5pm – an invitation to pause and engage with the day by receiving ashes and a blessing for Lent.
The Dean's Semon on Ash Wednesday
I wonder how many of you tucked into a pancake last night? I have to admit that I love them and was pleased to be invited to a pancake party last night. Pancakes were eaten before Ash Wednesday to use up all the dairy produce before the Lenten fast began. But there is something about a pancake that also speaks of what we must now, in Lent, confront. They are fat and they are flat. Fat and flat. Quite a description of the soul in many of us. Lent invites us to be more adventurous. Lent invites us to confront the fat, as it were, by scrutinising how we are living our lives, how we may have become a consumer instead of a human being, how we may be buying or eating more and more because there is another hunger buried in us somewhere. Lots to live with but little to live for. What is it you are reaching out for really when you pick up yet another un-needed gadget, shirt, book, sandwich? Will, as the Maggie Smith character in a recent play comments, the obituary of our generation just be: ‘we left no loft unconverted’?
Many people think that the Church is here just to make people feel bad about themselves and that Lent is good proof of the fact. This is not right. The Church is here to help us discover our humanity and humaneness and so enable love and life to enlarge by attending to human needs not wants, others’ as well as our own. Lent similarly is not here to say thou shalt not, thou can not, but to ask – is your life in balance, have you got things in proportion, where do you think adjustments are needed? Where would your friends tell you you need to make amendments? Traditionally it is a period of fasting, of learning that we can live with less, that we can travel lighter. But it is not just food we can fast from. We can fast from the angry word, the quick judgement. We can fast from the selfish act, the thoughtless behaviour, the cruel gossip, the waspish word unneeded, the lazy complacency. We all need to fast somewhere.
So, the pancake is fat and greasy but it is also flat. Like our Western lives, fat and flat. A flat life is one that just kills time before time kills us. And Lent is here to throw a rope to stop us living that flat, thin life but to discover depth, to deepen our relationships with God, each other and our own self, to take us away from surfaces and to push us into a dive into the spiritual adventure that cannot be achieved by pious thoughts or quick-fix so called spirituality, but by patient, prayerful, disciplined attentiveness. If your life is feeling flat, asks Lent, what´s gone wrong? What are you going to do about it? Where must you turn for help? No, really, what must you do, not just think about it for a moment in passing here now. What must you do: how are your habits shrinking, even killing you? Etty Hillesum’s short poem captures the situation:
There is a deep well inside me.
And in it dwells God.
Sometimes I am there too.
But more often
stones and grit block the well,
and God is buried beneath.
Then God must be dug out again.
Today is named after ash, the stuff that is left when the fire has gone out. It is pretty useless stuff, frail and powdery, easily blown away. God tells Adam and Eve that they are but dust and they would do well to remember it. The ash at this service is placed on our heads in the form of a cross, revisiting the place where the cross was placed at your baptism. The first stroke places an I on your head, the second stroke crosses it to make the cross of Christ. This is an act of unselfing, the I is remade into the Christ shape. That is our hope. That sign is made on your head, that is the individual protective case for your brain, for your thinking, reactions, feelings. Your will power. It is your mind, fragile and shaped by the past, but it is the place where you must decide whether this way of Christ is for you or not. Today is decision time again.
It is easy for us on our treadmills of overwork, stress, tiredness, gusts of anger and diminshing awareness to not see ourselves. When we get irritated or angry there are usually some warning signs or evidence of some unacknowledged shadows we are covering up. We relieve the pressure by projecting the shadows onto others. This is when we make the scapegoat, placing our own mess and baggage on someone else. So often, fearing we’ll be rejected we get in first and reject the other person. Jesus would never play this game. There will be no spiritual progress until we begin to rein in our projections and see ourselves and our own state before we look at others. Lent is a snowfall in the soul that slows us up and asks us what really needs addressing. Christians must give up self-justification for Lent. It’s all very exhausting anyway. Instead, Jesus asks us to beware of showing off, beware of trumpets, beware of using religion as an achievement award. He recommends we go into a secret room and begin to face ourselves in the loving presence of God, to defrost, to see our fragilities, to ask for grace so that others will not become the victims of those cruel antics we have learned to keep composed or superior. “When the evening of life comes”, says St John of the Cross, “you will be judged on your love”.