Rend Your Heart

a writing prompt for Ash Wednesday and Valentine's Day

Welcome to Writing in Company. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points for you to write about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

Today a rare event occurs as Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday are observed on the same day. According to the internet, the secular and sacred holidays have overlapped only three times this century—in 2018, today, and again in 2029. In the last century, it only happened three times, too: in 1923, 1934, and 1945.

Six times in 200 years, Lent-minded folks get to intentionally wrestle with what it means to mark our mortality on a day when we also celebrate love. As if we could ever really know what one is without the other. I think I only began to understand the depths of love after I came to know loss. Maybe joy in all its layered complexity only comes into focus through the lens of sorrow. Maybe that’s really the perfect way to start Lent.

No one expresses this better than Jan Richardson, the poet-artist-pastor who has been writing about love, loss, and faith before and after the unexpected death of her husband. She gives us a blessing for this day, to set us on a path of broken-open-hearted love for the 40-day journey through Lent.

Use her blessing as a prompt for your own writing. Find in it a word, a phrase, an image—a starting place—and then see where your words and your heart take you.

Blessings to you on your day, whatever it holds—ashes, hearts, loss, love. It’s all there, for all of us.

a writing prompt

Rend Your Heart
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

To receive this blessing,
all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go.

Your entire life
is here, inscribed whole
upon your heart’s walls:
every path taken
or left behind,
every face you turned toward
or turned away,
every word spoken in love
or in rage,
every line of your life
you would prefer to leave
in shadow,
every story that shimmers
with treasures known
and those you have yet
to find.

It could take you days
to wander these rooms.
Forty, at least.

And so let this be
a season for wandering,
for trusting the breaking,
for tracing the rupture
that will return you

to the One who waits,
who watches,
who works within
the rending
to make your heart
whole.

—Jan Richardson¹

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related prompts

Want more ideas? Here are my Ash Wednesday prompts from the last two years.

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1. This one is from https://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/02/15/day-1ash-wednesday-rend-your-heart/ You can find many more of Jan’s blessings in The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief

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