Ash Wednesday & Lent

Some time ago asked a friend of mine who is a counsellor how to stop projecting onto others my own fears and weaknesses, especially as it related to some members of my congregation. I was sort of asking 'How can I love them?' His reply went along the lines of “You must enlarge your capacity to suffer.”
The work of Lent is to rewrite the story by enlarging our capacity to take in the parts that we always want to leave out - the parts that aren’t so pretty, that make us less heroic but more real. If I had what he has, I would be? Him, not me. If I was famous I would still be me, only famous, with another set of large problems.
As someone wrote, in a different context, in "The Age" last weekend "If I had a new lover then I would be? Blissful, for awhile, and then he, too, would probably neglect to pick up the towels in the bathroom."
I know I may appear to be making light of it, but we know how much we have to accept about ourselves, all the hard truths, that will cause us to enlarge our own humanity, and write a new, and I would say, a better, story.

In Lent, accepting the ashes will enlarge our capacity to suffer. And, of course, with that work will come an enlarged capacity for joy.