It’s Ash Wednesday. A day for personal recommitment to collective liberation. A day marked by scrutiny, accountability, confession. A day to rediscover our identity and worth in the well-being of others. A day to remind ourselves of our baptism into the struggle for Something Else, from the ghetto to the Gaza Strip. A day to double-down on rebuilding what supremacy has burned down. A day to start giving up what weighs us down and holds us back. A day to embrace the beautiful, ancient tension of what the sacred text says in 2 Corinthians 6:4-10:

…but as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.