March 1, Ash Wednesday (Joel 2:1–2, 12–17; Matthew 6:1–6, 16–21)

The first time I ever attended Ash Wednesday worship, I was in seminary. I was also a spiritual tourist.

I hadn’t been raised in any faith. My call to ministry came when, curious about this thing called religion, I visited a Unitarian Universalist congregation. That was my first bout with spiritual tourism. I was 19 years old. I thought I was checking out religion to see if it might suit me. I figured this would take only a few hours on a single Sunday morning. Little did I know that God would hook me during the first five minutes of that worship service and keep me for 26 years (and counting).

Three years after that first visit, I was an aspirant for ordination in the Unitarian Universalist Association. But I was still curious about religion, and I had learned nothing about the risks of spiritual tourism. So I thought it would be interesting to visit King’s Chapel in Boston on Ash Wednesday. King’s Chapel was one of the only UU churches that offered an Ash Wednesday service; I had heard that they actually offered it with an authentic Christian liturgy. I was skeptical about Christianity. It seemed to me to be generally aligned with bigotry and the denial of scientific fact. But King’s Chapel was Unitarian, and I was a Unitarian seminarian—one who remained curious about religion.