Do you recall Ash Wednesday, 2018? Ironically, last year Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14. I said at the time that it seemed to be a strange juxtaposition--Valentine’s and Ash Wednesday. But Valentine’s Day 2018 was different for another reason. It was the day when a shooting took place at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen students and staff were fatally shot and seventeen others were wounded in that shooting, surpassing the Columbine High School massacre as the worst high school shooting in the United States. It was a day of enormous heartbreak.

In an online sermon Father Michael K. Marsh, an Episcopal priest, tells about the first picture that he saw from that horrendous scene. It was a woman with her arms around another woman, two mo…