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Financial District office workers exit the Bently Reserve after Ash Wednesday services hosted by Old St. Mary’s Cathedral. (Photo by Debra Greenblat/Catholic San Francisco)
February 22, 2018
Christina Gray
For workers in San Francisco’s downtown Financial District, the historic Bently Reserve building is where Lent begins.
“It’s so convenient and I count on it every year,” Harold Pestana, an executive with PG&E, told Catholic San Francisco as he walked the few blocks back to his office with ash-crossed co-workers Feb. 14 after an Ash Wednesday prayer service at the Bently Reserve.
The Bently Reserve, an historic federal reserve building on the corner of Battery and Sacramento streets, has for many years served as a popular outpost for the dispensation of ashes for Old St. Mary’s Cathedral and Chinese Mission in Chinatown. Old St.Mary’s, where the Paulist Fathers have ministered to Chinatown and the Financial District for more than 120 years, is a few too many blocks away to comfortably cover on foot and back in one lunch hour.
Pestana lives in San Jose and said his long commute could otherwise compete with the ability to take part in the Lenten ritual that is important to him. “It takes me back to the root of who I am,” he said.
Pestana was one of several hundred people – at a glance an upbeat mix of young adults dressed in business attire, fleece-wearing hipsters, and older local residents – who streamed into the stately building just before noon for the first of two services led by Deacon Simon Tsui from Old St. Mary’s.
For the past four years Deacon Tsui and a handful of lay volunteers from Old St. Mary’s have held the service, which is listed on the parish website but is spread mostly by word of mouth.
“We don’t ask who you are or where come from,” said Deacon Tsui. All are welcome, he said, at the brief service which includes a scriptural reading, a reflection and the dispensation of ashes. From start to finish, each of the two services – one at 11:45 and a second at 12:15 – lasts about 20 minutes.
While waiting for the service to begin in an elegant conference room, Mary Ann Hewy said she was not Catholic, but she enjoys coming every year with her friend and co-worker, Jennifer Flores. “We used to have to walk all the way up to Old St. Mary’s,” said Flores.
The Bently Reserve, formerly the San Francisco Federal Reserve Building, is occupied in part by the San Francisco Bar Association and other prominent tenants. It rents its lower floors out for business meetings and other events. For years the management has offered it to Old St. Mary’s free of charge for its Ash Wednesday service, according to Julie Todd, parish administrator, who assisted Deacon Tsui with her husband Jim Foster. Both are longtime parishioners.
“Ash Wednesday always floors me,” said Foster, noting that Ash Wednesday is the busiest day of the year at Old St. Mary’s. People come that day on a most willing basis, he said. “They wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Deacon Tsui made a pointed but humorous acknowledgement that the group might not all be regular churchgoers.
A preacher standing at the door after church one day grabbed a young man on his way and pulled him aside. “You need to join the army of the Lord,” the priest said. “I already am in the army of the Lord, pastor,” said the young man. The pastor asked why he only saw him at Christmas and Easter and he whispered, “I am in the secret service.”
“I am glad you are all here today,’ the deacon said after the laughter subsided. In his reflection, he said Ash Wednesday is about following Jesus on the path that leads through death to resurrection. That journey involves repentance, but not repentance primarily centered on guilt or penance.
“Lent means to return to God, to reconnect with God, to have a relationship with God,” he said, as well as the people around you.
The ashes are a reminder of our fragility, he said, and “a confrontation with a tendency to live unconsciously.”
He did not mention that Lent this year coincided with Valentine’s Day, but his was a direct message about love.
“Whatever we do with our Lent, make sure it’s a matter of the heart,” he said.