Dear Friends
Many people are generally aware that it’s a religious observance that happens every year and somehow involves people getting ashes smeared on their forehead and or giving up chocolate, alcohol or Facebook until Easter. But like most practices rooted in Christianity, the way people observe Lent, or whether they observe it at all, varies wildly depending on their heritage, specific religious tradition, and preferences.
Lent is the greatest and most solemn period of fasting on the Christian church’s calendar, leading up to the celebration of Christianity’s greatest feast day Easter. The easiest way to understand the church calendar is as a sort of live immersive theatre, designed to re-enact the life of Jesus every year from Christmas (birth) to Easter (resurrection). During that time, readings in traditional churches revisit stories from the gospels that focus on those events in Jesus’ life. Following Easter is a 50-day period called Pentecost, and then a season called “Ordinary Time,” which lasts until Advent begins around the end of November.
As Advent is the season of anticipation leading up to the great day of Christmas, Lent is the season that precedes the greatest feast day: Easter, which marks the day when we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and triumph over death. Lent technically lasts for 46 days. The period is a mirror of the 40 days that Jesus spent in the wildness, fasting, praying, and being tempted by Satan before he started his public ministry. Jesus had gone to the desert to prepare his soul for an intense three-year period of healing people, preaching, and ministering, at the end of which he was crucified by the Roman Empire and religious leaders.
The concept behind Lent is that each year, Christians will mimic Jesus’ actions in the wilderness. Lent is sometimes called the “Great Fast.” It’s a period of time in which Christians are meant to give up some comfort or adopt some spiritual practice that leads to self-examination, repentance from sin, and, ultimately, renewal of the soul, all in anticipation of greater dedication to serving others and God in the coming year.
Because each week, the fast is interrupted by a Sunday six in all. In traditional Christian teaching, each Sunday is itself a feast day, a mini-remembrance of Jesus’ resurrection that happens every week. So, Christians who observe Lent are told to break their Lenten fast on Sunday and celebrate the feast. The manner in which they break that fast varies, depending on the tradition.
Why fasting? For most religious people, their faith and practice is about more than mental assent to a list of beliefs it’s about the whole human experience, which includes the body. Fasting reconnects the body to the emotions, mind, and soul, often by interrupting our autopilot mode and recognising the ways we self-medicate that might be destructive to our souls. Lent is specifically designed to dismantle the egotistical ideas we sometimes have about ourselves, to identify the places in our lives where we’ve grown arrogant or complacent, to remember that we are going to die someday, and to repent and renew our dependence on God. Lent is meant to be uncomfortable. And it’s meant to end in gratefulness.
Solomzi.