Lent is the traditional season of preparation for the great celebration of Easter.
This is often marked as a season of fasting, where things are given up and taken up to help us on our spiritual journey.
The name Lent comes from the Middle-English word Lente which means springtime, which in turn owes its origins to Early-English Lencten and the Saxon word the same which meant ‘longer’ and indeed referred to the season where the days were getting longer.
Lent is typically described as forty days and is seen as referencing the forty days Jesus was fasting in the wild. Matthew 4:1-11.
The first day of Lent is Ash Wednesday, and in 2023 that is the 22nd of February and Easter Day falls on the 9th of April. And a quick calculation will show you that it is 47 days. There are two explanations for that. Either from Palm Sunday you have entered Holy Week, or as Sunday is always a celebration of the Resurrection you don’t count the Sundays in Lent as part of Lent.
Easter is a season of Fifty days, culminating at Pentecost, and of course there the Sundays are counted as part of the festival.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, and the theme for that day comes from the first reading from Joel:
Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
In the liturgical cycle, we come to this year by year, and the challenge for us is to realise that this can always be new for us. As we grow the same crop on the same land, we realise that each year we have a new harvest, yet perhaps different from last year.
There is the story of the wife who asks her husband “what are you going to do today?” and he replies “nothing!” she responds “that's what you did yesterday”, and he replies “I wasn’t finished!”
Our challenge is to encounter in the familiar ritual the freshness of the unfinished business, open to a new discovery in the old familiar ritual, the realisation that the Gospel is Good News, not stale history.
So we encourage you to have a Happy Lent, and that in this time you may have the joy of finding some new spiritual depth on this journey to the Cross and Resurrection.