Christians around the world are beginning to look towards the forty-day season of Lent, the time of preparation immediately preceding the 50-day season of Easter, where we celebrate what we believe to be the central moment in history: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As the calendar falls, this year marks one of the rare occasions when the Eastern and Western churches (the two largest “divisions” of the Christian world) mark Easter—and thus Lent—on the same day. Interestingly enough, our Muslim siblings are also observing the Holy Month of Ramadan, which celebrates the Prophet Muhammad’s reception of the Holy Qur’an. Both Lent and Ramadan are traditionally marked by fasting.
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, named so because of the practice of “receiving ashes” on one’s forehead. The ashes are both a symbol of our mortality (“ashes to ashes, dust to dust”) and of our inner desire to repent for our sins and amend our lives. The entire season is framed around Jesus’s forty-day fast in the wilderness after his baptism in the Jordan River. The season climaxes with Holy Week, where we remember the Passion of Christ: his arrest, trial, torture, and crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. Lent ends with a bit of a whisper, in the silence and emptiness of Holy Saturday, just before the new fire of Easter is kindled. It is worth noting that the season of Lent counterintuitively begins with ashes and concludes with fire. This is the miracle. Christians believe that God is always making things new.
Our Eastern Orthodox Christian siblings refer to Lent’s “luminous brightness” in an attempt to hold together two seemingly opposed experiences of the season: joy and sorrow. Lent invites us to a season of reflection. As Socrates wrote millennia ago, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Specifically, Lent invites us to reflect on how we live beneath our God-given human dignity: how we mistreat ourselves and others, exploit our shared creation, and ignore our call to faith and hope. We see the effects of a fallen humanity within us and all around us. That we fall beneath our God-given human dignity is a universal experience of our human condition. None of us is immune to sin. In Romans 3:23, St. Paul the Apostle writes that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Traditionally, this Lenten reflection takes the form of prayer, the study of scripture, the sacrament of reconciliation (“confession”) with a priest, and acts of charity. The purpose of our reflection is to make us aware of our spiritual footprint. Too often, we walk around blissfully unaware of our negative impact on the world around us.
And yet, Lent also calls us to joy because we are not abandoned in our sin. The Christian faith hinges on the belief that God dwells with us in our sin so that we might be raised to a new life of grace. As Barbara Brown Taylor explores in Learning to Walk in the Dark, some things only become visible to us when it is dark enough to see. As we observe the traps we fall into over and over again, we come to see God’s light, “in whose light we see light,” shining through the darkness to guide us home. Were Lent only about mortality and penitence, it would be an exercise in self-indulgent self-shaming. Lent is about the life that is made available to us by God’s love for us.
However you mark the season of Lent, I invite you to remember that Lent is not about winning a competition or proving anything. Lent is about waking up to a new reality. Yes, we are mortals and it is the fate of all mortal things to die. And yet, by grace, it is our fate to live a life of grace, one characterized by charity, faith, mercy, and peace. This is the life Jesus lived that transcended the cross and emerged from the grave on Easter morning. This is the life that extends beyond death because it is God’s life.
