Lent

Photo by Pablo Martinez on Unsplash

March 07, 2025

This week Lent began, on Ash Wednesday, a season of repentance and renewal in many Christian traditions, including Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, Episcopal, and Methodist. In recent years Lent has become popular even among some Evangelicals, though probably not Christian nationalists or MAGA adherents.

Historians generally agree that the 40-day period of fasting, prayer, and reflection leading to Easter originated as early as the second century. The fast was mainly for new converts, as preparation for their baptism during the Easter Vigil, but it soon became a common practice throughout the church. Lent lasts for 46 days, from Ash Wednesday until Easter, but the Sundays are excluded, leaving 40 days.

In the early history, the practices of fasting varied regionally and even from church to church, with some fasting on Sundays, others not. But for all, the fast itself was the same and it was strict: one meal a day, after 3:00 p.m., with no meat, fish, dairy, or eggs. Traditions of Mardi Gras, translated “Fat Tuesday,” evolved from the need to use up all the meat, eggs, and butter before Ash Wednesday.

It was Pope Gregory I (590 - 604) who set a standard time of Lent for the whole church, beginning on the Wednesday 46 days before Easter, with a ceremony of marking each worshipper’s forehead with ashes, symbolic of death, judgment, and repentance. Ashes also are an agent for purifying and cleansing.

Lent is part of the annual cycle of church liturgy, or patterns of worship, and Western churches such as the Catholic and Anglican that follow the liturgical calendar and a certain structure of worship are known as liturgical churches. When I was a kid in the 1960s, Evangelical churches such as my Southern Baptist church observed no liturgy whatsoever, except for two days: Christmas and Easter. No extended seasons of preparation nor of celebration.

Somehow, over the centuries, the strict fast of the early church evolved into a weird requirement to eat fish on Fridays and the sacrifice of some luxury for the duration of Lent. I had friends at school who gave up chocolate, and I envied them. Long before I knew what Lent was about, I wanted it.

Beginning in my high school years, I went through a series of religious conversions to gradually more liturgical churches, ending (for a while) with the Roman Catholic church. I thought the church of my childhood was far too recent in Christian history, and I wanted to get as close as I could to the original church, which I assumed to be more authentic and pure. I was smitten with the 16th-century saints Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross.

I did not know that, long before the 16th century, the church had been thoroughly corrupted by imperialism, White supremacy, patriarchy, and feudalism, a precursor to capitalism.

It’s actually comforting for me to excavate this bit of my history with Christianity, because over the past several years my relationship with it has grown increasingly uneasy. Despite my attachments to a succession of religious communities throughout my life, including a Jewish and Christian interfaith congregation, my actual faith is thin—if I may use the word “faith” to refer to a belief in some sort of reality of a thing. It’s as if I’m watching a play and engaging in a willing suspension of disbelief.

I’ve known for many years that I “believe” only when I’m under the influence of real believers. (Also when I’m singing, but that’s a story for another post someday.) So, as this Lent begins, I’m turning to the faith of others.

From Diana Butler Bass, Ash Wednesday’s Bad Piety:

On this Ash Wednesday, my heart is broken and every shred of hope I once had is gone.

I’m not well. My soul is sick. I see nothing but greed, destruction, lying, inhumanity, and evil all around.

If anyone tells me that I came from ash and will return to it, I may well laugh in their face. Or cry and never stop. I just hope I don’t hit the priest. Because — read the room, people — we’re standing in ash up to our knees.

This is a brutal Ash Wednesday.

There. I said it.

Butler Bass digs into the chapter from the prophet Isaiah that is read at church services on Ash Wednesday. The Hebrew people are in a bad place and crying out to God for answers, but the prophet tells them God is not to blame and challenges their version of prayer and fasting.

Is not this the fast that I choose:

to loose the bonds of injustice,

to undo the thongs of the yoke,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to break every yoke?

Butler Bass continues:

Historian Amy Oden describes it thus, “The fasting acceptable to God is a daily fast from domination, blaming others, evil speech, self-satisfaction, entitlement and blindness to one’s privilege. The fast that God seeks calls for vigilance for justice and generosity day in and day out.”

A daily fast from domination?

Sounds nice. But maybe a bit vague. Overly theoretical. Perhaps a little too Walter Wink or Dom Crossan. Can we have some specifics, God?

If you remove the yoke from among you,

the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,

if you offer your food to the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,

then your light shall rise in the darkness

and your gloom be like the noonday.

If…then. If…then. It’s like a to-do list.

Do these things. Then, I’ll give you strength. I’ll water your souls.

But: You have to do it. Your ruins will be rebuilt because you laid new foundations. You will be repairers of the breach. You will restore the streets. … Isaiah says: “If…then.”

Up off the floor. Stop sitting around sniveling about sin. You are part of the solution. Get to work and do something about injustice. Overthrow the domination system. Stand up to evil. Feed the hungry. Care for the suffering. Don’t beg for a miracle or a magic fix. Just do it. Spiritual wellness and social justice are intimately entwined. Indeed, spiritual wellness depends on doing the work of justice.

If….then….

That’s the piety God wants. Thus says the prophet. That’s the acceptable fast.

From Robert P. Jones, Reflections on the State of the Union on Ash Wednesday:

Jones names our present problem in stark terms.

In these somber days, we attempt to be more honest with ourselves, to put away our self-delusions, and commit ourselves to the way of Jesus. We all, including me, have our own struggles. But I can’t help but wonder: Will not a single Republican member of Congress who claims the name of Christ come to the conviction that—whatever their partisan or policy leanings—following and protecting this dangerous, authoritarian liar requires both a betrayal of their oath of loyalty to the Constitution and an abandonment of their Christian commitment to honesty, love, and truth? If JD Vance or Mike Johnson or Marco Rubio kneel today to have the sign of the cross traced on their forehead in ashes, will they not feel the hypocrisy?

I’m afraid we know the devastating answer to that question. On this rainy Ash Wednesday in Washington, DC, I’m feeling the weight of its implications, both for our country and our faith.

I confess that the weight of those implications is too much for my threadbare faith.

Of course, the ugly reality that Jones names is no excuse for abandoning Christianity. There were hypocrites when Jesus walked the earth—much of his preaching was calling them out—and for centuries before his time. In the present bewildering free-for-all that is American Christianity, I would guess that there are actually more Christians like Butler Bass and Jones than like JD Vance and Mike Johnson.

I would guess that there are more of the ordinary Christians who quietly and persistently give food to the hungry and water to the thirsty, provide clothing and other necessities, care for the sick, visit the prisoners, promote justice in whatever ways they can, and walk humbly with the god of their understanding.

I think that a positive effect of the growing distance between me and my religion is the paring down of my so-called prayer to two books, both related to Twelve Step spirituality. One of them is officially part of the Twelve Step literature, and the other is Look About You: A Book of Ordinary Prayers, by Cody Cook-Parrott.

One reason I like Look About You is that Cook-Parrott opens up the whole structure of prayer, so that it’s no longer necessarily “me” addressing some presumed “other being.” Sometimes it is that, and Cook-Parrott helpfully lowercases god. But many of the prayers are what traditionally would be called reflections, that is, not addressed to anyone, and sometimes they speak directly to me. I find these to be the most honest and heartfelt of the prayers.

And so, for my prayer as this Lent begins, I offer the prayers from Look About You for March 5, which just happened to be the date of Ash Wednesday this year, and for March 6.

March 5: Many systems of government and capital are built to keep us down, we turn toward a higher power to find hope. We can also turn towards hopelessness, a form of deep surrender and nothingness. When we crawl into the cave of no hope, we find only the spirit that lives inside of us, always waiting, always present.

March 6: Do not despair, for the holiness of light is upon us. Each day provides another chance to link up with comrades, fellows, friends, and god. A new day to pray for the well being of others, may all prosper so that we may rise above together. We do nothing alone, not one thing. Pray today to greet the despair instead of pushing it away.