The Sacred Year: Lent

By Annie Crawford

In this ongoing series, Annie Crawford, Senior Fellow at the Society for Women of Letters, explores the theological and symbolic significance of the liturgical calendar and discusses how Christians might incorporate celebrations of it into their everyday lives. In today’s installment of The Sacred Year, Annie examines the season of Lent and shares her personal reflections and recommendations.

A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the ‘bright sadness’ of Lent, we see — far, far away — the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is the entrance into the glory of the Kingdom.

-Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent

Here in the West, Lent begins tomorrow with the celebration of Ash Wednesday. While writing about Epiphany last month felt easy and joyful, writing about Lent feels hard — because Lent is hard. Christmas and Epiphany bring us free celebration, for at first when Jesus comes to us, he asks nothing of us. The incarnation is freely given and easily received; God comes to take on our flesh — to break through our isolation and darkness — and those who long for God rejoice at the light. Desire of nations, Joy of man’s desiring, He has come! Jesus himself defended the free celebration of his disciples before the Pharisees: “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast” (Mark 2:19). 

But the celebration does not last for long, for “the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day” (Mark 2:20). Christ has come to us and taken on the nature of man in order to complete a great mission. Though He has joined us in the darkness of our prison, we are not yet free. There remains before us the terrible task. We must ready ourselves to walk with Christ into Mordor and up to Golgotha, for He has warned us that “whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38).

Lent is the season when we prepare with Jesus for his journey to the cross, so it is fitting that, as we plough the fields for spring planting, we must also plough the soil of our hearts. The Sower is about to sow; will he find our souls thin and rocky, filled with weeds and thorns? Or will he find them softened and deepened by repentance and fasting, ready for the seed of eternal life which Jesus will sow with his own body?

The practice of fasting in preparation for Easter began within the lifetime of the disciples in obedience to Christ’s prophesy that his disciples would fast when the bridegroom was taken. As the tradition developed, the discipline expanded to forty days to reflect the pattern established by Moses, Elijah, and Christ Himself. In the East, this fast usually begins on the seventh Sunday before Easter and includes Sundays, while in the West, the fast begins on Ash Wednesday and continues in exclusion of Sundays, which are always seen as a resurrection feast, even during Lent.

In English, the name “Lent” is derived from the Saxon “lencton,” which means “length” and refers to the growing length of the days in spring. The growing light of the sun as it moves towards its spring equinox symbolizes what Alexander Schmemann calls Lent’s “bright sadness.” Paradoxically, at the very time we walk into the terrible darkness of the cross, the light of hope grows. 

In college, I spent several years mountaineering in the Cascades of Oregon. When preparing for a big climb, you must wake up very early, often leaving base camp by 3 or 4 am so you won’t be caught by afternoon storms on the top of the mountain. Although it is difficult to pull yourself out of bed and into the cold hours of a wilderness morning, the quiet vastness of the world at such a time and place is thrilling. As you make your way with headlamp through the mountain valley, up to the ridge that you will climb to the top, the morning light begins to dawn. The day draws near, and your heart cannot help but rejoice as the fresh beauty of the world unfolds around you in the emerging dawn. The light has come! The day is here! But the triumph is not yet. The hard road is yet ahead; the 3,000 feet of elevation leading up exposed rocky terrain rises before you. It’s time to set your face like flint toward the goal, pace your breathing, and steady your step. It hurts, but, oh! The glory of that summit is a joy like no other. 

For me, Lent is very much like those days of mountaineering. Christ has come and awakened us from the slumber of death. His light has dawned and he has called us out onto the path of life, but the high noon of his glory is not yet. There is a hard road to take before the glory of that vision. It’s time to deny ourselves the weeds and thorns of riches and comfort, pick up our cross, and follow him. But we take heart! “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Year after year, despite my faltering steps, the disciplines of Lent remind me of this truth. My weak flesh complains and flounders through the season’s fasts, but again and again the Lord meets me in the space carved out by self-denial. How much we crowd out the glory of God’s mountain-top presence with our own mud-puddle pleasures! How easily we fall back into the arms of lesser loves! The long cleansing of Lent is hard, but deeply good. We need the long road of ascent to clear out the soul and make us ready for glory. Unless we climb, we will not see the heights. Unless we die with Him, we cannot rise with Him. It is a truth more real than gravity. 

So I invite you to join with me in the preparation of Lent. Ready yourself for the climb to Easter glory! Begin tomorrow by celebrating Ash Wednesday at your local liturgical church. On Ash Wednesday, the palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday service are burnt and used to make a cross on our foreheads as the priest exhorts us to “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We begin our season of preparation with this Memento Mori, a celebration of dust and ashes. In his excellent guide, Living the Christian Year, Bobby Gross explains:

Dust and Ashes. These symbolize two themes at the heart of Lent: our creaturely mortality and our moral culpability. Finite beings and sinful persons, we are destined to die. And so we humble ourselves before the eternal God who created us and the holy God who must, if we are to live, redeem us. The dust speaks of our bodily dependence and the ashes signify our spiritual penitence. Ash Wednesday sets the tone for the season: humility, simplicity, sobriety and even sorrow. 

Next, consider adopting some form of fasting for the forty days of Lent. Fasting and other spiritual disciplines are not an effort to earn God’s blessing or to punish ourselves for sin but to grow in the holiness that brings us closer to the One we love. The simple truth is that fasting is a Biblical, essential part of spiritual growth. Jesus fasted and taught us to wash our face “when we fast.” He expected fasting to be a part of our lives as his disciples who follow him (Matthew 6:16). As Ash Wednesday reminds us, we are finite beings. We can only attend to one thing at a time; we only have twenty-four hours in a day. We cannot read Scripture and watch Netflix at the same time — to choose the one is to abstain from the other. As fallen creatures, our natural tendency will be to follow the easy path of indulging our lower appetites — to binge-watch Netflix rather than open our Bible or find our knees in prayer. Absent the intentional effort to sacrifice lesser comforts and pleasures, desire for these will rule our lives, and we will fail to cultivate the habits that develop spiritual joy and strength. 

Lenten discipline and fasting can take many forms. Remembering the purpose — to loosen the power of lower appetites and strengthen our love of God — is the best way to guide your own practice. First, consider what appetites tend to crowd your attention? Social media? Food? Alcohol? Shopping? Pray over a practice that might help loosen your attachment to one of those appetites. If you are new to celebrating Lent, you may find this Anglican Rookie guide helpful, and I highly recommend Justin Whitmel Earley’s work on disciplines related to digital media. Second, consider how you might fill the space you created by fasting. As Bobby Gross reminds us, “fasting is much like sabbath-keeping: a restriction that creates space for God” (134). Lenten practices of doing can also be very helpful. Bible study, reading, service, prayer, or starting a new habit can be meaningful and powerful ways of practicing the presence of God and cultivating higher loves that will keep our lower appetites rightfully ordered throughout the year. May the Holy Spirit guide you as you seek to discern his call for this season. 

Lent is hard yet joyful. Frankly, there is a simple reason the “bright sadness” of Lent has fallen out of fashion in the West. We don’t like self-denial, and we don’t want to pick up our cross and follow Jesus. Of course we don’t. The path of suffering that leads to life is painful. Yet like any good athlete, we will need to submit to the difficulties of discipline if we want to “run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1). And although “No discipline seems pleasant at the time but painful” (Hebrews 12:11), still I have learned to look forward to Lent because of the way its cleansing disciplines “restore to me the joy of your salvation” (Psalm 51:12). As those hard climbs up the Cascade mountains prepared me for the glorious views above, so these Lenten practices fit our souls to see once again the great glory of our Risen God. 

The light has dawned. Let’s get climbing.

—Annie Crawford is a cultural apologist and classical educator with a Master of Arts in Cultural Apologetics from Houston Christian University. She teaches apologetics and humanities courses and is co-founder of The Society for Women of Letters where she serves as Senior Fellow. She has written for Salvo, The Symbolic World, Circe Institute, The Worldview Bulletin, Classical Academic Press, and An Unexpected Journal. Learn more at anniecrawford.net.