An invitation to observe
the holy Lenten season

Speaking of Religion
The Rev. Dr. Tim Griffin

I invite you, therefore ... to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word. (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 265.)

Lent is a season of 40 days observed by many Christians. The point of Lent is to prepare oneself to participate in the mystery of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
For western Christians, Lent commences with Ash Wednesday (Feb. 21 this year), so called because ashes — the symbol for penitence — are bestowed on believers during a liturgy performed on that day. For eastern Christians, Lent begins on a Monday (Feb. 19 this year) seven weeks before Easter.
Despite this difference, the underlying focus of Lent is the same for both eastern and western Christians. It is a time to prepare and reorient one’s life; to turn and return to God. In this respect, Lent has much the same meaning and intent for Christians as Yom Kippur has for Jews and Ramadan has for Muslims.
The excerpt from the Book of Common Prayer (the prayer book for the Episcopal Church) cited above specifies three moves that are to inform the faithful’s actions and attitudes during the Lenten season.
First and most fundamentally, we examine our lives in order to more fully understand our need for repentance. This might seem like an easy step. Indeed most of us, even those who profess no religious commitment, feel that something is amiss in our lives. We have a sense that we are separated from something fundamental.
Believers, regardless of their faith tradition, recognize this feeling as consciousness of sin and its accompanying separation from the source and principle of life. Moreover, we recognize that this sense of alienation — our exile from the source of life — is the outcome of acts and omissions — things done or left undone by us or by others in which we are complicit.
Self-examination and repentance are the first step in reorienting our lives. Acts of self-discipline are a natural accompaniment of this first step. Thus, as the prayer book notes, we engage in prayer, fasting and acts of self-denial.
In our time and culture. the prescription of self-discipline and self-denial are regarded with some suspicion. They recall images from the past of acts taken to unhealthy extremes that damaged the physical and mental well-being of believers.
However, there is little danger of such overzealousness if we bear in mind that our acts of penitence and self-discipline are not performed for purposes of winning favor with God. God loves us whether we eat meat or refrain from it; and we can rest assured that God does not desire us to engage in self-flagellation.
The point of self-discipline, fasting and prayer is not to diminish ourselves but to re-establish our perspective so that we will be able to more fully cooperate with and participate in God’s life and God’s desire for our life.
In addition, in this age of great divisions between the haves and the have-nots, Lenten discipline can enable us to take small but positive steps towards restoring the balance between we who have so much and the far greater numbers of our brothers and sisters around the world who so little.
Thus Lent provides a time for us to rethink our excessive consumption, individually and nationally, that is responsible for impoverishing so many around the world and is contributing to the destruction of our planet as well.
Finally, our acts of self-discipline and self-denial open us to the new life that God has promised. We learn of this new life through reading and meditating on Scripture. We read and meditate on God’s word so that we may work towards establishing God’s kingdom on Earth as in heaven.
Thus we read Scripture with our hearts and minds in order to be transformed through learning of God’s vision of peace and harmony for and among all people. And we meditate on Scripture because its real meaning for our life is at a far deeper level than its literal meaning.
So, I invite us to the observance of a holy Lent — a Lent in which we repent of a way of life that is harming us and others of God’s children and creation; a Lent in which we begin to free ourselves from inordinate attachment to the satisfaction of desire in order that we may finally be free to love God with all our hearts, minds and souls, and our neighbors — all of them — as ourselves. ••
Father Tim Griffin is priest-in-charge at the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, at 1946 Welsh Road in Bustleton.