perspectives on lent

What is Lent? Honestly I don’t really know. I know it has to do with Easter, it follows the very popular Mardi Gras, it means you make sacrifice {ala you give something up, like my ‘sacrifice of coffee’}, it goes along for 40 days like Jesus Christ days of temptation in the desert.

But what is Lent really?

Tim Keel has posted a couple of quotes which do well to help illuminate what for me is a very murky. One is from Frederick Buechner, I’ll reproduce for ease of reference.

“In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the River Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question of what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves…to answer questions like this is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.”

The idea that (1)Lent is a tithe of sorts for the year. (2)Lent is a time of soul searching, attempting to understand who we are in Christ, just as Christ did the same thing. Especially with the imagery of going from ashes to Easter. That is a sense of hope that the search will lead to a happy end. {How many searchings end with exhaustion and the lack of desire to continue, instead of finality with definite success?}