What is lent?

We have entered into the season of lent. Often we do not have a proper understanding of lent: what it is? What we are suppose to do? Etc. For many lent is a time of some or much penance and mortification. Giving up your favourite pass times or food or wine etc. Deprive yourself of many things and live a hard life and punish your body. In some places, they even go up to the extent of receiving lashes or wearing thorns etc. All as a penance for their sins. The whole idea behind is something like this. This I read in one of the book-lets on lent. ‘It is like a man who was hitting himself against a brick-wall. When someone asked him why he was doing that , he said, “It’s just so nice when I stop it.”’ What I mean is this. Lent is not all about making your life ghastly or miserable for few weeks to feel good about it afterwards when you go back to the same old things. I don’t think you are going to give up wine permanently or chocolates or cigars or meat or something else. I feel lent is not all about this. Even though penance is part of lent, it is not the whole of it.
Lent for me is all about relationships: rebuilding or restoring the relationships with God and men. I heard that the word Lent is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word lengthen or lencten meaning "spring." That is why lent is also called as the ‘Spring season of Christian calendar.’ I want to focus on three important aspects of Spring time in relation to Christian life.
First of all, Spring is the time of Change. What change? It is a time when day time starts lengthening and night time starts shortening. You can already see the change now. As the days go by you’ll notice it more clearly. You know why it is happening like that?……It is because, the axis of the earth is starting to tilt towards the Sun now. All these days (I.e.during winter) the axis or the orientation of the earth was away from the Sun, hence there was more darkness and less day-light. Now that the earth starts changing its orientation towards the Sun, its life changes. There is more of day light and less of darkness. And this has got great spiritual significance for us Christians. For us Christians, lent (or spring-time) is a time when we begin to tilt our orientation towards Christ, the risen Son (Sun) so that he may have more say in our lives or more time in our lives. For me this is what lent essentially means. ‘Changing our orientation’ towards Christ. All these days our axis may have been directed towards other things like, money, fame, success, pleasure, etc., which in themselves are not bad. but now we let it change. We let more of Jesus come into our lives. We will not leave many dark corners(What we sometimes call as private) in our lives. This is true lent.
2.Secondly, Spring is also a time of new life and new beginning. If you go out and watch the trees now, you can notice that these trees which were leafless all this winter, have started blooming. You can see the buds already and by the end of lent you can see beautiful tender leaves all over the trees making it to look so green and beautiful. That is why I say it is a time of new life and new beginning. So also our Christian life. It is a time for new beginning. You must have began your life anew last year, but time and weather must have weathered your leaves and they have fallen and you stand like the trees in winter; Leafless and apparently lifeless. Now why begin again? You may ask me. Remember, ff trees were to think, ‘last year I produced leaves, they didn’t last; the previous year it was same. or in fact it is same every year. So no use.’ and stop budding new leaves, there will not be any growth. That is true of our Christian life too. Don’t think of your failures last year. This again I say about changing your self not about doing penances. Start again. Tree may not know it is growing but we who look at it know. So also, we may not know we are growing but God can see it.
Finally, Spring is also a time of action. It is the time when farmers spring into action. The idle and cold winter is gone and so the farmers spring into action to cultivate something. What is first step for that? It is ploughing and planting. That is what they do in the spring. They spring into action and plough their field to remove the weeds and plant new and good seed with the hope of a good harvest. That is what we are expected to do during lent. Plough out those old bad-habits and plant new good-habits; habits that can give good harvest. They say it takes six weeks to form a habit or leave a habit. Fortunately, we have got six weeks for lent. Enough time to for or to leave.
Let us then spring into action from day one. This is what lent is all about.
God bless you!