The very first time I gave anything up for Lent, I did it with a desperate heart: not sure what I needed, not sure what I wanted, and not sure what the whole thing was about anyway. I was raising and homeschooling three growing children, teaching literature at my homeschool co-op, running 30+ miles a week, and […]
Last week when I was in Egypt a young earnest Anglican asked me how Anglicans fast.
I was giving nine lectures on Anglicanism to sixty Egyptian Anglican bishops, priests, deacons, and their wives at a Coptic retreat center outside of Cairo. Bishop Mouneer Anis, bishop of Egypt and leader of the Global South, was my host.
I told this young man and […]
Lent begins with a necessary reminder: you are dust and to dust you shall return.
In Ash Wednesday, we speak these difficult words so that we might resist the influential fictions that our daily lives impress upon us. The fiction that we are in control. That we can fix ourselves. That we were designed first and foremost to love and care for […]
Lent is about to kick us in the seats of our pants soon, when it darkens our foreheads, and then takes away our chocolates. Not to mention causing us to face our privilege by helping others and then making us read the Church Fathers in the original Latin or Greek. (I made that last part up).
So what is this Lent […]
The penitential and preparatory season of Lent includes 40 days of fasting, but if you look at the calendar closely enough and do the math you’ll see that the actual season is a bit longer. Why? Because within those 40 days are excluded each and every Sunday. Sundays are feast days and cannot be fast days. It is for this […]
With the Season of Lent upon us, I’m setting out to explore the traditional Lenten disciplines of fasting, almsgiving and prayer. These disciplines are taken from the opening verses of the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. See how Jesus begins each section of this sermon:
You’ve come to the right place!
Lent is a time for prayer and fasting. It is a season of spiritual preparation in which we remember Christ’s temptation, suffering, and death.
Historically, the church has celebrated Lent as a 40-day period beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding the day […]
We’ve all said it. I know I have said it: “In Lent, we fast except on Sundays.”
We do think that way, at least I do. I’m focused on the fast, and I tend to think of Sunday as an exception: a time to give up the fast so I can take a break and indulge in something I’ve given up. Then on […]
