Have you ever needed to hear something over and over again for it to stick? Probably something a parent or your spouse reminded you of countless times before you realized it was, after all, the best thing for you? When my dad was a teenager, he was pretty rebellious, he told me. He didn’t rebel…
Lent at Antioch: The Spiritual Disciplines of the First Christians
The first Christians did not have the word Lent, nor did they have a season of forty days before Easter. However, they did practice the spiritual disciplines of Lent: almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. In the New Testament, we see all three practices together at the church at Antioch, where believers were first called Christians. Acts…
The Liturgical Home: Fasting as a Family
Lent is a pilgrimage of the soul, an opportunity to walk closely with the Lord in a path of repentance and renewal. From the ashes of Ash Wednesday to the glory of Easter Sunday, Lent is a beautiful narrative of redemption that echoes the enduring love of God and his unwavering desire to draw us…
Jump Back, Satan: The Spiritual Tune-Up of Lent
Lent is Like a Necessary Tune-Up Lent gets my attention. It is kind of a tune-up, and just like my car, I require this kind of fine-tuning at least once a year. Spanish reveals the very worthwhile pun of “auto examinación,” (“auto” referring to the self) or “self-examination,” and signals the forty days of Lent….
Unnatural Cravings: A Lenten Reflection
Learning to Love Lent 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,…
How to Avoid the Deadly Sin of Gluttony this Lent
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…
The Gift of Lent
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…
How to Lent and Why: Questions for an Anglican Priest
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…
Fasting and Feasting in 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…
Lenten Disciplines: Fasting
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…
