Lent: the road to the cross

Read this at the start of Lent, if your household keeps the year. It belongs to the Year view only.

For the forty days before Easter, not counting Sundays, the church has always walked with Jesus toward Jerusalem. Lent is the plainest season of the year. It does not decorate; it strips. It began as the season when new believers made themselves ready for baptism, and the whole church fasted alongside them, because nobody should have to get ready alone.

The readings of these weeks are the hard ones: the wilderness, the treasure, the excuses, the forgiveness without a ceiling, the enemies loved, the cross taken up. Read them slowly. They cost something. They are meant to.

A few simple things a household might do to keep the season:

Give something up, together if you can. Not to impress God, who is not impressed by hunger, but to loosen the grip of one comfort and find out how little you actually need. A food, a screen, a habit. Let the children choose their own small fast, and take it as seriously as yours.

Take something up, too. Lent is not only subtraction: a kindness done weekly, a person visited, an apology finally paid. The empty space the fast leaves is for filling with love.

And keep the table plainer than usual. Save the feast; it is coming, and it will mean more to the ones who fasted.

Then Holy Week arrives, and the road ends at the cross, and does not end there. But first, let it be Lent. Walk the road slowly enough to feel it.