Lengthening days/oddities
Frances Stebbins
{Frances Stebbins has been writing about Western Virginia events, especially those relating to faith communities, since 1953. She resides in Salem. Her column now appears monthly.}
When I first heard my mother and others in our church talking about observing Lent, I didn’t know it had anything to do with there being more hours of light in a 24-hour period. But the simple word actually is Anglo-Saxon in origin and refers to the approach of spring.
The period includes 40 days, not counting Sundays, before Easter. That greatest of Christian holidays marking what believers site as the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, is regarded as “a moveable feast” meaning it depends on the phases of the moon.
In 2023 it will come on April 9 which is about midway in the months of March and April.
Meanwhile, Lent starts with Ash Wednesday, so-called because for well over 1,000 years those who follow the Christian tradition, the day is especially for thinking of the ending of one’s life and the hope of death leading to a better existence and in some indefinable way being in the presence of God. The ashes symbolize mortality, and when they are applied to the forehead usually in the form of a cross, the words “Remember, O man (or woman) that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”
Biblically, Lent relates to Jesus’ time of temptation in the desert –what’s called “the wilderness” in Scripture is hardly a wooded area of tangled undergrowth that I have associated with those words but the dryness of the Middle East now in the region of modern Israel. The hymn “Forty Days and Forty Nights” expresses the spirit of penitence.
The observant Christian reflects on how he or she could be a more loving and understanding person to other people as well as accepting God, or a Higher Power, as some prefer to call the Deity.
It is helpful to some to refrain from certain pleasurable practices during this time of penitence. That’s how a common understanding of the period may be shared with the less observant. Chocolate, sweets, alcohol and any other luxury will do.
I once managed to refrain from my favorite late-night snack of peanut butter on crackers with a sweet or dill pickle.
Just what this refraining from pleasures does for the soul makes no sense at all to plenty of folk. Far more sensible, they say, to set aside some extra money for the needy .I’ve done that too.
In fact, my earliest connection with Lent came in my Sunday school class where we pre-school pupils were shown “the leper pig.” This little metal replica of the dirty farm animal had a slot for coins, and we were told our money would go to help people with a terrible disease called leprosy.
By Easter our small hands dropping in pennies might result in a dollar or more.
Not all Christian denominations make anything of Lent. Because it was long associated with the Roman Catholic Church and certain abuses of its power at that time in Europe, such groups as Baptists rejected any use of liturgical “seasons” which other believers see as reminders of Christ’s life. Generally, the observance is most marked among Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans and many different groups associated with the 18th Century English clergyman, John Wesley and Methodism.
***
It seems odd to me, a senior-age woman, that two necessary articles, once taken for granted in households, are difficult or impossible to find in retail stores. Recently, I searched in vain for men’s cotton handkerchiefs and common wood matches.
My late husband left me with a good supply of the handkerchiefs he always had in a pocket, but now 15 years after his death, I need some new ones.
And when I sought a box of long wood matches to light my Advent wreath and the large candle I like to burn on my supper table during the dark winter evenings, a clerk had to find me some at Kroger.
Don’t men blow their noses anymore?