How long is lent and why

By ThoughtCo. Cite this Article Format. How Are the 40 Days of Lent Calculated? How to Determine the Date of Ash Wednesday.

The Liturgical Seasons of the Catholic Church. Should Catholics Fast on Sundays in Lent? How Eastern Europeans Celebrate Easter. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for LearnReligions. However, 40 of these are fasting days and six are Sundays which are traditionally believed to represent the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness.

Some people think it also reflects the 40 hours that Jesus spent in the tomb after his death and before his resurrection. Tradition dictates that Christians should fast during the 40 days of Lent, meaning they should only have one full meal and two small snacks each day. Food items like chocolate or unhealthy habits like smoking are a popular choice for things to give up. Fasting and abstinence is meant to mirror the experience of Jesus Christ and his experience of fasting in the desert.

Prayer and almsgiving giving extra money to the poor are also emphasized during Catholic Lent observance. Orthodox Christianity is far more strict about the fast. In fact, strict Orthodox observers fast from meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, olive oil, and alcohol every Wednesday and Friday.

During Lent, a fairly complicated fast is observed: Every weekday, Orthodox Christians abstain from all of those products. Additionally, during the first week of Lent, worshippers may fast entirely from Monday morning through Wednesday evening, and then observe the strict fast the rest of the week and throughout the Lenten period. Wine and oil are added on weekends in the second through sixth weeks.

And Orthodox worshippers may fast from Thursday night through Saturday night before Easter. Observance can vary from individual to individual. Lenten practices are why we have Easter eggs — the faithful would abstain from eggs and dairy during Lent, but in the days before refrigeration, the dairy then would spoil.

Eggs, however, keep fresh much longer and would still be good when it was time to break the fast. But your purpose for fasting will probably differ, depending on your motivation to participate. Christianity is hardly the only religion in which fasting is part of the yearly observance. Muslims observe a month of sunrise-to-sunset fasting during Ramadan , and Jewish people may also mark high holidays with fasts, particularly Yom Kippur.

Fasting is a big part of Hinduism , Buddhism , and many other religious traditions. Why fasting? Fasting reconnects the body to the emotions, mind, and soul, often by interrupting our autopilot mode and recognizing the ways we self-medicate that might be destructive to our souls.

If everyone celebrates Lent the way they celebrate Christmas, it could just seem like another way Christianity is taking over. But I think nonbelievers reclaiming the best parts of religious traditions does the opposite, and reestablishes American morals outside of organized religion. I still give up sweets for Lent every year, and sometimes alcohol or meat.

The faithful were called to go to confession during that time in preparation for the Lenten observance. Pentecost is a feast day based on the account in the second chapter of the Book of Acts where the Holy Spirit fell on the apostles as they were gathered together in the Upper Room. This is considered the birthday of the Church and the mission to evangelize the whole world.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it as follows: "On the day of Pentecost when the seven weeks of Easter had come to an end, Christ's Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, manifested, given, and communicated as a divine person: of his fullness, Christ, the Lord, pours out the Spirit in abundance.

Since that day, the Kingdom announced by Christ has been open to those who believe in him: in the humility of the flesh and in faith, they already share in the communion of the Holy Trinity.

By his coming, which never ceases, the Holy Spirit causes the world to enter into the "last days," the time of the Church, the Kingdom already inherited though not yet consummated. The 40 days of Lent, which precedes Easter is based on two Biblical accounts: the 40 years of wilderness wandering by the Israelites and our Lord's 40 days in the wilderness at which point He was tempted by Satan.

Each year the Church observes Lent where we, like Israel and our Lord, are tested. We participate in abstinence, times of fasting, confession and acts of mercy to strengthen our faith and devotional disciplines.

The goal of every Christian is to leave Lent a stronger and more vital person of faith than when we entered. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, "The seasons and days of penance in the course of the liturgical year Lent, and each Friday in memory of the death of the Lord are intense moments of the Church's penitential practice. These times are particularly appropriate for spiritual exercises, penitential liturgies and pilgrimages as signs of penance, voluntary self-denial such as fasting and almsgiving, and fraternal sharing charitable and missionary works.

In the Protestant world, particularly among many evangelical denominations and independent churches, the Church Calendar is not observed. The seasons were omitted along with most of the sacraments and the use of liturgy in their approach to faith.

These Christians do observe Christmas and Easter and some might even celebrate Pentecost. Lent officially ends on Holy Thursday. Easter is not only a day but an Octave eight day celebration leading to a Season of the Church, Easter Season, which ends on Pentecost. Lent is 40 Days long because Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days with the Lord Exodus , Elijah traveled forty days to Horeb to encounter the Lord Kings and Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness praying and fasting Matt.

Although the number of days from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday add up to 46 days, we observe the season as the 40 days of Lent.

Some may feel it would be more accurate to refer to it as the "forty day fast within Lent. The difference between Lenten abstinence refers to abstaining from eating meat and Lenten fasting mean limiting all food on a particular day. No, because every Sunday is a little Resurrection since Jesus rose on the first day of the Week. However, this does not necessarily mean we get to indulge in our additional penitential practices on Sundays.

A lot of people choose something to give up on their own during Lent. These practices are disciplinary and often more effective if they are continuous, including Sundays. These practices are not regulated by the Church, though, and left to an individual's conscience. Ash Wednesday liturgies are some of the best attended in the entire year. Some people suggest that is just because the Church is giving out something free, but I suspect there are deeper reasons! Ashes are an ancient symbol of repentance sackcloth and ashes.

They also remind us of our mortality "remember that you are dust" and thus of the day when we will stand before God and be judged. This can be linked easily to the death and resurrection motif of Baptism.

To prepare well for the day we die, we must die now to sin and rise to new life in Christ. Being marked with ashes at the beginning of Lent indicates our recognition of the need for deeper conversion of our lives during this season of renewal. For most older Catholics, the first thought that Lent brings to mind is giving something up. In my childhood, the standard was to give up candy, a discipline that found suitable reward in the baskets of sugary treats we received on Easter.

Some of us even added to the Easter surplus by saving candy all through Lent, stockpiling what we would have eaten had we not promised to give it up. Some years ago a friend of mine told me that he had urged his children to move beyond giving up candy to giving up some habit of sin that marked their lives.

About halfway through Lent he asked the children how they were doing with their Lenten promise. One of his young sons had promised to give up fighting with his brothers and sisters during Lent. When his father asked him how it was going, the boy replied, "I'm doing pretty good, Dad--but boy, I can't wait until Easter! That response indicates that this boy had only partly understood the purpose of Lenten "giving up.

That always involves giving up sin in some form. The goal is not just to abstain from sin for the duration of Lent but to root sin out of our lives forever.

Conversion means leaving behind an old way of living and acting in order to embrace new life in Christ. For catechumens, Lent is a period intended to bring their initial conversion to completion. The primary way that the Church assists the catechumens called the elect after the celebration of the Rite of Election on the First Sunday of Lent in this conversion process during Lent is through the celebration of the rites called Scrutinies.

These ritual celebrations on the Third, Fourth and Fifth Sundays of Lent are communal prayers celebrated around the elect to strengthen them to overcome the power of sin in their lives and to grow in virtue. To scrutinize something means to examine it closely. The community does not scrutinize the catechumens; the catechumens scrutinize their own lives and allow God to scrutinize them and to heal them.

There is a danger in celebrating the Scrutinies if the community thinks of the elect as the only sinners in our midst who need conversion. All of us are called to continuing conversion throughout our lives, so we join with the elect in scrutinizing our own lives and praying to God for the grace to overcome the power of sin that still infects our hearts. Many parishes today seek to surface the concrete issues that the elect need to confront; these issues then become the focus of the intercessions during the Scrutinies.

Some parishes extend this discernment process to the wider community so that all are called to name the ways that evil continues to prevent them from living the gospel fully. Even if the parish does not do this in an organized way, every Catholic should spend some time reflecting on what obstacles to gospel living exist in his or her own life.

Then when the Scrutinies are celebrated, we will all know that the prayers are for us as well as for the elect. Taking seriously this dynamic of scrutiny and conversion gives us a richer perspective on Lenten "giving up.

Along with the elect we all need to approach the season of Lent asking ourselves what needs to change in our lives if we are to live the gospel values that Jesus taught us. Our journey through these forty days should be a movement ever closer to Christ and to the way of life he has exemplified for us. The elect deal with sin through the Scrutinies and through the waters of the font; the already baptized deal with sin through the Sacrament of Penance.

The same kind of reflection that enables all members of the community to share in the Scrutinies can lead the baptized to celebrate this Sacrament of Reconciliation to renew their baptismal commitment. Lent is the primary time for celebrating the Sacrament of Penance, because Lent is the season for baptismal preparation and baptismal renewal.