The impulse is understandable. Many people go on vacation during the summer months, so a lower turnout amongst regular churchgoers is always expected. Also, a lot of extra work and preparation go into the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. By Pentecost, most clergy, church musicians, staff, and volunteers are exhausted and in need of a break. Taking time off for rest, reflection, and discernment is vital in any organization, but it is an absolute necessity in the life of the church.

That said, thinking of ordinary time as “off-time” tends to reduce the experience of Christian faith down to something like a spectator sport. Church becomes little more than a series of theatrical productions retelling the story of Jesus before packing it up for the season. This misses something vital about the internal logos or logic of the liturgical year, which is meant to be a full annual cycle in which the “ordinary” half of the year mirrors the “extraordinary” half.

In fact, ordinary time is the season in which we are most meant to focus on the life of the Church, in both its individual and collective expressions, though this doesn’t mean offering high-level liturgical productions each week. Rather, it is a time of year when ordinary people are called to “put on the mind of Christ,” in order to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the ordinary world. In other words, ordinary time is a season for praxis — a time for practicing what it means to walk in the way of Jesus that we just spent half the year trying to understand.

In order to fully appreciate these themes within ordinary time, it’s helpful to take a step back first and look at the entire liturgical cycle, to see how it works as a comprehensive whole.

The Liturgical Year: An Overview

Each year, the annual liturgical cycle walks us through the entire life cycle of Christ. This includes:

ADVENT: The darkness of the womb and the promise of Christ’s coming into the world. (4 weeks)

CHRISTMAS: The birth of Jesus as the light of Christ coming into the world, including his infancy and childhood. (12 days)

EPIPHANY: The recognition of Christ’s presence in the world both within and beyond the Jewish religion, symbolized by the visitation of the Magi and Jesus’s baptism by John. (4-9 weeks)

LENT: The temptation to sin that Jesus overcomes in the wilderness, and his subsequent three years of public ministry. (6 weeks)

HOLY WEEK: The betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death of Jesus, and his descent into hell. (1 week)

EASTER: The resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples in the flesh, proclaiming God’s triumph over death. (7 weeks)

ASCENSION: The resurrected body of Jesus departs from earth, leaving behind the promise of the Holy Spirit. (1 week)

PENTECOST: The Holy Spirit shows up and moves and through the disciples, driving them out from their hiding places and into the world to embody Christ and preach the Gospel.

If we think of the liturgical cycle as little more than a memorial re-telling of the historical Jesus event, then it would seem as though our story ends here. But in the Christian theological tradition, the completion of Jesus’ earthly ministry is not the end of Christ’s story. The Church is understood to be the Body of Christ birthed from the broken and resurrected body of Jesus through the activity of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

That is why the side wound of Jesus was frequently depicted in medieval imagery as a vulva from which the Church was born. This is reflected in the vesica piscis shape of most church seals, which is derived from the geometric overlay of two circles and serves as a multivalent symbol that not only conveys the overlapping of heaven and earth, but is related to mathetmatical principles like the golden ratio that can be found throughout Christian art and architecture.

The vocation of the Church as the Body of Christ is to keep us all connected to the work of the Holy Spirit in concrete and tangible ways — through our participation in the sacraments, through spiritual practices and teachings that deepen our self-understanding, and through modeling and facilitating prayerful action in the world.

When treated as an entire year, it becomes easier to see that the full life cycle of Christ includes both the earthly life of Jesus and the Church as the living embodiment of Christ in the world:

Proportionally, the respective lengths of these two “halves” of the year varies depending on the date of Easter, which falls within a 35-day window (March 22nd to April 25th) on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. The date of Easter then determines both the date of Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent (46 days prior to Easter), and the date of Pentecost, which is always 50 days after Easter (hence the “pente-” prefix). The length of Advent, which starts four Sundays prior to December 25th, can also vary by up to a week, impacts the length of the season after Pentecost as well.

Notice also that the season after Epiphany and the season after Pentecost are both green seasons of “ordinary time.” These two seasons actually mirror and reflect one another, because they both emphasize the presence of Christ in the material world (hence the green). The season after Epiphany focuses on the recognition of Christ’s presence in the world through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the season after Pentecost emphasizes Christ’s presence in the world through the Church as the Body of Christ.

These two seasons also mirror one another in the liturgical calendar: when the season after Epiphany is shorter (due to an earlier Easter), the season after Pentecost will be longer, and vice versa. Years with a later Easter result in a more evenly split year with a shorter season after Pentecost (28 weeks vs 24 weeks), while an earlier Easter makes for a much wider difference and a longer season after Pentecost (19 weeks vs 33 weeks).

But both seasons of “ordinary time” highlight the earthly nature of the Christian faith and the activity of God in material world, inviting us to consider how the liturgical year relates to the natural rhythms of agricultural life and the cycles of creation.

Liturgical & Agricultural Seasons

The liturgical year begins, as we all do, in the dark. Derived from the ancient Hebrew creation myth found in Genesis 1 — where all of creation begins in the dark waters of “the deep” — this pattern is reflected not only in our annual liturgical cycle, but in the Judeo-Christian understanding of daily time as well: new days are always understood to begin at sunset, rather than sunrise. This is why so many holy days in the Christian tradition are celebrated on the “eve” of the night before.

The deeper logos of this orientation to time and its relationship to the material world becomes clearer when we overlay the liturgical year onto a map of the solar year from the perspective of the northern hemisphere (the geographic context from which the Jewish and Christian traditions emerged).

Nowadays, most people only recognize the four primary seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. But ancient people were far more attuned to subtle seasonal shifts in light, temperature, and precipitation, which impacted the harvest cycles that sustained human life. And so in addition to celebrating the solstices and equinoxes, most ancient people also recognized the four cross-quarter thresholds that mark the halfway points between solstices and equinoxes. Taken together, this creates an annual cycle of 8 seasonal divisions:

Grafted onto the liturgical year, it becomes easier to see how the church calendar is designed to walk us through this perennial life cycle with Christ as our guide for how to navigate this journey in ways that keep us in right relationship with the Creator and the rest of creation.

As in daily time, our journey begins at the “sunset” of the year, just as life around us is moving into hibernation and the light is being swallowed up by darkness. In the ancient world, this was a time when many northern European people were particularly prone to making sacrifices to the gods (including human sacrifice), in the hopes of securing prosperity for themselves in the coming year. Even many modern people who are completely estranged from the rhythms and anxieties of agriculture tend to become more insular this time of year. During the winter months we are naturally more aware of our vulnerabilities as a species, and our dependency on forces beyond our control.

The Babylonian Talmud (ca. 5th century CE) contains a wonderfully relatable story from the Rabbinic Jewish tradition about Adam’s first winter solstice, which captures the natural feelings of existential grief and anxiety that this time of year can elicit for many people:

“When Adam saw the day gradually diminishing, he said “Woe is me! Perhaps because I sinned, the world around me is growing darker and darker, and is about to return to chaos and confusion, and this is the death heaven has decreed for me!” He then sat eight days in fasting and prayer. But when the winter solstice arrived, and he saw the days getting gradually longer, he said, “Such is the way of the world!” And he proceeded to observe eight days of festivity.”

A similar rhythm of fasting in the days before the winter solstice, and feasting in the days after, is reflected in the Christian liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas. These festivities help get us through this most difficult part of the year with a spirit of hope, expectation, joy, and the promise of the light’s return.

Christmas is then followed by a short season of “ordinary” time, which marks the start of the planting season, on a day traditionally known as “plough Monday.” This season calls our attention to the light slowly coming back into the world, but is interrupted by a 40-day “wilderness” period that confronts us with the limits of the human will and the inevitability of our impermanence. While the dates of Lent and Easter can vary by up to a month each year, their predictable overlay with the seasonal weather patterns of the northern hemisphere is so blatant that it can almost seem cliche: the stormy battle between darkness and light during the season of Lent (in February and March) always inevitably gives way to the abundance of resurrected life at Eastertide (during April and May).

These overlaps between the liturgical and meteorological seasons are no coincidence. The Hebrew tradition out of which Christianity emerged intentionally sought to align human activity with the Creator by studying and emulating the rhythms and “laws” of the natural world. Particularly during their 40 years living in the wilderness, the people of Israel discerned the heart of YHWH by paying close attention to the lessons of the desert, and calibrating their religious lifeways accordingly.

The events of Holy Week and Easter have their roots in the rich symbolism of Passover, which is itself rooted in ancient Hebrew agricultural practices that were discerned while living in the wilderness. The 7-week season of Easter overlaps with the ancient Jewish practice of “counting the Omer,” a time of waiting and trusting in God that occurs between the fresh harvest of barley and the first fruits of the new wheat crop. This 50-day period once culminated with a celebration at the Temple of first fruits of the spring wheat harvest, a holiday that came to serve as the symbolic context for the Day of Pentecost.

For further reflections on the thematic connections between the agricultural seasons and the liturgical year, check out my year-long “Annum” series of 8 seasonal playlists:

The Liturgical Year, Part 1: Apprenticing to Jesus Christ
(Advent to Pentecost)

Theologically, the first half of the liturgical year focuses on the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It is significant that we do not begin with Christ’s birth, but with a 4-week gestation period that functions as a liminal threshold between the “ordinary” part of the year, and the extraordinary events we are about to witness.

During the season of Advent, we hear from Jewish predecessors of the faith — John the Baptist, Jesus’ mother Mary, and the prophet Isaiah — all of whom looked with hopeful expectation for a coming Messiah. We also hear apocalyptic visions from Jesus and Paul that point us beyond the present age to the fulfillment of all time, when all of creation will be reconciled to God.

In this sense, Advent holds together both beginning and end in an eternal time loop that technically “has no end.” It is our annual reminder that the Christian faith is not oriented according to modernity’s linear map of “progress,” which places the beginning and the end on opposite poles and then envisions humanity as advancing from one end to the other, primarily by its own devices. Rather, the Christian faith (at least as it is lived out within the liturgical tradition) is a slow, ever-deepening cyclical process by which we come to know and embrace God’s eternal love and unconditional mercy towards all of creation.

There is enormous grace in this cyclical orientation: it reminds us that we don’t have to have it all figured out all at once. Because our faith is being held in trust by an eternal Communion of Saints, we are free to engage genuinely in the humble process of learning — a process that involves curiosity, wonder, revision, stumbling, repentance, doubt, intentionality, failure, commitment, practice, and the humble awareness that we do not always have all the answers. This is the natural manner in which all human beings learn and grow: we forget, and then we remember. We make fail, but then we come to understand more deeply. We resist the truth that is right in front of us, but then in a flash of insight we suddenly have eyes to see.

A more accurate rendering of the Greek word translated as “disciple” in the New Testament (mathetes) is “apprentice.” An apprentice is not merely one who follows, but one who closely observes a wise master and seeks to emulate them in the hopes of becoming more like them. Imitative or “mimetic” learning is the most innate and embodied form of learning, and it was the model for how Jesus taught his disciples (apprentices) the Way of Love.

During this first half of the liturgical year, we are invited to apprentice our lives to Christ by walking with Jesus through his birth, life, death, and resurrection. Like the disciples, we find our story within this larger story through our own encounters with the miracle of God’s incarnation. This also allows us to discern new layers of meaning and wisdom in the Gospel each year, because while the story of Jesus may not change, ours certainly does! Maybe we have moved to a new town, lost a loved one, changed jobs, gotten sick, had kids, watched our kids move away, or witnessed a major political shift or cultural upheaval. Or maybe we’ve just gotten one year older. As our journey unfolds in real time, our context changes in ways that can dramatically shift what we are able to see and hear.

This cyclical approach to apprenticeship also makes plenty of room for confusion, doubt, and error. It expects that we will sometimes misunderstand, and even occasionally “miss the mark.” Certainly the disciples who apprenticed their lives to Jesus misunderstood his meaning all the time, and stumbled mightily in their efforts to emulate him. But no matter how many times we fall away from the path, the liturgical cycle catches us and offers us the grace to return. “You do not understand right now what I am doing,” Jesus tells Peter, “but later you will understand.” (John 13:7).

Whether we have lost the thread for a few weeks, a few months, or many years, the liturgical cycle allows us to jump back in at any point and continue on our journey apprenticing our lives to Christ from wherever we find ourselves now.

The Liturgical Year, Part 2: The Church as Christ’s Body
(Ordinary Time)

The second part of the church year can stretch anywhere from 24 to 33 weeks (6 to 8 months). It is usually the longer “half.” This is significant, because it is a time of year when we are meant to reflect on our active role in the Church as the body of Christ in the world. During this time of year, we are challenged to take what we have learned during our months apprenticing to Christ, and go out as witnesses to the Gospel in our ordinary, everyday lives.

In her book on liturgical time, Ashley Wallace writes:

“Ordinary time might not have the excitement of Advent calendars or Lenten disciplines, but in many ways it is the most essential part of the Christian year. This is the long green stretch of days where our faith takes root and begins to grow. Ordinary time invites us not into preparation, but into formation. It’s the season for building spiritual habits, and shaping the quiet, consistent ways [we] walk with the Lord.”

The word “ordinary” has taken on many layers of meaning over the centuries, particularly in the history of the church. “Ordinary” is still the proper title used for a bishop, pointing to their role in maintaining “order” in the churches under their jurisdiction, and their role in “ordaining” priests. The root word “order” is not only used in secular courts of law, but also for those living under special vows of religious obligation and discipline (“ordained” clergy, as well as those who have devoted their lives to monastic “orders” like the Benedictines or the Trappists).

But the Latin ordene, from the proto-Italic “ordn-,” means something a bit more quotidian. It is simply: “a row, line, series, pattern, arrangement, or routine.” The root word seems to come from the practice of weaving, with ordinem originally meaning “a row of threads on a loom” — similar to the Old English endebyrdnes, which expresses the idea of a methodical or harmonious pattern strewn together from a series of parts. This gets us closer to the significance of the “ordinary” in the liturgical sense: it is through simple, ordinary routines that we piece together a meaningful whole from our daily lives.

Lo Cotidiano: Finding the Sacred in the Mundane

Still, the term “ordinary” tends to have a negative connotation in our culture — one that conveys monotony and boredom. These negative associations are heavily influenced by the conditions of late capitalism, which tempt us with a constant stream of emotional overstimulation and hyperarousal. We are daily immersed in the near-constant pressure to maintain a heightened state of consumer pleasure, and to be agitated or even infuriated when we are unable to do so. Our culture’s broad fixation on positive “vibes” can become addictive and performative, amplifying our need for control and exacerbating our anxiety about what might happen if we actually allowed ourselves to just stop and rest.

From this vantage point, the simple dignity of labor is lost: a routined life is thought to be one without meaning or purpose. Trapped in the logic of perpetual self-improvement and the desire to be at the center of our own “hero’s journey,” we constantly internalize the message that we are not enough, the world is not enough, our efforts are not enough, and God is not enough. Many megachurches and mainline progressive churches even convey that the Gospel is not enough, by fixating on adiaphora like worship aesthetics, branding optics, virtue signaling, and heightened entertainment value, hoping to compete in a marketplace that has to destroy the self-esteem of everyday people in order to sell them the solution.

And yet, in his book Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life, theologian and ethicist Brent Waters reminds us that we “attend to others primarily in and through the muddle of commonplaces relationships and activities.” It is in the relatively routine practices, chores, activities, and social interactions that meaning is actually woven, and we discover the true purpose of our lives. And it is here that we come to understand the true meaning of the Gospel.

One of the central concepts in mujerista theology is “lo cotidiano” or “the everyday.” For Latina theologians like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, the concrete and material experiences of everyday life (and the common relational sensibilities that arise from them) are the starting point for Christian theology and praxis. Black contemplative theologian Barbara Holmes echoes this same theme in her own writings about how the holy can show up in the midst of the everyday:

“When you least expect it, during the most mundane daily tasks, a shift of focus occurs. This shift bends toward the universe within — that cosmos of soul and spirit, bone and flesh, which constantly reaches toward divinity.”

If we never allow ourselves permission to “come down” from heightened states of emotional overstimulation and artificially manufactured joy, we will never have the opportunity to discover the richness that is already at the heart of creation and the simplicity of everyday life. As Claude Atcho writes,

“Ordinary time is the season in which all the cycles that have gone before combine to form our daily living. Think of ordinary time as a steady reverberation of extraordinary time, a sort of ripple effect of Jesus’s work in his people that stretches out to shape life in all its beauty and mundanity. We are now placed into a season in which the cumulative power of Christ through the church year flows forth in the nitty-gritty of our common daily life.

How does this happen? Partly through a different tempo and pace. In ordinary time, we slow down. We have space to consider, contemplate, and apply. In this season, we find where the life of Jesus intersects with the daily lives we inhabit. We seek and meet Jesus in the mundane and discover that this, too, is holy ground.”

Framing the Ordinary

Ordinary time is bookended by two special Sundays: Trinity Sunday and Christ the King Sunday. These two holy days frame this important liturgical season by situating us within a proper understanding of what Christians actually mean by “God,” and how our understanding of God relates to our lives in the world and to the earthly institutions and powers that influence them.

Trinity Sunday always falls on the Sunday after Pentecost, with the purpose of clarifying the Christian understanding of God’s nature in light of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit. This feast day reminds us that the Christian God is not like the pagan gods of old, requiring sacrifices in order to be appeased.

Through broad-based councils of discernment, the Christian understanding of God came to be articulated as an active, creative, embodied, and relationally self-emptying love Who is always at work in the world, both within us and beyond us. Most preachers struggle to convey this message fully in their Trinity Sunday sermons, but the day offers us a capstone to our journey with Jesus that interrupts any lingering assumptions we might have about God as some sort of “sky daddy” or cosmic vending machine.

Many liturgical calendars dating back to the Middle Ages actually refer to the first half of ordinary time as Trinitatis, or “Trinitytide,” rather than the “season after Pentecost.” This is still what ordinary time is called in the Church of England, which is distinguished from the latter half of ordinary time, Michaelmas, starting in mid-September (sometimes signified by a very subtle shift to a darker green).

Christ the King Sunday closes out our season of ordinary time with a final reminder that Christ is “king” above all other kings. In other words, Christ’s eternal victory over death is not beholden to, dependent upon, or threatened by any earthly institution, political power, or ruler. This holy day is a relatively recent addition to the liturgical year, added to the church calendar in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in response to the growing nationalistic fervor that emerged in the wake of World War I.

Within the larger logos of liturgical time, this final Sunday confronts us with the paradox of “the Church” as it is lived out in the world. The Church (with a big “C”) is an eternal and mystical Communion, held in trust by Christ and the communion of saints, in which we participate through the sacraments. But churches as sociological and political entities are made up of human beings, who are prone to both individual and collective (systemic) sins and blind spots. Thus, the earthly institutions that make up “the church” with a small “c” must continue to apprentice themselves to Christ as well, in order to live more faithfully into their call to be the Church with a big “C.”

Christ the King Sunday, then, closes out our church year with a final reminder that no earthly “Caesar” will ever have the final judgment over humanity: including any individual priest, pastor, parish, deacon, theologian, bishop, pope, street preacher, or denomination. All earthly powers, institutions, and individuals — especially those seeking worldly power in the name of God — will be humbled by the leadership of Christ’s vulnerable, self-emptying love.

A “Fall Triduum”: All Saints Day & All Souls Day

November 1st is the cross-quarter threshold marking the halfway point between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. This octant of the solar year ushers in our final turn towards the enveloping darkness. Advent arrives about halfway through this season, with its aforementioned liminal transition into a new liturgical cycle.

But the November 1st threshold is also set apart as holy in its own right, with two sacred days focusing on the relationship between life and death: All Saints Day and All Souls Day. All Saints is also anticipated by “All Hallow’s Eve” on the evening before, a celebration commonly referred to as Halloween. This mini-season not only honors the reality of “sister bodily death” that is part of our experience in ordinary time, but lifts up the example of ordinary people like ourselves who have died in the faith, and found their eternal life in Christ.

These holy days are sometimes referred to as a “Fall Triduum” because of how they mirror the Paschal Triduum in the spring: both seasons mock the power that death holds over us while also integrating and accepting that suffering and death are an inevitable part of life. The playful mocking of death on All Hallows Eve gives way to the celebration of All Saints Day, which reminds us that Church is held in trust by a Communion of Saints who stand as witnesses to the faith even when we stumble. All Souls Day then provides us with a further opportunity to honor all of our ancestors who have shaped our own lives of faith personally.

Most Protestant churches nowadays combine All Saints and All Souls into one Sunday celebration that honors all of the faithful departed at the same time. But celebrating both days allows us to make room for the ordinary people of faith who have impacted us both collectively and individually. In the liturgical tradition, “saints” are not necessarily people who lived perfectly moral lives, but ordinary individuals whose lives turned towards Christ in such significant and demonstrable ways that their stories continue to materially impact the lives of countless Christians across time and space. This is distinct from All Souls Day, which provides us with a particular opportunity to focus specifically on the everyday saints in our own lives — ancestors who continue to pray for us and shape what faithfulness looks like in our lives, even beyond death.

The Emotional Logic of the Liturgical Seasons

One of the gifts of the liturgical year is that it interrupts the messaging of our consumer culture by reminding us that we don’t need to constantly manufacture an artificial sense of “joy” in order to be okay. In this way, the liturgical year is deeply affirming of the whole human experience: it blesses our humanity by making room for the entire life cycle and every human emotion.

This process helps us to develop resiliency through our experiences of grief and trauma over time, by teaching us to regulate our emotions in healthy ways while avoiding the human tendency to compartmentalize, repress, or split off from those emotions and experiences we define as “negative” or “bad.” This is significant, since these are the very patterns and mental habits that most often lead to projection, shame, gaslighting, denial, and scapegoating — patterns that perpetuate real harm, which the Christianity identifies as “sin.”

This pathway of emotional resilience is shaped for us aesthetically in the liturgy by the subtle changes that occur in collects, prefaces, chants, hymns, prayers, and dismissals. The themes of the liturgical year are also expressed in the logic of the lectionary, and in the shifts to decor, lighting, and color.

• During Advent, a quieter, more contemplative and reflective atmosphere is nurtured to provide a womb of preparation, so that we can inwardly receive the miracle of Christ’s incarnation. The color during Advent is either purple or sarum blue.

• This is contrasted with the festive celebrations of Christmas, which provides us with 12 days of innocent joy and wonder and gratitude. The color during Christmastide is white.

• Epiphany returns us to a wintry season of apprenticing to Jesus as he shines his light to more and more people in the ordinary world. The color during this season of ordinary time is green.

• During Lent, the Great Litany is recited, the kyrie (“Lord, have mercy”) is chanted, and the word “alleluia” is removed not only from the Eucharistic liturgy altogether, but from chants and hymns, as well as from the Daily Office. This significant shift in tone makes room for lament and grief, allowing us to engage in honest self-reflection as we humbly cultivate within ourselves a sense of our dependency on God in the wilderness moments of our lives. The color during Lent is purple.

• This is again contrasted by the heightened experience of a more mature joy that comes with Eastertide, when the liturgy itself is framed at both the beginning and the end with a call and response refrain: “Alleluia! Alleluia!” The addition of the alleluias during Eastertide holds special significance in the liturgical tradition because of its relationship to the Temple hymns that were sung specifically during the Passover. This refrain during Eastertide speaks to Jesus’ triumph over hell and death. The color for all 50 days of Easter is white.

• Pentecost marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the “birthday of the church” with a somewhat chaotic celebration of diversity, community connection, and joy. The color for the Day of Pentecost is red.

• The return to Ordinary Time is marked by a return to simplicity, emphasizing the everyday nature of our faith and the shift to a season of praxis. Aside from the holy days of Trinity Sunday, All Saints Day, and Christ the King Sunday (which are white), the color for ordinary time is green.

Sometimes laypeople who are new to the liturgical tradition get confused during the shift back into Ordinary Time, thinking that the “alleluia” refrain is being “taken away” during this season (like in the season of Lent). But those who actually pray the Daily Office know that this is not the case at all. Rather, a more humble aesthetic of simplicity is encouraged during the Sunday Eucharist in ordinary time, in order to shift focus away from heightened liturgical performances, and to call us out into the world in appreciation of lo cotidiano (the everyday).

This slower pace is also deeply countercultural, drawing us out of our desperate capitalist mindset of never-enoughness. This green season of ordinary time invites us to “touch grass,” cultivating within ourselves habits of self-restraint that push against the anxiety and overconsumption of our age. In this way, we grow into an even deeper sense of spiritual maturity as we learn how to steady and sustain our faith through the common rhythms of daily prayer and embodied praxis.

The Grace in Liturgical Seasons

Some Christians (especially Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and other evangelical and “non-denominational” churches) recoil at the very idea of liturgical seasons. Influenced by the teachings of John Calvin, these denominations tend to dislike the practice of anything being set apart as “sacred” — not just holidays or times of the year, but furniture, buildings, music, and even clergy. Their argument is usually something along the lines of: shouldn’t all of us be doing all of this all the time? Shouldn’t we keep the spirit of Christmas every day? Shouldn’t every day be Easter? Shouldn’t we be doing everything, everywhere, all at once?

One of the many issues I have with this rather puritanical way of thinking is that it lacks real emotional self-awareness. If we are being honest with ourselves, and humble about the realities of the human condition, we will appreciate the importance of taking time for steady and intentional practice, while also understanding that it usually doesn’t take us very long before we come up against the limits of our good intentions (both individually and communally).

After 6-8 months of trying our best to faithfully embody Christ’s hands and feet in lo cotidiano, many of us find that we are confused by our relationships, frustrated by seemingly intractable conflicts, and beginning to lose hope in our ability to make a meaningful difference in the world. It is then that we are most in need of a Savior — another cycle to apprentice our lives to Christ.

The expectation that we must maintain a perfectly “fixed” attitude of faith at all times tends to lead, more often than not, to spiritual stagnation and scripted performances of religiosity that lack depth. When we try to force ourselves to be in every season all at once (emotionally or religiously) our anxieties and our need for control tend to become heightened, and under these conditions our spiritual lives eventually become fallow. The liturgical seasons meet us as we are in space and time, as humble and imperfect creatures of God, and invite us to grow in faith from wherever we are through the natural rhythms of communal prayer, action, rest, reflection, integration, and restoration.

Blessed be God for this sacred gift.

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All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners
or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

—Jan Richardson
from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

If you happened to notice someone walking around with dirt on their face a couple of weeks ago, it might have been because they accidentally rubbed their forehead while cleaning out the fireplace, but it was probably because February 18th was Ash Wednesday, the day when liturgical Christians following the Gregorian (Western) calendar marked the beginning of a 40-day season of Lent.

That little smudge of dust on the forehead was your friendly reminder that we’re all going to die.

For some, that might seem like a rather ominous portent. For many gnostic-leaning Protestants, it may even sound blasphemous. American churches across the sociopolitical and denominational spectrum — infused with a curious combination of self-help capitalism, narcissistic exceptionalism, and psychological splitting — often refuse to accept or even acknowledge that pain, loss, and death are part of the human condition. The euphoric high vibes of Easter are channeled year-round in a desperate attempt to drown out any negative thoughts, emotions, or “energies.”

But for Christians who affirm the sacred cycle of liturgical time, Ash Wednesday’s raw confrontation with the existential reality of our creatureliness is what makes the holiday so holy, and necessary:

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

These are the words spoken as a cross is drawn upon your forehead, using ashes made from the burnt palms of last year’s Holy Week. The words are completely mundane, utterly factual, and yet increasingly scandalous to say in an era of transhumanist utopianism, reality-denying sim theory, cancerous devotion to economic models of limitless growth, and tech bro fantasies of GenAI bots riddling out what the ancient gods never could: how to save billionaires from the jaws of death.

The cowardly hubris that drives human beings to believe they have found a hack for death is nothing new, of course. But it has taken on a particularly grotesque form in the last 30 years, highlighting how easily false promises about the future can be used by wealthy elites to justify sacrificial violence in the present.

Within this context, Ash Wednesday’s witness to the humble reality of our creatureliness feels like an especially radical form of resistance.

Ash Wednesday, like Christianity, is body-positive. Incarnational theology affirms both the reality of the material world and its goodness. Both are still remarkably controversial claims.

Though much confusion remains in Western pop culture about the collective wisdom that slowly emerged as “orthodox Christianity” during the first eight centuries, contrary to the most popular Protestant version of the story, Byzantine Christianity was not simply some puppet project of imperial Rome. In fact, many of the doctrines that the church discerned in the years between 325—787 CE affirmed the common faith of the people in defiance of the preferred ideologies of emperors and elites (see the Council of Ephesus, for example). Constantine himself was an Arian, a doctrine that was emphatically denounced as a heresy at the First Council of Nicea in 325.

Imperials, of course, have always tended to prefer more dualistic ideologies that can be easily grafted onto traditional narratives of power: hierarchies of gods and humans that can be used to justify the sacrifices of those at the bottom to serve the spiritual elites at the top, usually in exchange for some trickle-down benefits. At various points throughout church history, Christians have themselves contorted the Gospel into their own body-denying theologies of trickle-down salvation. But the incarnational faith of the councils still offers a radical theological vision that is surprisingly hopeful and positive about the potentialities of the human, despite its clear recognition of our bodily mortality.

Two millennia later, the nuances of this theology still serve as a stumbling block to ever-new forms of hierarchical dualism and pietistic perfectionism that continue to serve the egocentric whims of the privileged: prosperity theologies and wellness cult spiritualities that prioritize earning and advancement through esoteric stages of metaphysical superiority, the confused ramblings of Silicon Valley pseudophilosophers like Peter Theil (who has somehow mistaken the long tradition of Christian nonviolence with fascism), and really just the entire modern Western project of crafting for the individual self (who can afford it) an idealized experience of control through a life purged of all physical, psychological, and relational limitations, boundaries, and consequences.

This is not the way of Jesus, of course. The way of Jesus — rooted in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrews, whose God remained steadfastly by Israel’s side through periods of exile, enslavement, and defeat — follows the path of the broken, the poor, the sinner, the oppressed… the loser. The way of Jesus follows the downward path of kenosis, a Greek word that means “self-emptying.” When Jesus says “blessed are the poor,” he is not recommending some new minimalist aesthetic as a spiritual technique for attaining moral superiority over one’s peers. Rather, Jesus affirms that the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed, the merciful, the grieving, and the weak are “blessed” because their perspective is much closer to reality. The “least of these” are often far less prone to the uniquely human delusion that life is a game they can win.

Still, all human beings are habitually prone to seek our own personal safety by purging our environment of perceived threats and impurities. In clinical psychology, the mental barriers human beings construct between our sense of “self” and those things we perceive to be harmful, negative, or shameful is known as splitting, also known as “black and white thinking.” This mental habit is related to another psychological phenomenon called projective identification, wherein we not only dissociate from those rejected attributes in ourselves, but we simultaneously fixate on their presence in an Other — someone or something outside the self that we can then try to change, fix, control, or eradicate.

Splitting can take on a variety of forms in different individuals and cultures, but perhaps no other habit is more quintessentially human, since it relates to both our intersubjective confusion and our ability to use symbols to assign meanings to distinct phenomena. In other words, splitting is an unfortunate side effect of our basic capacity to use language to communicate consciously with an “other” at all (even the most insistent gurus of “nondualism” are forever doomed to define their concept against its opposite, for contrast).

In his 1982 book The Scapegoat, French anthropologist René Girard mapped these cognitive patterns onto both literary and cultural history, identifying how these ingrained tendencies, when played out at scale, graft onto oversimplified narratives of good vs. evil that usually result in collectively justified violence. The undercurrents of our current social and political climate are rooted in this psychological phenomenon, but it is a habit that stretches far back in humanity, well before the time of Jesus.

The problem, of course, with trying to purge our own shame by eradicating it in an Other, is that even if we succeed in doing so, it still does not resolve the original fracture within the Self. As long as this internal splitting remains in the shadow of our own self-conscience, we will continue to look for, and will always inevitably find, another scapegoat.

“Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye? How can you say to your neighbor, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye” while the log is in your own? You hypocrite — first take the log out of your own eye, then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.”

—Matthew 7:1-5

This delusional and addictive habit of externalization and self-justification is the process by which we crucify ourselves and one another, in our misguided attempts to gain control over our own unacknowledged pain, shame, and fear. Crucifixion is the result of our refusal to accept and integrate the brokenness we find in ourselves and our world.

Ash Wednesday interrupts this unconscious cycle by first of all confronting us with the limitations of our own perspective: “Remember that you are dust” means, first and foremost, remember that you are not God. Remember that you are not all-seeing, all-knowing, or all-loving. Remember that, like all human creatures, you are wholly susceptible to the same unconscious patterns of blindness, indifference, and self-serving confirmation bias as your ancestors.

The Story of Sin

This reminder that we are not God cuts right to the heart of the ancient creation myth found in Genesis 2-5, which describes with surprising accuracy the psychological process by which human beings “miss the mark,” as told through the primordial story of the very first humans: Adam and Eve.

Most of us know the basic outline — the crafty serpent catches Eve in a solitary moment when God seems absent, introducing suspicion and confusion into her mind: “Did God really say that…?” It’s worth noting that what the serpent says to Eve is technically true: “You won’t die,” he insists, “…but you will become like God.” The deception casts a shadow of doubt on the trust in God that the humans, up until this point, had simply taken for granted.

And yet, one of the most important details of the story is also the one that’s most often missed: the fruit was not, in fact, an apple. It is specifically identified as the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

In other words, this “fruit” is a direct reference to the aforementioned shadow side of human consciousness: the splitting that divides our field of vision in two, causing us to perceive everything — ourselves, one another, the earth — through the black and white lens of judgement. “Eating” from this fruit twists our basic survival needs into anxious and self-serving justifications for accumulation, manipulation, and domination.

We see this pattern reflected in the very things that Eve notices when the serpent lures her to look again at this forbidden fruit: she perceives that it is good for food, that it is a delight to the eyes, and it is desirable to make one wise. Here, Eve struggles with the three basic temptations out of which all “sin” arises, all of which are rooted in our core survival instincts. When we reach for divine status in order to satisfy our own desires:

• …our basic need for sustenance becomes the temptation to hoard possessions

• …our basic need for belonging becomes the temptation to project a false self-image for the sake of prestige

• …our basic need for safety becomes the temptation to control, manipulate, and dominate others for power

Giving into these temptations is not inevitable, but it does tend to happen more easily and frequently in times of stress and confusion, when we allow suspicion and doubt to guide our seeing and thinking. Under these conditions, “the knowledge of good and evil” looks like the path to eternal life. It seems to be just the thing that will allow us to claim for ourselves all we need forever — a life without limits, without death, without God. Indeed, we will be like Gods.

But this is not what happens when the humans eat from that fruit. They do not immediately die, no, but something has irrevocably changed. Suddenly they are ashamed of their differences. They sew fig leaves to hide their nakedness from one another. And when God finally questions them about what happened, they quickly shift into postures of blame, judgment, and scapegoating. Adam blames Eve: “The woman made me do it!” Eve blames the Serpent: “The devil made me do it!”

The shadow side of our ability to judge others, it turns out, is our fear of being judged. This is “original sin.”

Now seeing themselves as the subjective reference point for what is right and good, Adam and Eve can no longer live in the Garden of eternity because they are no longer in right relationship with themselves, one another, or the rest of creation. But they interpret the experience of consciousness and its inevitable consequences as a punishment from God: the patterns of narcissism and codependency that get mapped onto human relationships… the ways in which we anxiously toil for food as we exploit and plunder the earth… these were not necessarily part of God’s will for us. They are the direct fruits of our trying to grasp at divinity for ourselves, meeting our own needs through our own willpower, rather than humbly learning to accept what it means to be fully human.

The limited human ego cannot bear the knowledge of good and evil comprehensively or impartially. There is a reason that the 12 step process of healing from addiction begins with admitting our powerlessness and surrendering to a Higher Power. Lent begins with a similar challenge: first, you must remember that you are not in control… and then you must accept that this is okay. It is okay that the world does not revolve around you. It is good, even. This is meant to humble us, but not for the sake of piling on more shame and judgement. On the contrary, it is meant for our liberation. This is the pathway to true rest.

Lent invites us into the liberating process of learning how to de-center ourselves in an ontological context of love and belonging. We take 40 days to learn how to respond to temptation by mirroring the postures that Jesus took during his 40 days in the wilderness. In the desert, Jesus faced all the same temptations as the first humans, but the Gospel of Matthew shows us how he overcame them:

• When Satan tempted Jesus with the desire for possessions (“turn these stones into bread”), he responded by maintaining a clear distinction between his anxious desires and his authentic needs.

• When Satan tempted him with the desire for prestige (“set him on the pinnacle of the Temple”), Jesus responded by trusting in God’s mercy and his own belovedness without the need for proof.

• When Satan tempted him with the desire for power (“all the kingdoms of the world can be yours”), Jesus responded by refusing to bow down to any earthly authority, declaring his allegiance to the Creator alone.

This is what it looks like to resist temptation.

This is also what we mean when we say that Jesus was fully human but “without sin.” Notice, this does not mean that he maintained a zen-like state of calmness, that he avoided all pain, that he was always nice to people, or that he stoically suppressed his so-called negative emotions. Resisting temptation is not about controlling “vibes” — yours or anyone else’s. It also does not guarantee escape from pain or suffering (anyone who says differently is selling something!). All four Gospels report that Jesus experienced anger, fear, and sadness at various times throughout the years between his being tempted in the wilderness and his execution on a cross. But the choices of his life were guided by a different compass.

The pathway to becoming fully human is about choosing to trust in God even when our emotions, our circumstances, and our communities and cultures are conspiring to drive us into denial or despair. We will not do this perfectly. But as Christians, we are called to continually seek intentional ways day after day to pattern our lives after Christ, situating ourselves more and more in God’s eternal love and mercy. We are called to do this every day, but the 40 days of Lent invite us into an intensive period of discernment that re-enacts Jesus’ time in the wilderness, allowing us to confront the reality of our mortality, accept our human frailty and limits, and learn to resist temptation in concrete and specific ways.

How to Practice Lent

Many people choose to “give up” something during the season of Lent — certain foods, alcohol, social media, etc. Others (especially industrious hard-working Protestants) prefer to take on something for the season — a new spiritual practice, devotional reading, or a discipline of prayer. Overachievers do both, while more seasoned practitioners may wisely reflect on their need to give up overzealous performances of religiosity for Lent.

In recent years, it has also become commonplace for people to offer hot up takes about Lent on social media — this year for Lent, don’t give up chocolate, give up injustice. Like most thought-terminating cliches on the internet, however, these kinds of posts do little to actually help a person move through the complicatedness of self-reflection and inner transformation in the context of real, everyday life.

In a cultural context of digital voyeurism and self-help pyramid schemes, Lenten practices of all kinds can become distorted and turn into just another form of earning. But fasting is not dieting. This is not a “do over” for your New Year’s resolution — a chance to gain extra “spiritual” points while also dropping a few pounds. If anything, Lent offers a grace to us right around the time that our resolutions are probably starting to slip, confronting us with the limitations of the human will left to its own devices.

Lent is also not about trying to come up with some clever way to put a creative new spin on a penitential season to show off how nuanced your theology is, or how aware of social justice issues you are. As Jesus reminded his disciples nearly two thousand years ago, in a text that is still read every year in churches all over the world on Ash Wednesday:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them… whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.”
—Matthew 6:1,13

Practicing Lent isn’t ultimately about what you give up or take on. It’s about an examination and transformation of your true inner intentions. It’s about the very untrendy exercise of “making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves” (again to borrow language from the Twelve Steps), so that we might turn away (“repent”) from habits and patterns that unwittingly lead us to participate in the crucifixion of ourselves and others. That’s it.

The reason we give something up during Lent is to challenge our sense of dependency on those things to which we most easily become addicted: food, drink, image, control, attention. Again, the idea is to replicate the experience of Jesus in the wilderness, which was itself a mirroring of the 40 years that the Israelites had to spend in the wilderness learning to live according to the ways of their Creator.

Giving things up helps us to recognize the intensity of our wanting, while at the same time showing us that we can resist these patterns in conscious and healthy ways, by redirecting our focus and sense of dependency on God. Likewise, the reason to take up something during Lent is to intentionally make room for the development of new habits and patterns in our lives that can help us more easily and instinctively “practice resurrection.”

This is not the kind of shift that happens all at once. As Episcopal Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe writes in his Ash Wednesday letter, “the conversion of the heart that we must undertake may start with a blinding light, but the ongoing change it requires is the work of a lifetime.” Spiritual transformation is a lifelong process of learning how to deepen into self-awareness in the context of grace. That is why our liturgical calendar moves us through yearly, cyclical seasons of learning, growing, and maturing.

Lent is not a time to prove that you have this Christianity thing all figured out. It is a time to commit to some specific action, however small, that could effectively move the needle of your life closer to the mercy and love of God in some concrete way.

Things to Give Up

Mindful of the aforementioned caveats, and taking into consideration humanity’s three “root” temptations, I offer here some ideas to consider if you are new to the practice of Lent, or just drawing a blank on what would be most helpful this year:

• FOOD: Again, fasting is not dieting but an embodied form of prayer. It is crucial to understand this difference before embarking on any Lenten fast involving food. People under the age of 17, over the age of 60, and those with eating disorders or other physical or mental health concerns are not encouraged to engage in Lenten fasting involving food. However healthy adults age 18-59 may want to consider the following options:

  • Go Vegetarian — Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians each have their own fasting rules during Lent (outlined in more detial below) but one common theme is giving up meat, since vegetarianism was the diet that God originally prescribed for humans in the story of creation.

  • Give up a Specific Food — Many people choose to give up a specific food to which they feel a particularly unhealthy attachment (if you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, giving up chocolate is not going to be particularly revelatory). Abstaining from alcohol during Lent is also a practice common to both Roman and Orthodox traditions. Whatever you abstain from, the idea is to choose something that is challenging enough that the practice will regularly call your attention back to God.

  • Eat More Mindfully — Another way to approach this is just to consider your eating habits more broadly, striving for simplicity and austerity throughout the season in general: give up fast food or eating out, cook less elaborate meals, use simple or unprocessed ingredients, or just commit to eating more mindfully at each meal.

• POSSESSIONS: The first temptation involves not only food but also time and money, which we believe we must hoard in order to have “enough.” Almsgiving is considered one of the “three pillars” of Lent (along with fasting and prayer), which can take the form of money or time/labor:

  • Give up Excess Wealth — During Christmastide all Christians are encouraged to give charitably from whatever they have out of a spirit of joy and generosity. But Lent is a time when those with excessive wealth are particularly encouraged to consider the impact that their extra stores of money might be having on their ability to follow Jesus.1 For those who want to explore their relationship with money more deeply, especially in order to discern out how to responsibly divest of their excess wealth, the Faith and Money Network is an amazing resource.

  • Give Your Time — Instead of giving up money or things, consider making a commitment to give up your time in the service of others. This could mean volunteering at a community organization, but it could also just mean listening for opportunities to help folks out as the need arises: offer to give someone a ride, make someone a meal, run an errand for someone who is overwhelmed, show someone how to do something, take extra time to sit with a friend or family member who is struggling, offer to watch someone’s kids while they treat themselves to a break.

• PRESTIGE: The second temptation is to project a false self-image in order to earn our sense of love, self-worth, and belonging. This can lead to addictive and unhealthy relationships with others. We resist this temptation by staying rooted in our confidence that we are already God’s beloved.

  • Give up Social Media — The most popular form of fasting from prestige during Lent is to give up social media, which can help us to recover a sense of what life was like before everything became a performance we could monetize. For many, this also comes with the added bonus of creating a lot of extra free time to take up something new (see below for some ideas!). For those who are unable to fast from social media completely because of family or work, apps like Freedom and FocusMe can help you set a schedule to limit your use during this fasting season.

  • Give up Self-Referencing — Simone Weil wrote that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Most of us have a tendency to keep our attention on ourselves even when we are talking with others. Fasting from various forms of self-referencing during Lent can help us to develop a deeper self-awareness and a greater sense of empathy. This might include things like: not interrupting others, not comparing ourselves to others, not immediately responding to someone else’s story with a similar story from your own life, not giving someone advice based on something that worked for you, not piggybacking off of someone else’s idea or comment in order to get your own point across, etc.

• POWER: The third temptation confronts us with the ways in which we seek power over others in order to feel “safe.” In his Ash Wednesday sermon, Pope Leo XIV acknowledged that while sin is personal, “it takes shape in the real and virtual contexts of life, in the attitudes we adopt towards each other that mutually impact us, and often within real economic, cultural, political, and even religious ‘structures of sin’.” Considering some of the ways we participate in these wider webs of cultural harm might be the most important thing all of us can do this year.

  • Give up Quid-Pro-Quo Exchanges — “All the kingdoms of the world I will give you,” the devil promises Jesus, “if you will fall down and worship me.” So much evil in the world results from our willingness to sell ourselves out for the chance to succeed, get ahead, and/or maintain our own safety. Lent is a good time to resist this transactional mindset, examining all the ways we habitually minimize, justify, ignore, or defend the harm others in the name of our own safety and security.

  • Give up Harsh Words and Judgments — In his Lenten message to Catholics, Pope Leo XIV also encouraged the faithful to abstain from “words that offend and hurt our neighbor” and “rash judgments.” Lent is a good time to pay attention to both overt and covert ways we seek power over others, and whenever we notice ourselves doing these things, to repent. This might include behaviors like gossip, deceit, complaining, accusations, blame shifting, gaslighting, shaming, slander, and passive aggression.

  • Give up Isolation — Between COVID, the rise of social media, and the spread of AI, our sense of the Commons has all but eroded, leaving many people isolated, lonely, and cut off from any real sense of what it means to be a human living in community with other humans. This distorted view of reality has had disastrous effects on our mental health and our ability to function as a democracy. Intentionally finding regular opportunities to be in community with other human beings who are different from you, in real life (yes, in person!), is one way to start cultivating a remembrance of our shared humanity, while challenging the assumptions and fears we have developed in our isolation about “others.”

Things To Take Up

For those who would prefer to do something for Lent (rather than not do something), here are some ideas:

• PRAYER — Prayer is the third “pillar of Lent.” If you do not already do so, consider setting aside a particular time each day for prayer.

  • Silent Prayer: Taking time to sit silently with God is one of the best ways to develop real self-awareness while training yourself to be at rest in God’s love and mercy. Centering prayer is an excellent tool to introduce this practice for those just getting started. It teaches us the skill of humbly returning our attention to God, over and over.

  • The Daily Office: The Book of Common Prayer has prayer liturgies for morning, noonday, evening, and bedtime. The Mission of St. Clare and Venite are two app resources that can help you learn the format and navigate the readings for each day. The Daily Office can be read as a family or as an individual. When praying by yourself, the call-and-response format is a reminder that we are not praying alone, but joined by people all over the world who are praying this ancient liturgy of the hours.

  • Other Ways of Praying: The Christian tradition offers an abundance of spiritual practices you might want to learn about and try, including the Daily Examen, the Jesus Prayer, praying with rosary/prayer beads/prayer ropes, praying with icons, welcoming prayer, and many others. Journaling, prayer doodles, or just a good old-fashioned conversations with God are also always good go-to practices for when you don’t want to overcomplicate things.

• DEVOTIONAL READING — Read a verse of Scripture each day and meditate on it through journaling, artmaking, or lectio divina. The Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches all offer daily lectionary calendars for each day of Lent.

  • Pray As You Go: A faithful group of British Jesuits maintain this website (and app!) that offers high-quality audio recordings of guided meditations on daily Scripture passages that are rooted in the Ignatian tradition.

  • Devotional Books: There are a number of devotionals that can be read for daily inspiration and reflection. Some of my favorites for Lent include:

    • A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent by Walter Brueggemann

    • Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter by Plough Publishing

    • The Way of Thomas Merton: A Prayer Journey Through Lent by Robert Inchausti

    • Hunger for Righteousness: A Lenten Journey Towards Intimacy with God and Loving Our Neighbor by Phoebe Farag Mikhail

    • Were You There? Lenten Reflections on the Spirituals by Luke Powery

    • Bless the Lent We Actually Have: 40 Days to Reflect, Pray, and Bless Our Imperfect Lives by Kate Bowler

    • A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent by Christine Valters Paintner

    

• MUSIC — Some of you may already be familiar with my “Annum” playlist project, which weaves the moods and themes of the agricultural and liturgical seasons into a series of 8 curated playlists of (non-AI!) background music for music therapy, reflection, and healing. Below are two playlists to accompany you for the liturgical season of Lent:

  

  Listen on Spotify

  Listen on YouTube

  

  Listen on Spotify

  Listen on YouTube

What if I mess up?

If you break your fast for whatever reason, the first thing to do is not despair! Reflect honestly on what happened and why, and then re-commit to your practice with greater self awareness. Do you need more support? Do you need to be more realistic about your limitations? Do you need to adjust your fast in light of what you have learned?

Remember, the whole purpose of our Lenten journey is not perfection but an honest confrontation with ourselves and with reality. Your fast cannot ruined by mistakes, but only by the hidden pride that makes us want to either justify ourselves and rationalize our choices, or just give up completely.

Why are There Two Easters? Whose Lent Do I Follow?

Here’s some bonus content for those of you who want to really go down the rabbit hole. Many people, when first becoming acquainted with the phenomenon of Christianity find the perplexing number of denominations and cultural expressions that have emerged in the past 2,000 years to be daunting at best. But the question of why different churches observe the most important Christian holiday on two different dates is something that still confuses many faithful, lifelong Christians.

For the first three centuries of Christianity, there was no fixed date for Easter. It was celebrated alongside the Jewish Passover, which always falls on the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. In the early days of the church, many Christians were still practicing Jews, so the anniversary of the resurrection was celebrated either on the day of the Passover, or on the following Sunday. Jewish fasting rituals in preparation for the Passover gradually evolved into a Christian tradition of fasting in preparation for Easter.

By the time Christianity was adopted as the official state religion of Rome in the fourth century, however, Jewish influence in the empire had been violently suppressed, and Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism had developed in two distinctly different directions. The celebration of the Passover was no longer practiced in many regions, leading to confusion about when the feast of the Resurrection should be celebrated. And so in the year 325, bishops at the Council of Nicea officially agreed that the celebration of the resurrection should be held on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon that occurs on or after the Spring Equinox. This was also when the bishops decided to officially institute a 40-day season of fasting to precede the Paschal celebration.

Over the last 1700 years, however, things have changed quite a bit in terms of our understanding of astronomical events. Historically, the Spring Equinox was observed every year on March 21st, but the astronomical equinox, as it turns out, varies slightly from year to year, falling between March 19th and March 22nd. Similarly, the ancient Greek system that was used to determine the date of the full moon was based on approximations that do not always line up precisely with the astronomical full moon, which can now be calculated down to the minute. So a distinction also now has to be made between the actual astronomical full moon, and what’s known as the “ecclesiastical full moon,” which is still used to calculate the date for Easter.

To make matters worse, in the 16th century European astronomers discovered that the calendar system everyone had been using since 45 BCE (known as the “Julian calendar”) contained a critical mathematical error: the observance of too many “leap” days had resulted in an accumulation of 11 minutes and 14 seconds per year. By the 16th century, the distance between “March 21st” and the actual observable Spring Equinox was off by a whole 10 days! After consulting with the best astronomers of the time to understand the problem and correct it moving forward, Pope Gregory XIII issued in a new calendar (the “Gregorian calendar”) in 1582, which deleted the extra days from the month of October.

Unfortunately, due to ongoing theological and cultural tensions between the Eastern and Western churches, the updated Gregorian calendar still has not been adopted for liturgical use by most Eastern Orthodox Christians, even though nearly all of the Eastern Orthodox countries (including Greece, Turkey, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Bohemia) have already switched to the Gregorian calendar for their civic time.

The result is that for the last 400 years, Eastern and Western churches have, for the most part, celebrated Easter on two different dates, with the exception of certain years when the two calendars just so happen to align (which occurred in 2025 and will happen again in 2028). The distance between the two calendars continues to drift more and more every year, with the Julian calendar now lagging behind the Gregorian calendar by a whopping 13 days. Efforts to resolve this matter are ongoing, and mostly face-palm inducing:

Both traditions also have slightly different ways of numbering the days of Lent, even though they are both built around the same idea of spending 40 days in the wilderness with Jesus prior to Easter. But which days they start on, which days “count,” and what kinds of fasting rules apply for which days varies between the two traditions. Here’s a quick look at the main differences:

Roman Catholic Lent: 40 + 6 days

40 fasting days (includes Holy Week) + 6 “cheat” days

For most people living in the U.S., this is the version of Lent that is the most accessible and the easiest to practice, because it is derived from the historical traditions that developed in the “Latin” or Roman Church in Western Europe, which sought to adjust the historic practices of the ancient church for the sake of more widespread accessibility. Accordingly, this is also the calendar that is recognized by Anglican/Episcopal churches, along with some Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian congregations, and other Protestant Christians who choose to practice Lent.

In this tradition, Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which falls 7 weeks prior to Easter Sunday. Ash Wednesday is a uniquely Western church tradition. The first reference to a liturgical “Day of Ashes” dates back to the 8th century in the Gregorian Sacramentary, but it did not become a common practice in Latin-speaking churches until the 11th century reforms of Pope Urban II. The 40 days of Lent observed in the Western tradition are indicated below in purple:

Note that in this tradition, Holy Week is included in Lent, but Sundays don’t count towards the 40 penitential days (which is why you end up with technically a 46-day season that starts on a Wednesday). This tradition is derived from the theology of the weekly liturgical cycle, which considers every Sunday to be like a “mini-Easter.” All Sundays are therefore considered “Feast Days” even during Lent (which also means they function as “cheat days” — days on which you are allowed to break your fast!).

Roman Catholic Fasting Rules
Lenten fasting in the Roman tradition is simple, accessible, and relatively tame compared to the traditions of the Eastern Church (which are both incredibly tame when compared to Islamic fasting rules during Ramadan!). In the Western church, there are only two obligatory fasting days: Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. On fasting days, healthy people between the ages of 18-59 are expected to refrain from eating meat, and are encouraged to eat only one full meal, plus two smaller meals that together are not the equivalent of a full meal. In other words, even on “fasting” days you are still supposed to eat something! That’s because the purpose of Lenten fasting is not self-deprivation, but re-orientation towards God.

In addition, everyone age 14 and older is encouraged to abstain from eating meat every Friday during Lent. That’s why so many cultures with large Roman Catholic populations have “Friday fish fry” events in late February and March. Fish isn’t considered “meat” because of ancient taxonomies that differentiated between warm-blooded and cold-blooded animal species. Also, fish was considered a staple for most poor people, whereas eating the flesh of warm-blooded animals like sheep and cows was considered a luxury. Again, the purpose of Lent is not to punish or deprive the body, but to learn how to distinguish between true needs and the temptations of luxury.

Eastern Orthodox “Great Lent”: 40 + 8 days

40 fasting days (no “cheat” days) + 1 day + Holy Week

If, like most people in the U.S., you aren’t familiar with Eastern Orthodox Christianity, you are probably prone to think of it in either an overly romanticized way as an exotic relic of the ancient world, or from a more judgmental perspective that is rooted either in Western Christianity’s insistence on the centrality of Rome or Protestant critiques of the early church councils (or both). I am grateful that I was able to study church history with Romanian Orthodox priest Fr. John A. McGuckin while at Union Theological Seminary, through whom I befriended many wonderful Orthodox Christians, theologians, and scholars that challenged my own assumptions about this living faith tradition and its varied cultural expressions.

I only have enough knowledge about Eastern church traditions to appreciate how much I don’t know, but I can explain the basics of how Great Lent works in the Orthodox tradition, and how it differs from Western church traditions:

One of the main differences is that in Eastern Orthodox churches, the 40 days of Great Lent do not include Holy Week, which is treated as it’s own special season. Lent is therefore a full 40-day season prior to Palm Sunday. The other big difference is that Sundays definitely “count” in Orthodoxy’s Lenten season, which begins on a Monday, known as “Clean Monday,” and ends on the Friday before Palm Sunday. The 40 days of Lent are also bookended by two special days: “Forgiveness Sunday” inaugurates the season of Lent by highlighting the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve from Genesis 2-3, and “Lazarus Saturday” tells the story of Lazarus as a prefiguring of Christ’s Resurrection.

Eastern Orthodox Fasting Rules
Fasting in the Orthodox tradition can be complex, but it is rarely practiced in isolation. One fasts as part of a community. Even more so than in the Roman tradition, fasting is not approached as a punishment of the body but as a kind of school for the soul, by confronting us with our habits of consumption, distraction, and indulgence in order to gain better clarity about what are true needs are. The Orthodox not only fast during Lent, but at various points throughout the year as part of the normal rhythm of their Christian practice.

The church calendar for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America provides a helpful key that explains the different fasting rules for each day. For most weekdays in Lent, a “strict fast” is held — which means refraining from meat, fish, oil, wine, dairy, and eggs. It is essentially a vegan diet. There are no “cheat days” in the Eastern tradition, but Saturdays & Sundays are still both honored as feast days by allowing wine and oil on weekends. On the Feast of the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, fish is allowed in addition to wine and oil to honor the special celebratory nature of these two days.

For all of the liturgical traditions (Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Anglican/Episcopal), Holy Week culminates in a special 3-day celebration known as the Paschal Triduum: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday move through a re-enactment of Christ’s final supper with his friends, his arrest and sentencing by Pilate, his crucifixion, death, and burial, his descent into hell, and his glorious resurrection.

In Eastern Orthodox churches, the Great Vigil lasts literally all night long, and culminates with a great celebratory meal on Easter morning, at which everyone breaks the fast of Great Lent together in community. In other words, the shared joy of the resurrection is greatly heightened by the shared experience of fasting in the Eastern tradition.

Lent is a Living Tradition

One thing that it is important to remember about Lent is that it is meant to be practiced as part of a community. Christianity was never meant to be practiced by individuals in isolation for the sake of personal benefits. Even the early desert hermits quickly came to realize that it was better for most of them to gather in religious communities to support one another, rather than trying to go it alone.

Up until the Protestant Reformation, the Christian faith tradition was largely passed down mimetically — in communities of monastics, clergy, and lay elders who had learned to embody the way of Jesus through applied praxis in real life and in real community contexts. The saints who are honored in these traditions are not necessarily people who lived perfectly moral lives, but those whose lives moved demonstrably in the direction of God, and helped others do the same.

Which is also to say that the best way to learn about how to practice Lent is to actually visit a Christian community that observes the liturgical seasons, where you can connect with seasoned elders in the faith who can support you in your journey. This includes Anglican (Episcopal), Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox churches (some other Protestant denominations practice variations of Lent, but it largely depends on the congregation). I am an Episcopalian, and my husband is an Episcopal priest, so obviously I’m biased… but the Episcopal church is by far the most open, affirming, and accessible option for exploring liturgical Christianity within in the United States.

But even if you aren’t ready to connect with a community and just want to explore Lent on your own this year, remember that you are never alone in your walk with God. Even when we are alone in the wilderness, we are always being guided by the Trinity, the communion of Saints who have walked this way before us, and the prayers of people from around the world who are also seeking to live their lives more humbly and genuinely from the posture of kenosis that Jesus modeled for us.

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Then suddenly, after two days of feasting and figuring out how to spend quality time with everyone on both sides of your family in the short span of 48 hours, it’s all over. You may still be exhausted, filled with cheese, and have wrapping paper and ribbons all over your floor. But as far as capitalism is concerned, once the *shopping* season is over, “the Christmas season” has come to an end. Starbucks goes back to its standard white cups. Target starts stocking its aisles with Easter candy and bathing suits. And right here, in the midst of what is still the coldest and darkest time of the year, we are supposed to pack our lights away, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and get back to work (and usually some form of restrictive dieting). Perhaps we might extend some extra grace to one another during the “dead week” between Christmas Day and New Years Day. But certainly by January 2nd we are expected to put all this revelry and merriment behind us.

Ironically, many of the very same people who most aggressively insist that Christianity is under attack by “secular culture” do not themselves even follow a *Christian* season of Christmas. So focused they are on trying to claim capitalism (aka power) for Christianity, they insist on saying “merry Christmas” instead of “happy holidays” throughout December’s *shopping* season, but are usually among the first to toss their trees to the curb before the start of the new year.

For those of us who do still observe a *Christian* liturgical calendar — which is to say, the seasonal calendar that follows the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in relation to the story of Creation and the natural cycles of the earth, helping us to understand our place in the cosmos and find our footing as humans in the family of things - IT IS STILL CHRISTMAS!

In the Christian tradition, “the Christmas season” actually *begins* on Christmas Eve, and lasts for 12 merry days, until another big feast known as the Epiphany on January 6th, which is sometimes called “little Christmas” or “second Christmas” (cue Pippin: “We’ve had one, yes... but what about second Christmas?”)

As obnoxious as that old song may be, “The 12 Days of Christmas” is one of the last remaining vestiges in our culture that preserves the memory of what a true Christian Christmas actually looked like: a season when the feasting, relaxing, gift-giving, friend-visiting, caroling, almsgiving, and merriment were all supposed to keep building and building until the Twelfth Night... at which point the singer of the song would have a total of 12 leaping lords, 22 dancing ladies, 30 flute players, 36 drummers, 40 milkmaids, and 224 birds (42 swans, 42 geese, 40 gold-ringed pheasants, 36 colley birds, 30 French hens, 22 turtle doves, and 12 partridges in 12 pear trees). In other words, quite a party!

For how could we possibly contain the joy of Christ’s birth — much less discern the deeper implications of the incarnation — in a mere 48 hours? Why limit the spirit of charity and goodwill to just one day of obligatory gift-giving with our closest family and friends?

In the English commonwealth, the day after Christmas is known as Boxing Day, which has become a day for celebrating football, but was originally a reference to the alms boxes in churches that collected money to be redistributed to the poor. December 26th is the feast day of St. Stephen, one of the first deacons of the church, whose job it was to make sure that the physical needs of the poor, the elderly, and the most vulnerable in the community were being met. Boxing Day was therefore a day to gather up one’s own surpluses of food, wealth, and warmth after a day of feasting, and to give them away to people in need. The memory of this tradition is still preserved in the song “Good King Wenceslas.”

December 28th is known as the Feast of the Holy Innocents - a day of remembrance for the children of Bethlehem who were slaughtered by King Herod, a puppet king of Judea who hoped to rid the world of the Christ child because of the threat he posed to tyrants and grifters everywhere. In many parts of the world, the Feast of the Innocents is still celebrated with traditions of “misrule,” turning our instinctive narratives of power upside down by allowing children to be “kings” for the day, making decisions about meals, schedules, and other household activities. In ye olden days, poor children would go around to the houses of the rich during this time, and demand food, ale, and figgy pudding. If the master of the house refused, the children could play mischievous tricks on them (one of the origins of “tricks and treats”). The memory of this tradition is still preserved in the songs “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing.”

For Christians, you see, the Christmas story is more than just a single birth moment... it is a disruption of the entire cosmos! It is the whole story of what it means for God to take on human flesh. And that is a messy story: one that includes not only a messy birth in a barn, but the subsequent murder of a town full of babies, the heartache of a mother who very much did know that her son would be opposed by his own people, and the blood of the martyrs who are remembered at Christmastide — St. Stephen, Thomas Becket, and Anysia of Thessalonica — all of whom suffered death unjustly at the hands of worldly powers. The blood of the martyrs is what gives us the red of Christmas. It is an acknowledgement that joy contains the full reality of what it means to be fully human, which includes the suffering we face in the course of real life, and real agape love. Christmas is not a time for spiritual bypassing, or split-off emotions of forced happiness that require us to live in a state of denial and repression, putting on a happy face in order to maintain positive vibes at the expense of confronting reality.

The joy of Christmas is far too complex for one single day. That is why it must spill over into 12 merry days, culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany, when we celebrate the envoy of Zoroastrian astrologers who traveled all the way from Persia to visit the infant Christ. Their presence at the birth of Jesus was an acknowledgement that his life offered hope not only to the Hebrews living under Roman occupation, but for all people, for all nations, and for all time. The three gifts brought by these wise sages served as harbingers of the life he would lead: gold, symbolizing his true “kingship” over the economic and political powers of this world; frankincense, symbolizing the convergence of heaven and earth in his very body; and myrrh, symbolizing the death he would suffer as a result of taking on human flesh.

In some parts of Latin America, children still leave their shoes by the door on Epiphany Eve (along with grass for the camels!) in the hopes that the Magi will leave a few gifts for them as well. In Ireland, Epiphany is referred to as “Nollaig na mBan,” and is celebrated with another tradition of role reversal: one in which the men do all the cooking and cleaning for the day, while the women take the day off to go hang out at the pub. In many parts of the British Isles, it is still common for people to go wassailing on Epiphany Eve, or to host another big party where people come together to feast as they put away their Christmas decorations. In other words, taking down the Christmas tree on Epiphany was originally a party in its own right, not a tedious and depressing household chore that must be performed alone before getting back to work.

In fact, medieval tradition held that while January 6th marked the end of Christmastide, it was just the beginning of winter festivities. The period of time between Epiphany and Lent was known as Carnival, which continued celebrations of merriment that lasted into February, culminating in one big final party on Mardi Gras. In many places, it is still customary to leave evergreen decorations up in one’s house through Candlemas on February 1st. These ongoing festivities were meant to help those of us living in the northern hemisphere (which is approximately 90% of the human population) maintain a spirit of hope throughout the winter season, until the “first kicks” of spring at Imbolc.

So how did we lose these 12 days of Christmas? As you might have suspected, it had mostly to do with the Puritans, those killjoys. Christmas was deemed to be “popish",” and was actually outlawed in Boston from 1659 to 1681. Anyone found to be exhibiting the Christmas spirit could be fined 5 shillings. For much of the 18th century, Christmas fell out of fashion primarily because it was associated with British culture and the Anglican church. Renewed interest “old world” traditions during the 19th century led to the capitalist reimagining of Christmas we experience today, but it is one where the old Puritan influences can still be felt, especially when we consider our self-improvement resolutions for the new year.

Christmas in the Middle Ages, however, was meant to be a time of deep rest. It was a time when only the most necessary chores were done; a time when warmth, charity, and human connection were prioritized; a time when people devoted extra time to prayer and religious practice in order to stay connected to the light during those long, cold, lonely nights of winter.

Whether or not you consider yourself a “Christian” (but especially if you do!) I invite you to lean into the 12 days of Christmas this year. Let your house stay messy. Keep your decorations up. Let those sparkling lights continue to glow into the long dark nights of January. Gather up your extra non-perishable food, gently-used clothing, and other goodies, and donate them. Take some time to sit with a good book, or work on a handmade craft. Make amends with an old friend. Go out of your way to connect with someone you see regularly but have never spoken to. Host a game night with friends and neighbors. Give out packets of hand-warmers to those standing on street corners. Go caroling at a hospital or an Alzheimer’s facility. Think up mischievous ways to disrupt people’s assumptions about power. Laugh deeply from the very depths of your soul.

Do at least one random thing between now and January 6th that restores your faith in humanity and makes you feel truly, outrageously happy. Model the hope you wish to see in the world, and show the people around you glimpses of the Basileia of God.

And even if you can’t do any of that, at least give yourself 12 days of grace this year.

For wisdom has come embodied into the world. Material existence has been deemed beloved. We are not alone. God is on the side of the poor and the suffering. Tyrants, narcissists, and grifters will not get the final say. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. This is the true meaning of Christmas.

And I think that’s worth taking a little bit of extra time to celebrate, don’t you?

For those who want to extend the holiday spirit into the new year, here is a Christmastide playlist that offers 10 hours of medieval carols, choral hymns, and instrumental versions of Christmas songs that still make sense to listen to after December 25th. Enjoy and share freely!