https://www.facebook.com/Dr.ScottHah...28195920534831
Every year, as we prepare to celebrate Easter, the great feast of the Paschal Mystery, we undergo purification through forty days of desert: the “forty days” of Lent. Lent is the season that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. When we exclude Sundays (the ancient Fathers forbade fasting on Sundays), that usually makes for a total of forty days.
The number forty is primarily symbolic—and it is richly symbolic. The earliest reference we have to a forty-day preparation for Easter is in the canons of the Council of Nicaea (a.d. 325). One of the most compact expressions of its meaning, however, appears in the work of St. John Cassian in the fifth century. He describes Lent as “the tithes of the year,” because it is roughly a tenth of the days in a year. We give those days to the Lord as a special offering; and, in doing so, we imitate his own fast, as he intended us to do. Cassian also notes the Old Testament models of Israel in the wilderness, and of Moses and Elijah, who also underwent fortyday fasts.
If we are lay people living in the world, we need not take on a monastic fast of bread and water. In my country, we follow the Lenten custom of fasting by “giving something up,” preferably a favorite food or pastime to which we are unduly attached. We may also stop eating between meals, or skip dessert, or forgo second helpings. We return it all to God for forty days, not because any of it is “bad,” but because it is indeed very good. Only good things should be offered in sacrifice to God; only the best of the harvest could be offered as a tithe. We give them to God so that we learn not to put anything in God’s place in our lives.
—I hope you enjoyed this excerpt from my book “Signs of Life.” Learn more at
https://stpaulcenter.com/product/sig...biblical-roots
Scott Hahn