Rites of Spring

The Anglo-Saxons first named Lent. Year after year they watched for and welcomed the lengthening of the days: the great sun warming earth and air and sea and quickening all that lives. They named this lengthening Lent. And they saw that it was good. Like love in a cold climate, Lent-time, AKA springtime, lengthened and warmed. Inside and out.

Liturgical Lent has not always held the same warmth and quickening of life for me. I had not yet connected it with true calendar nor felt its lengthening of light and life. Its six weeks of orchestrated solemnity seemed more cerebral than celebratory. Its passion more an introduction to the darkness of fear, pain, and deprivation: more suffering than exultation. Never an Anglo-Saxon and not yet an amateur gardener, I hadn’t observed the cyclic rhythms of nature and grace which Lent names. Some of my childhood and, admittedly, later Lents seem more contraction than lengthening of spirit, more deprivation of, than clinging to. The hinges upon which this doorway to Easter rests—prayer, fasting, almsgiving, good works—seem at times precariously hung. The door sometimes too heavy, the room to which it opens too mysterious.

Yet, a central meaning emerged, an historical reenactment and a drama that skirts mystery. The story carried along by layers of language, then Aramaic and Greek and Latin; of color, still purple; scenes of deserts, crowds and suppers; accounts of a trial and a crucifixion and, ultimately of a rising and ascending, with details at once familiar and startling. I realize now, that I stood and stand at the unfolding of these events and of their retelling in rite and word, like the early Anglo-Saxons; I was observing how those heavens worked, recording the data and living the story as best I could. And now I, too, can name this time of lengthening Lent, and know it to be springtime of the soul. And it is good.

Lent-Easter, a moveable feast, is set by phases of moon, tides of history and decrees of popes and patriarchs. Its drama-reenactment-mystery constitutes the central event of Christian observance. Within our communities of believers, of watchers and namers, we lengthen and quicken. The feast moves within us—as with tide and history and decree—
and raises us up.


Mona Schwind