This week much of the Christian world observes Ash Wednesday, the start of the 40-day Lenten season that presages Easter’s 50 days of feasting and celebration. Just three years after Western governments enacted unprecedented persecution by forbidding Christians from worship during our highest Holy Week, this year Lent is especially precious to its observers.
The wise see the gathering storms and make ready to weather them. The culture war is a spiritual war, and that means it must be fought with spiritual means: receiving Christ’s true Body and Blood, fasting, prayer, public repentance, and increased Biblical instruction. This is what Lent is all about: training for and engaging in spiritual warfare.
Lent is a special time to practice repentance and other spiritual disciplines, just as an athlete denies his own comfort and trains to win. As Saint Paul exhorts: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.”
Sure, Christians could — and should — pray hard and practice self-restraint all year. But making Lent an annually recurring part of church life (along with Advent, another penitential season) puts a special focus on spiritual discipline every year, to help us grow over time. As even secular self-help gurus know, habit and regularity
