Letter to the Parish

A brief history of Lent and Ash Wednesday

This year seems to be passing quickly already. A few days after you pick up this edition of the Village Magazine we'll be into the season of Lent - I think I must have blinked because it doesn't feel that long ago that we were celebrating Christmas together; but since then we've also had New Year, of course, and Epiphany - the manifestation - when the wisemen visited and saw the baby Jesus.

Originally Lent may have followed straight on from Epiphany, as Jesus' visit to the wilderness followed on immediately from his baptism. It soon became firmly attached to Easter though - the principal time of baptism - and new candidates had to be prepared for this. They did so through self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter - the traditional characteristics of Lent. The season of Lent has been around for a very long time, here is a short verse, originally written in Latin, from before the 12th century:

Now is the healing time decreed
for sins of heart and word and deed,
when we in humble fear record
the wrong that we have done the Lord.

As the candidates for baptism were instructed in Christian faith the whole Christian community was invited to join them in the process of study and repentance, the extension of which over forty days would remind them of the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness being tested by Satan; hence the "Forty Days of Lent".

The calculation of these Forty Days has varied considerably, but now - in the Western Church - is counted back from the end of Holy Week to get to the start of Lent; but not including the Sundays as these are kept as a day of celebration. It also gave folk a short break from the discipline of self-denial - from which we have the tradition of giving something up during Lent. If you count back forty days from the Saturday before Easter Sunday, and take out the six Sundays in that period, you get to a Wednesday; what is known in the Church calendar as "Ash Wednesday".

On the evening of Ash Wednesday, which this year falls on the 10th February, we have a service (8pm, at the Mission Church in Sandhurst) which involves the imposition of ashes - drawing the sign of the cross on the forehead in ash. Ashes are an ancient sign of penitence, and from the Middle Ages it became the custom to begin Lent by being marked in ash with the sign of the cross. This is simply to remind us that we are all mortal, we all do things that are wrong, and we all need to work at trying to live better lives. I produce the ashes from last year's palm crosses. This letter is basically a long way of asking you to let me have your old palm crosses back by Sunday 7th February please.

I hope that the Forty Days of Lent do not pass you by as quickly as the first forty days of the year up to Ash Wednesday have!

Revd. David Commander
Rector

Benefice of Benenden and Sandhurst

T: 01580 240658 E: david@dc-uk.co.uk