The Mystical Meaning of Lent
By Jim Miles
In the Christian tradition, the holiest day of the year is Easter Sunday, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. However, Easter Sunday is a moveable feast. An early church council decreed that the date of Easter would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox (March 21). Thus, the range of the dates of Easter can be as early as March 22 or as late at April 25. This year, Easter falls on April 8. Once we know the date of Easter we can back track to the beginning of the Lenten Season.
This year, Lent begins on February 21, also known as Ash Wednesday, and occurs 46 days before Easter. The Lenten Season is considered 40 days long, because Sundays in this period are not counted among the days of Lent. Traditionally, Lent has been a time of cleansing and purifying the soul in anticipation of participating in Christ's resurrection. Some believe that Lent commemorates the 40-day period Jesus spent in the wilderness purifying himself to ward off the temptations of Satan. That story is often seen as a metaphor of everyman's struggle to resurrect the Christhood lying dormant within. For this reason, Lent is observed by fasting, abstinence (originally from meat), and repentance of transgressions.
Prior to the beginning of the Lenten Season, in anticipation of the fasting and abstinence that was soon to come, early Christians took part in carnivals, indulging their senses with excessive eating, drinking, merry-making, and revelry. It is not by accident that the word "carnival" has its roots in the Latin word "carne" which means "meat." In fact, the day before Ash Wednesday is known in cities along the Gulf Coast as "Mardi Gras" or "Fat Tuesday," and in other parts of this country as "Shrovetide," representing the three days before Lent set aside for confessions and for ribald festivities. In all instances, this pre-Lenten period has become "party time," before the somber season of mortification and self-abnegation that follows.
As with most Christian observances, the Lenten Season has its origins in ancient, mystical traditions based upon timeless wisdom and universal symbolism. The word "Lent" means "spring" or "the lengthening of day." This is the time of year when days become noticeably longer as we approach the Vernal Equinox, recognized by the ancients as the time when nature moves from darkness into light, from death into rebirth.
This theme of transition is a universal concept in nature. In the mystical language of symbolism, the number 40 connotes the time that the egg or seed of life is immersed or incubated in matter before "hatching" or germinating to begin a new life cycle. Forty days were observed as the time the wheat grains, sown in the waters standing over the fields after the annual flooding of the Nile River, would take to germinate. Forty was therefore recognized as the number symbol of the interval of "death" of the germ of new life when incubated in matter. It was the symbol of the dark interval preceding the dawn of a new cycle. Mystically, it dramatized the incarnation of spirit into matter which involves initially the death of spirit and its subsequent regeneration throughout its incarnation into a new life through a "rebirth."
Since our ancient pagan ancestors accepted reincarnation as a natural process, the 40-day period represented a metaphor for each of our own lives or incarnations. In a sense, our spirit dies when it incarnates into the physical body subject to the vagaries of the human condition. Slowly the soul (spirit, consciousness or conscience) begins to awaken and, tempered and purified through its struggles with the flesh, has the opportunity to grow and evolve into its next incarnation eventually culminating in oneness with the All That Is.
So important was the symbolism of this 40-day period, that the ancients incorporated it into the cycle of the year. This 40-day motif was merged into the Christian tradition with liturgical celebrations taking place 40 days after the Winter and Summer Solstices and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes. Even when Easter became a moveable feast day, from the Vernal Equinox, the early church fathers continued to use the 40-day motif by decreeing that the date of Jesus' ascension into heaven would be commemorated on Ascension Thursday, 40 days after Easter.
Just as exoteric or orthodox Christianity honors the death and resurrection of the Christ of the Bible during this time, so might we also observe the esoteric or mystical meaning of the Lenten Season as the dying of the self and being reborn into the light, or the death and resurrection, as St. Paul writes, of "the Christ in you."
