What Is Lent? Forty Days, Fasting and the Road to Easter

The early church prepared candidates for baptism at Easter with a period of fasting and instruction, and by the Council of Nicaea in 325 a season of forty days before the feast was recognised across the church; the number comes from the forty days of Jesus in the desert, of Moses on Sinai, of Elijah's journey and of the rain of the Flood, and the word Lent is simply Old English for spring, lengthening days. The season's shape was fixed by the sixth century: Ash Wednesday at the start, since Sundays, as feast days of the resurrection, were never fast days and forty fasting days needed forty-six calendar ones; Holy Week at the end, with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday; and Easter Sunday, on which the fast ended with the greatest feast of the year.

For most of Christian history Lent was a real fast, and its rules shaped diet, trade and cooking:

• •One meal a day, taken in the evening, with meat, eggs, milk, butter and cheese forbidden throughout, which is why fish, dried and salted, was the food of Lent and why the herring and cod trades of the Baltic and the North Sea were built on it
• •Shrove Tuesday, the day of being shriven, of confessing, before the fast: the eggs, butter and fat were used up in pancakes in England, doughnuts in Germany and the whole of Carnival, farewell to meat, in Venice, Rio and New Orleans
• •Dispensations: the rich bought permission to eat butter, the Rouen tower paid for by the butter dispensation is still called the Butter Tower, and beaver, puffin and barnacle goose were ruled to be fish
• •The Eastern churches keep a stricter Great Lent, without meat, dairy, eggs, fish, wine or oil on most days, and begin it on a Monday
• •The Reformation dropped the obligation in Protestant countries, and the Catholic church reduced it in 1966 to fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstaining from meat on Fridays

What remains for most Western Christians is the custom of giving something up for Lent, chocolate, alcohol, social media, meat, and of taking something on, prayer, charity, reading, and the three traditional disciplines of the season, fasting, prayer and almsgiving, are the ones named in the Sermon on the Mount. The purpose, as the church has described it, is not self-punishment but preparation: to loosen the grip of habit, to notice what one depends on, and to arrive at Easter having paid attention. The season has been taken up by people outside the church for the same reasons a January detox is, and the forty-day length, long enough to feel like a real effort and short enough to endure, is part of why it has lasted.

Lent is written into the calendars and the cooking of Christian cultures. Carnival exists because of it, the days of feasting before the fast, and Mardi Gras is Fat Tuesday; the pretzel, in one account, was a Lenten bread shaped like arms crossed in prayer; the fish on Friday that survives in schools and canteens across Europe and America is the last trace of the abstinence; and the hot cross bun of Good Friday and the eggs of Easter, forbidden through Lent and back on the table at its end, are the season's punctuation. Mothering Sunday in Britain, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when the fast relaxed and servants were allowed home to visit their mothers, became Mother's Day.

Lent has no fixed place in the calendar because Easter does not. The rule that became standard in the early church sets Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon falling on or after the spring equinox, which the church fixes at 21 March rather than observing in the sky, and the full moon is likewise taken from tables. Because lunar months and the solar year do not line up, Easter can fall anywhere from 22 March to 25 April, and Ash Wednesday, forty-six days earlier, moves with it, landing anywhere from early February to early March.

Eastern Orthodox churches follow the same principle but calculate it with the older Julian calendar, which now runs thirteen days behind the Gregorian calendar most of the world uses, and with different tables for the moon. As a result Orthodox Easter usually falls a week or more after Western Easter, sometimes as much as five weeks later, and in some years the two coincide. Orthodox Great Lent begins on Clean Monday and counts its days differently, so the two traditions often start their fasts in different weeks, even in cities where both are practised side by side.

The ashes used on Ash Wednesday have a history of their own. In many churches they are made by burning the palm crosses and branches handed out on Palm Sunday the year before, so each Lent begins with what is left of the last one's ending. The ashes are often mixed with a little water or oil so that they stick, and the words spoken while they are applied echo God's sentence on Adam in the book of Genesis. In the early church, ashes and sackcloth were the marks of public penitents doing penance for serious sins, and only later did whole congregations take them on.

Inside the church the season changes how worship looks and sounds. Western churches use purple or violet vestments, and many medieval English churches covered altars and images in a Lenten array of plain unbleached cloth. The joyful word alleluia is dropped from services until Easter, and some communities mark its departure with a small ceremony of burying it, sometimes as a written banner laid away in a box. Flowers are usually removed, organ music is restrained, and in the final two weeks many churches veil their crosses and statues, so that Easter morning, when everything returns at once, arrives as a visible and audible change.

The day before Lent begins, Shrove Tuesday, takes its name from being shriven, confessing sins and receiving absolution, before the season of penance. It also became a day for using up foods traditionally given up during Lent, such as eggs, butter and fat, which in Britain and Ireland turned into the custom of making pancakes, hence the name Pancake Day.

In other countries the same day is Mardi Gras, fat Tuesday in French, the climax of carnival celebrations in places such as New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro. The English town of Olney in Buckinghamshire holds a pancake race in which runners carry a frying pan and flip a pancake, a tradition said to date back centuries. Carnival itself is often linked to a phrase meaning farewell to meat.

Lent is the forty-day season of fasting and preparation before Easter, fixed by the fourth century in imitation of Jesus's forty days in the wilderness, running from Ash Wednesday to Holy Week with Sundays excepted. It was once a strict fast from meat, eggs and dairy that shaped Europe's diet and the fish trade and produced Carnival and Shrove Tuesday pancakes on its eve; the Eastern churches keep it strictly still, the Western ones reduced it in the twentieth century, and giving something up for the forty days is what most people now do with it.