When is Lent?
Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and ends as Easter arrives, with the exact dates moving each year because Easter follows the lunar calendar. Counting the forty days is a little quirky: Sundays are not included, because every Sunday remains a celebration of the resurrection, so the season actually spans about six and a half weeks. The final week, Holy Week, walks day by day through the last week of Jesus' life, from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday to Easter.
Pancakes first: Shrove Tuesday
The day before Lent begins is Shrove Tuesday, known to almost everyone in Britain as Pancake Day. The name comes from the old word “shrive”, meaning to confess and be absolved: this was the day to be shriven before the fast began. The pancakes were a practical matter, a way of using up the eggs, butter and other rich foods in the house before the lean weeks ahead. The custom outlived the strict fasting, which is why the whole country still eats pancakes on a Tuesday in February or March, whether or not anyone in the house intends to keep Lent.
Ash Wednesday
Lent proper opens with one of the most striking services of the church year. In Catholic and many Church of England churches, worshippers come forward to receive a cross of ash on the forehead, made from the burnt palm crosses of the previous year, with the words “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is a blunt, strangely comforting moment: an honest acknowledgement of mortality and a call to turn back to God. Many churches now offer ashes at lunchtime services for people to attend in a work break.
What do people give up?
The classic Lenten discipline has three strands, drawn from Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:
- Fasting. Giving something up. Chocolate, alcohol, and social media are the modern favourites; Catholics also abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday and the Fridays of Lent, which is one root of the fish and chips on a Friday tradition.
- Prayer. Taking something on. Many churches run Lent courses, study groups or daily reading schemes, and lots of Christians use the season to rebuild a habit of daily prayer.
- Giving. Almsgiving, in the old language. Money saved by fasting goes to charity, and many congregations adopt a Lent appeal for a food bank or an overseas project.
The point is not self-improvement or a second run at new year's resolutions. The disciplines are small, deliberate ways of making room: clearing space in an ordinary life to attend to God, and letting the hunger for one thing point to a deeper hunger for another.
Mothering Sunday
The fourth Sunday of Lent is Mothering Sunday, the origin of the British Mother's Day. Historically it was the day people returned to worship at their “mother church”, the church of their home parish or the cathedral, and servants were given the day off to visit their families. Over time it gathered up the celebration of mothers themselves, and churches still mark it warmly, often with flowers, most commonly daffodils, given out to the congregation. Falling mid-Lent, it acts as a breather in the fast, and its older name, Refreshment Sunday, says as much.
Who keeps Lent?
Lent is kept most fully in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Methodist traditions, where the season shapes the readings, hymns and even the look of the building: purple hangings, sparser flowers, a quieter register. Many Baptist, Pentecostal and independent evangelical churches historically paid Lent little attention, though plenty now borrow its rhythm of fasting and focus without the ceremonial. Nobody is required to give anything up, and a newcomer visiting in Lent will simply notice a slightly more reflective tone than usual.
If you would like to experience the season, an Ash Wednesday service is a powerful place to begin, and Holy Week, with its journey from Palm Sunday to Easter morning, is the most dramatic week in the church's whole year. You can find a church near you and check its Lent and Easter service times on its noticeboard or website.