Lent

Ash Wednesday 2023: Here's all you need to know about Ash Wednesday - the first day of Lent (a 40-day period of preparation and fasting before Easter).

Holy Thursday - the celebration of Jesus's last supper and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday is a part of the Holy Week which ends on Easter Sunday. On Ash Wednesday, priests apply ash on the forehead of each person coming to the Church, saying - 'Thou art dust and unto dust thou shall return'. Believers in Christ around the world observe Ash Wednesday as a time for prayers, acts of charity, and mortifications. Traditionally Lent begins on the Monday of the seventh week before Easter and ends on a Friday that is nine days before Easter, according to Britannica.com. It is preceded by Shrove Tuesday and falls on the first day of Lent, a 40-day period of preparation and fasting before Easter. This year, Ash Wednesday falls on February 22.

If you're unfamiliar with the Christian holiday, the celebratory ritual has been observed for centuries and continues to be a major part of Christian faith ...

It is believed that many Christians keep the ashes on their forehead throughout the day as a witness to their faith. While Ash Wednesday is not a [holy day of obligation](https://www.britannica.com/topic/holy-days-of-obligation), it is the most commonly attended service on the Christian calendar for non-Sunday services. [brittanica.com](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ash-Wednesday-Christian-holy-day), the early Christian church observed Lent over a six-week period or 36 days with fasting except for on Sundays. Therefore, while the word is absent in the Bible, the reality of Lent is woven throughout the whole of Scripture, as we have discovered." The Bible commands a lifestyle of worship and devotion that looks considerably like Lent. [britannica.com](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ash-Wednesday-Christian-holy-day). Serious sinners and penitents began a public penance on the first day of Lent. But not all Protestant believers. [@ChrisFSims](https://twitter.com/ChrisFSims). [uscatholic.org](https://uscatholic.org/news_item/how-to-answer-some-common-ash-wednesday-questions/#:~:text=A%3A%20No%20one%20is%20required,her%20face%20after%20the%20ritual.). [brittanica.com](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ash-Wednesday-Christian-holy-day). What to know about DST?](https://www.pjstar.com/story/news/2023/02/14/daylight-savings-2023-when-does-the-time-change/69891466007/) [Where do the ashes for Ash Wednesday come from?]

The holy holiday is meant to open up Christians to spiritual reflection and to connect with God through communal fasting and prayer. Ash Wednesday occurs ...

However, the Eastern Orthodox begin their Lenten season on a Monday rather than Wednesday. Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists are the denominations within the Western Christian world that recognizes Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday occurs approximately six weeks before Easter Sunday — the resurrection of the Christian savior and begotten The main practice of Ash Wednesday is to place ashes on the foreheads of each member of a Catholic congregation. The overall purpose of Ash Wednesday is to honor the 40 days Christ spent in the desert by fasting and practicing self-control. The overall purpose of Ash Wednesday is to honor

Ash Wednesday marks the start of the Lenten season and traditionally in the Catholic faith in Ireland this is observed by receiving ashes – from the Palm ...

STEELSTOWN: Mass times on Ash Wednesday at Our Lady of Lourdes Steelstown will be at 7.45am, 10am and 7pm. ST MARY’S CREGGAN: Mass times at St Mary’s Church in Creggan will be at 7am, 10am and 7.30pm. ST COLUMBA’S LONG TOWER: At St Columba’s Long Tower Church, ashes will be blessed at the 7.00am Mass and distributed at the 7.00am, 10.00am and 7.30pm Masses. This is accompanied by the words 'Dust you are and to dust you shall return’, a quite from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. HOLY FAMILY: At Holy Family Church, Ballymagroarty ashes will be distributed at 10am and 7.15pm Masses. St EUGENE’S CATHEDRAL: Mass times for Ash Wednesday at St Eugene’s Cathedral are 8.00am; 10.00am; 1.00pm and 7.30pm.

Beirut (Agenzia Fides) - The Eastern Churches begin the penitential season of Lent while earthquakes, poverty, conflicts and political crises continue to ...

The rule of fasting - the Maronite Patriarch commented - is that "what you save by fasting is to help those in need". To recall the Christian urgency of coming to the aid of brothers and sisters overwhelmed by the earthquake, the Maronite Cardinal and Patriarch Béchara Boutros Raï also quoted the Fathers of the Eastern Churches in his Letter for Lent: "You do not have the right to use your money as a person who enjoys it according to your desire, but rather as a person to whom it has been entrusted", wrote Saint Basil the Great, while for Saint Gregory of Nisa, "what flows from you is not yours , therefore you cannot own it". In this way - added the Primate of the Syrian Catholic Church, citing Benedict XVI's message for Lent of 2006 - "while the tempter leads us to despair or to place a vain hope in the work of our hands, there God keeps us and sustains us".

Vienna Church Prepares For Lent Season With Drive-Thru Ashes - Vienna, VA - As Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent for some Christian faiths, ...

The Christian observance of Lent will begin on Wednesday and end with Easter on Sunday, April 9. For those interested in receiving the church's devotions for Lent publication, visit The drive-thru ashes are a change from the church's pandemic practices. Copies of the church's 24th annual Devotions for Lent publication will also be handed out, as well as coffee and cookies. The event will be held in the parking lot of the church at 2351 Hunter Mill Rd., Vienna. The Church of the Good Shepherd, a United Methodist church, will observe the start of Lent with drive-thru ashes on Wednesday from 6:30 a.m.

Ash Wednesday, like other days in the Christian calendar, is designed to encourage spiritual reflection. After 6 days, Genesis describes God as having.

To be reminded that we are sinful and mortal is to be reminded that God can heal us. If – on Ash Wednesday – we remember that we are dust, it is also worth remembering what God can do and has promised to do with dust. To be reminded that we are sinful and mortal is to be freed from the mistaken notion that we can save or heal ourselves. It is meditation on these two facts of our existence and our dependence upon God around which both Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season revolve. Increasingly, churches have called on people to spend Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season meditating on societal injustices, which – while not without merit – is too narrow a focus to substitute for the rigors of Lent. And the liturgical calendar builds on the significance of that act, reminding us all of God’s saving acts and our dependence upon them.

Lent begins this Ash Wednesday, February 22 and begins the time when Christians prepare for the celebration of Easter.

It is both a blessing and a curse - great for keeping in touch, finding out the news and watching funny videos but it's hard to get away from. Who doesn't love a chocolate bar or a nice bag of sweets, especially when relaxing in front of the TV. If you haven’t yet decided what to do, here are 10 ideas that might provide some inspiration.

I started going to Ash Wednesday services when I was working in New York City, in an office a few blocks from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

“There is a balm in Gilead,” the choir sang in the cathedral. I knew which teas she kept in a jar and the taste of the persimmon cookies she made. Ash Wednesday not as a private meditation but as a communal practice; Ash Wednesday in a place I lived rather than a place I visited: This was the remembrance I needed. From my vantage point on the stage, I watched my fellow congregants, only 15 of them, form a line and approach the altar. The ashes in the bowl are made from the fronds of the palms we waved the year before. From our place on the stage, my husband and I sang our way through the service. There can be a strange beauty in the difficult and the macabre, in silence and penitence. John the Divine, I am part of the life of this congregation. If we’re not careful, Lent in the life of the church can be like a John Keats ode, a tragic play, or a sad song: there to provide emotional release. Was it wrong to look forward to a service about a subject—my sin, my death—that I was supposed to face with fear and trembling? In the Howells Requiem, in Bach’s St. I went to the cathedral only on special occasions like Ash Wednesday, when the professional choir would sing polyphony and spirituals and Gregorian chants.

Often there isn't much time to prepare for the 40-day season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, beyond a hasty resolution to give up something — alcohol, fast ...

But what he means when he says that it should be a perpetual Lent isn’t that the monk should be perpetually miserable, because he emphasizes that Lent is a joyful season because it orients our eyes toward what is the source of our joy, which is Christ’s Pasch. The important thing at the end of Lent is to ask: Have I arrived? At the end of Lent, is it good to look back and ask ourselves if we’ve observed the season well? Pasolini devoted it to Pope John XXIII, and it is a moving and, I think, extremely realistic depiction of the Gospel. A crucial aspect of almsgiving is hollowing out that capacity for mercy in myself and touching that vulnerable core where my heart is touched in compassion by the need and the misery of others. It’s an ecstatic practice in the strict sense of that word: It helps me to step outside myself and toward the other, and to grow in attentiveness. And Easter is the assurance that life eternal is restored to us. The Church teaches that Lent should be a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. And the whole point of Lent is to prepare us precisely for Christ’s victory over death. And that’s the really important thing: that these 40 days aren’t just a time during which we have to grit our teeth in order to arrive at our destination. To ground us in the real, which the Church is good at doing, if we listen. Benedict](https://www.solesmes.com/sites/default/files/upload/pdf/rule_of_st_benedict.pdf), which says that “the life of a monk ought always to have a Lenten character”?

The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday and lasts about six weeks, culminating with Easter Sunday. It is the day Christians believe Jesus rose from the ...

The season of Lent is a pilgrimage. The book is divided into weeks and features a Bible verse at the start of its eight chapters. Clemente Lisi is a senior editor at Religion Unplugged and teaches journalism at The King’s College in New York City. McCaulley does a masterful job and offers a mix of research and personal history to bring the meaning of Lent to life. In this magnificent tome (Westminster John Knox Press), author Jill Duffield makes the case that God “works through the ordinary.” She has a point. Dedicated to prayer and meditation, the book is beautifully illustrated and features art by noted illustrator Valerie Delgado. Esau McCaulley, a theologian and associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College, the book details why Christians have to undergo this process ahead of Holy Week. It’s in this gospel that we learn about Jesus’ ministry and how that connects to our daily lives. This book (InterVarsity Press) about Lent focuses on exactly what the title suggests — both repentance and renewal. The season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday — which this year falls on Feb. (REVIEW) Christians around the world are anxiously preparing for the season of Lent. In this book (Thomas Nelson Publishers) by Dr.

In Genesis, we meet a cool speculator. “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, 'Did God ...

In the Epistle to the Colossians, a list describes life before we have put on Christ. The world is a place of limited resources and ominous threats. We live in the presence of divine mystery suffusing all creation, and so are invited to wonder and exultation. There is, of course, another way to see the world, of which we are all quite aware. The Devil promotes “critical thinking skills” in the face of a mystery we know only in part. 3:1) The serpent stands aloof from the divine, suggesting that it is possible to live by something other than “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt.

From the Anglo-Saxon Lencten, meaning springtime, Lent is the 40–day period of prayer, penance, and spiritual endeavour in preparation for Easter. Lent is not ...

We walk the way of the Cross and find meaning to our suffering and pain. Through the way of the Cross we understand that we are not alone in our life journey. The three main pillars of the season of Lent are: Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving. Indeed, the virtue of love is bound up in this great pillar of Lent. Lent is then I would call it a retreat of 40 days, a time to live in the spirit of his Baptism, a time of penance in the ancient sense of repentance, metanoia - change of heart and mind, conversion. May we never undervalue the source of grace from God that fasting allots for us. It is a call to repentance; It also reminds us of our own mortality as well as the eternal life we share with Jesus through his Cross. Lent is not an end in itself; it exists only to lead to the paschal feast and so can be rightly understood only in the light of Easter. The accumulated evidence of Christian tradition in this regard shows without any doubt that the real aim of Lent is, above all else, to prepare Christians for the celebration of the death and RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. The season of Lent begins with the Ash Wednesday. Easter gives meaning to Lent and shows it for what it is: the great paschal retreat of the Church. From the Anglo-Saxon Lencten, meaning springtime, Lent is the 40–day period of prayer, penance, and spiritual endeavour in preparation for Easter.