Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Lent 2025
Lent was never observed in my home growing up. We belonged to a nonconforming evangelical group called the Plymouth Brethren Assemblies, a worldwide organization like the Quakers. We didn’t have a liturgy or religious holidays. When I grew older, I would often attend an Anglican church in our city of Chennai to hear a sermon based on Easter or Christmas. We celebrated these holidays at our home but considered them “heathen”, evoking their origins before Christianity.
In conversation with my Muslim friends, especially those who observed Ramadan, I would say that Christians used to observe Lent and explain that it was similar but then tell them that we don’t fast anymore. They still invited me to celebrate Eid with them to end their month of prayer and fasting. Once, I was at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for an Easter morning service, but I was distracted by the constant stream of tourists coming and going. Many of my Hindu friends had attended Catholic schools in India and would be more attuned to Lent and Easter but they had their own special days. They often fasted and prayed every Tuesday or on the eleventh day of each month or on Navratri, which is a festival that lasts nine nights and involves fasting, pujas and reading holy scriptures.
We wanted to raise our children in the Christian faith and had them baptized at All Saints Episcopal Church Palo Alto, but we still did not pay much attention to Lent. I would sometimes have a brunch for Easter. A few of my more spiritual friends mentioned giving up wine, chocolate or social media for Lent, but in a light offhand way. The meaning of Lent has started to deepen for me, especially now that I am old and leaning towards my Christian roots more and more. I feel that meditation and spirituality give me more confidence in my faith and comfort me in these transitional, turbulent and trying times. I loved reading the psalms when I was sixteen and now, I read them again with new, wiser eyes.
Lent seems a perfectly good time to lean into this old but also newfound part of my life. As Ayyah Medanandi says in her poem, My Religion:
‘To live and die without regret’ -
That is my religion -
To taste the cup of the sacrament
Of this moment
Now
My only moment.
I am willing to lean into Lent. Moment by moment.
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