So why lent?

Why lent?

Especially now, especially coming to the end of a term

during an otherwise sad month with little daylight

and very little in the way of anything to look forward to.

Why would the church pile on?

Why would the church focus its attention on a penitential season?

One, that is peculiarly intense, which sometimes seems impossibly difficult,

especially when we're overeager at the outset.

So, Lent, with its insistence on prayer and fasting and almsgiving,

puts before our eyes, it kind of places before us

in a way that we cannot dismiss our own limitedness, our own weakness, our own inability,

which can oftentimes be a very terrible realization. So how could this be good? How could this

possibly be something desirable? How could this possibly be something desirable?

How could it possibly be something saving?

Now, there's a notion abroad that progress is inevitable.

That due to advances in technology or to increase learning in, you know,

whatever particular subject matter or whatever particular discipline,

that the state of humanity will just, as if by a law, ineluctibly, get more and more perfect,

that man will inevitably progress into a place of greater and greater happiness and abundance.

But this notion has been abroad for some time now, and it has pretty significant critics.

I was just talking about J.R. or Tolkien in a conversation last night, and Tolkien is quoted

...