Fifth Day of Lent

The season of Lent is the 40 days preceeding Easter. Sundays don't count because for Christians every Sunday is a "Little Easter" a celebration of Christ's resurrection. So Lent is 6, six-day weeks plus four more days, starting on Ash Wednesday and ending on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter.

Lent is a focused meditation on the fact of human mortality. We are finite creatures. We live for only a brief period of time, and every day of life we come closer to our deaths. During Lent Christians face this reality, and ask, "In the face of death, how shall I live?"

Human mortality is a fact, but not necessarily a problem. Spiritually minded people may profitably borrow the Lenten observation on the fact of death without taking on the Christian response. Is death an abberation to God's plan or part of the plan? Is death a enemy lurking at the end of life, or simply one more life experience? In the mystery that follows death will we have experiences very different from those we have now, or much the same, or cease to have experiences at all? Do the choices we make in how to live now have any effect on our fate after death?

Given the inevitablity of death, both our own and the deaths of those we love, it's useful spiritual practice to do some preparatory work before being called upon to respond to actual death in our midst. The yearly season of Lent gives us a chance while healthy and capable and very much alive, to consider the meaning of existence when we will be none of those things.