The Forty Days Nobody Talks About

One of my students came to me a few years ago — I'll call her Mia — near the end of February. She sat down in my office and didn't say much for a moment. Then she said: "I've been feeling really off this month. Not sad exactly. Just... heavy. And I don't know where it's coming from."

We talked for a while. Nothing in her life explained it. No crisis. No specific grief. Just a weight she couldn't name.

I asked, almost offhandedly, if she'd been attending any Ash Wednesday or Lenten services.

She looked at me like I'd asked if she'd been going to the opera.

Her confusion stayed with me. Because here's the thing — I understood her. Not because I've always observed Lent. For most of my years in ministry, I didn't. I understood her because I recognized that heaviness. That vague, unnamed weight that shows up in late winter and doesn't announce itself.

And I've started to wonder if some of us are carrying something during those weeks that we don't have any language for. Something that needs a container, and we've just never been handed one.

What I learned, later than I'd like to admit, is that Lent is the forty days before Easter. Forty days of preparation — not counting Sundays, which have long been treated as small Easters even inside the season. The number isn't arbitrary. It mirrors Jesus's forty days in the wilderness, and before that, Israel's forty years in the desert. The forty is never comfortable in the Bible. It's always the long stretch before something happens. The place where things get stripped down to what's actually real.

The season begins on Ash Wednesday, with a specific gesture that has always unsettled me in the best possible way. You come forward, and someone traces ashes on your forehead — the sign of the cross, made from burned palm branches — while a room full of people waits quietly behind you. And the words spoken over you are these: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

That's it. No follow-up. No "but don't worry." Just the stark fact of it — straight out of Genesis 3, the moment God speaks our mortality plainly.

I've stood in front of congregations in rooms designed to make people feel welcome and uplifted, and I've thought: we have trained ourselves to be very, very good at the uplifting part. I'm less sure we've kept the other thing. The part where you just sit with what is true and hard, without rushing to the comfort.

I think we let Lent go because it asks us to do something contemporary worship has largely stopped asking us to do: lament.

It's worth saying plainly. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments — raw, unresolved, sometimes angry cries aimed directly at God. The Psalter, laments included, was the first hymnbook of the church. Somewhere along the way, in the church I grew up in at least, the dark ones got quietly set aside. We moved toward the celebratory, the grateful, the victorious. There's nothing wrong with any of that. But a worship diet without lament will do something to you over time. You start to feel like the only acceptable thing to bring to God is your best stuff. Your pulled-together stuff.

And then February comes around, and there's this heaviness, and you don't have a name for it or a place to put it.

That's what the forty days are for. Not to make people feel worse, or to manufacture guilt, or to be grim for its own sake. The season is a container. A space the church carved out specifically for honesty about darkness — about death, about what's broken, about what we can't fix ourselves. A place where lament is not a failure of faith but a form of it.

There's something else I keep coming back to. Lent moves toward the cross. It follows Jesus not toward a celebration but toward Gethsemane. Toward the place where he asked if there was another way, and was told, in the silence, that there wasn't.

Jesus didn't skip the wilderness. He didn't skip the garden. And — this is the part I'm still learning to hold — he went there for us. Before we ever showed up to observe a single day of Lent, he had already walked the forty days, already knelt in the garden, already gone all the way down to dust on our behalf. Which means our Lent isn't a performance. It isn't us doing the hard spiritual work of sitting with darkness on our own. It's more like — following someone who has already gone ahead. Accompanying him toward a place he has already been.

I haven't always been willing to do that. I still have years where Ash Wednesday comes and I let it go by, and Easter morning arrives and I've spent the previous six weeks in roughly the same gear I'm always in. But in the years I've actually tried to slow down in late winter and let myself sit with what Lent is asking — something has been different on the other side. Easter hasn't just been a bigger Sunday. It's felt like something that cost something. Like a morning that could only mean what it means because of what came before it.

I'm not sure we can receive resurrection fully if we haven't genuinely sat with death. The season is designed to make sure we don't skip straight to the empty tomb.

Maybe your church doesn't practice Lent. That's fine. I'm not here to convince you to change your liturgical tradition. But I think there's a quieter question underneath all of this — one that has nothing to do with which church calendar you follow.

What do you do with your heaviness? Where do you put the parts of your life that don't fit in the celebratory songs?

Because if you don't have a place for those things, you'll find yourself sitting in an office in February, heavy and unable to name it. Just like Mia. Just like me, more times than I'd like to admit.