Lent as a Verb, Not a Noun

In Christendom Lent, from the Latin for “forty,” is the annual season of fasting and penitence for 40 weekdays before Easter. But, as someone in mourning, I’m having a hard time thinking about giving up chocolate or staying off Facebook as anything as penitential as the sudden death of our son Mack, 8, on New Year’s Eve 2012. The standard preparation for Lent asks us to step away from our busy lives and consider our mortality: for you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. Until Mack died, Lent was a kind of intrusion into my busy […]