A Witch's Lent

I did not invent this phrase. Many years ago a witch wrote about her observance of a different type of lent.  This year, when I knew that my Craft would gradually encompass a renewal of all the things I had grown up with rather than an attempt at worshipping gods I had never known, and practicing rituals that had no meaning to me, I realized Lent was on its way, and I quickly began to see a number of posts for what is called a witch’s Lent.

            But why in the world should a witch have Lent? Why in the world is this most penitential of seasons, the thing which so many Catholics moan about, something a witch would willingly turn to? I believe, because, like many things which exist in ancient churches, its roots are far older than Christianity. Lent is, in some ways, the last initiatory mystery in a currently very mainstream religion. Before it was penitence and giving up meat it was the weeks of preparation for those about to be initiated into the mysteries of Christ. In a time when only the initiated saw the ritual which has come to be called the Mass, this was the time for the uninitiated to ready themselves and so, many centuries later, when Christianity is so common it is banal and so banal it has nearly lost meaning, unless one is to delve deep into it, Lent remains, and Lent has an appeal.

            We are approaching the glittering Golden Castle. We come to this golden, many towered stronghold on a hill, surrounded by a lake of fire. It stands directly over the cool land where green is just coming into bud, frost on one side and growing green on the other, but the mood upon approaching is not revelry or excess, no, the mood is Lent.

            We had begun to have some sense that, as we moved from the cold to growing, there was a deep need to change the way we were living and looking.

On my Saint Patrick’s Day walk I actually saw this new and snowless land. We have had a breathtakingly cold winter, but also a gorgeous one.  Such whites, the beauty of the black river with sheets of ice rising from it, the sky during a snowstorm at night, glowing pearly white as streaks of flurries blow down. But now, as the snow melts into spring, and I walk, I see not only matted hunks of grey brown grass, but all the accumulated trash of the last three months. I see, in the parks, potato chip bags and river banks clogged with debris. The mighty winds have blown down, for several weeks, only to be hidden under snow again, the branches of old trees and their skeletal limbs go grey everywhere.

In my home, devoid of daylight for so long, so very cozy, suddenly the sun shines on dust and dirt and unsightly things, and the need for Lent, for a cleaning up of all the mess that has occurred, naturally, in the time of darkness, is apparent. Winter required a different approach to life. In winter, in fact, we gave up, we went into rest, we knew it was time to not do too much. We did what we had to. It was even time to let things die, to atrophy. In the shadow country we let the shadows grow, and they had to. We follow the wheel to its end, a system of celebrations old and new which people hardly see, from Hallowmass and the Days of the Dead to Armistice Day we enter the land of the dead and winter, and there is a brief lighting of it at Yule with the birth of the Child of Light in the land of Darkness. There is a grace we need to live through this happening, and we take it more on faith than actual observance that light is increasing. Indeed, we are not even ready for light. The time of Epiphany shows a light we cannot understand and leads to Candlemas when we first set our sites away from the Glass Castle and begin to look on the Golden Castle.

From now on the light of the Golden Lantern just barely shines for us. We are stuck between the desire to grow, and the need for hibernation. We are victims of a world which will not let us rest when we want to, when we need to. We tumble toward Valentine’s Day and the first hint of the waking of Love and now, at last, in Lent, we look at melting snow and debris covered land, and we need a time of sacrifice, a time of deepening, a time to, after such a long sleeping, wake up. We want to wake up, but we don’t. All at the same time. We want the Castle of Revelry, but we also want to go on sleeping in the cave. We need the Spring, but we aren’t yet fit for it. We must get the sleep out of our eyes. This is what Lent is doing, or rather, what we are doing in this Lent.