Do you Speak "Church"?

Most organizations, if they survive long enough develop their own terminology. Given its origins in the time of the Roman Empire, it is not at all surprising that historic Christian traditions such as Anglicanism use a fair amount of recycled imperial terminology in their every day lives with terms like 'diocese' and 'province' being traceable to the administrative Reforms of Diocletian (284-305). The terms bishop and priest derive from the Latin versions of the Greek episkopos and presbyteros, whilst the names of some of the vestments such as the alb, the stole, the chasuble, and the surplice come from late Classical or Early mediaeval Latin. There are also some weird ones like the 'Geisma' Sundays that precede Lent.

The 1928 BCP rather prosaically refers to this as 'Pre-Lent' but a lot of Anglicans refer to them as the 'Gesimas - Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima. In Church math they are the called 70th, 60th and 50th days before Easter even though they actually fall between the 60th and 70th, 50th and 60th, and 40th and 50th respectively! Their existence is a survival of an early debate about the length of the pre-Easter fast, with the three dominant views being (a) just Holy Week, (b) forty days in commemoration of Christ's fast in the wilderness, and whilst some influential figures wanted (c) seventy days in commemoration of the Babylonian captivity of the Judeans in the 6th century BC. By the seventh century, a fast of the forty weekdays before Easter came to be observed, and the two and a half weeks between Septuagesima and the first day of Lent came to be observed as a 'warm-up period' so that the faithful could observe Lent properly.

OK, I know, maximum nerd points for this post, but there is a point to it.

Lent is coming up soon - February 18th - and we need to decide what we are going to do to keep Lent properly. The traditional Lenten discipline focused on fasting and good works, and for some people that may still be a valid discipline, but in the 21st century it is sometimes more relevant to fast from something like social media, or the incessant business that make us deaf to God. In the ten days that we have remaining before Lent, we need to decide how we are going to keep the coming 'fast' by deciding what we need to do in order to make Jesus Christ the true priority in our lives. At some point, this is going to involve asking some really hard questions about our use of time, and whether we keep those habits of Church attendance, Bible reading, prayer, receiving communion, and doing good works which help build a healthy spiritual life.