Whittaker Chambers’ Lenten Faith

For Christians, Lent is a forty-day period of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – a purgatorial preparation for the joy of Easter. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday with the words of Genesis 3:19, “Remember, O man, that thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return,” a reminder of human mortality. It concludes with Holy Week, the triumphal liturgical commemoration of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. 

Lent is also a time to remember the suffering of Our Lord, and in remembering to strive to become more Christlike. The spiritual rigors of Lent are meant to train the Christian to better serve the Kingdom of God in the face of suffering. 

Beyond the forty days preceding Easter, there is a sense in which a Christian’s faith can always be a “Lenten” practice of penance. Roman Catholic writer Dwight Longenecker, for instance, once described the poet T.S. Eliot’s anguished life as a “long Lent” in which he drew “back from the love and happiness he longed for out of a mixture of guilt for the harm he had inflicted on” his loved ones. For ten years, Eliot maintained a life of penance to atone for his sins.

Another great Christian writer, Whittaker Chambers, endured a “long Lent” of his own at the height of the Cold War. In the midst of his immense suffering, Chambers turned to the Christian Realism of the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as a guide through his penance. Christian Realism presented an ethical and theological framework for Chambers to understand his Lenten suffering – and it can help Christians today understand their walk in faith, too.

Read more at Providence Magazine.