Forty Days and Forty Nights

The title of this post sounds like a poor movie title doesn’t it? Yet the number 40 shows great significance in the Bible. Forty is seen as denoting a period of trial and testing. Remember the time Jesus spent in the desert in Matthew 4:1-11 and also in Luke 4:1-13 when the devil tested him? From these two Bible readings we can see how Lent has taken on the 40 days symbolism.

We begin Lent with Ash Wednesday, which we all know and a majority of us took advantage of receiving ashes to start off Lent prayerfully. But, did you know that the 40 days does not start until the 1st Sunday of Lent? If you count the days until Holy Thursday it will be exactly 40. And on Holy Thursday we begin the Triduum which lasts until Easter Sunday.

Maybe you could think of a fun way to keep track of those 40 days. In Spain it is the custom to make a paper scorpion with 40 legs. The paper scorpion represents the “sting of death” that St. Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15:50-58. He tells us “The sting of death is sin…” Each day during Lent (in Spain) one of the scorpion’s legs is torn off and then on Easter the legless creature is tossed into the bonfire. This represents that “in Christ, death itself dies.” Of course we wouldn’t harm a real scorpion, but the symbolism is what we see with this idea.

If you are crafty you could have a special place with a green cloth where you could add a cotton ball sheep each day until you have a flock of 40 sheep. Maybe you like creating paper birds using the origami technique, you could fold one bird per day and add them to the green cloth until you have a flock of 40 birds or bring a bare tree branch in and put it in a vase and hang the birds from the smaller branches.

Remember one of the other areas we see the number 40 in the Bible is the in the story of Noah’s Ark, Genesis 6:5 – 8:22. There were 40 days of rain while Noah was on the Ark with his family and the animals which he had brought in by pairs. Make a cardboard ark and add 2 animals each day and by the end of the 40 days you will have an ark full of 80 animals or 40 pairs.

On your dining table you could place a cloth with a bowl on it and add 40 prayer intentions to the bowl. Each night at dinner you could take a prayer intention from the bowl and the family could pray for that intention. Leave the prayer intention on the cloth so by Holy Thursday your bowl will be empty surrounded by all those things your family prayed for as a family during Lent. Then on Easter you could take a container to church and fill it with Holy Water from the newly blessed water and then take it home and pour it into the empty prayer bowl. As you eat your Easter meal everyone can bless themselves with the Holy Water before your say our meal prayer.

What other ways can you think of to count the 40 days and 40 nights?