As the church prepares for another Lenten season, I recall a Socratic-type exchange that one of my seminary professors initiated with us many years ago.

"What is the first thing that comes to mind," he asked, "when you hear the word, 'Lent'?" Our answers were conventional. Lent means penance and "giving things up."

When it became obvious that no one was about to give the answer he was looking for, he finally said, in benign exasperation, "Spring!"

The students looked at one another with an arched brow, as if to say, "Where did that come from?"

In hindsight, however, our teacher was right. The Middle English word for "Lent" is lenten, which means "springtime." Lent and spring are indeed inextricably linked --- at least for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

But a more liturgically correct answer would have been "Easter," because the Lenten season actually exists to prepare the local faith-community and the universal church for the celebration of the greatest feast in its liturgical year.

Fifty years ago, we young seminarians --- and most other Catholics as well --- could not have given such a liturgically sophisticated answer. Indeed, the term, "Easter Vigil," wasn't in common use then.

The comparable celebration --- if you could call it a "celebration" --- was known only as Holy Saturday. It yielded the longest --- and possibly dullest --- liturgical ceremony of the entire year, and attracted only a handful of people.

The service was held at seven o'clock in the morning, not, as now, late in the evening, with Mass at midnight. It included one lengthy reading after another from the Old and New Testaments --- all in Latin --- along with a series of mysterious rites involving fire and a candle at the back of the darkened church.

For altar boys, a Holy Saturday assignment was one of the least coveted in those days. The ceremony was long and boring, and no one was ever quite sure what to do next. On the other hand, no one in the congregation would have known if mistakes were made or things were left out.

The Easter Vigil nowadays is seen as the culmination of the church's liturgical year. Perhaps not every Catholic knows that, but many who attend Mass regularly do, especially those who usually participate in all or most of the Holy Week liturgies.

The fact that the Lenten season is essentially a preparation for Easter becomes more vividly evident when, at the Easter Vigil, the catechumens are called forward with their sponsors to be baptized and confirmed. A while later, they make their first Communion along with the rest of the eucharistic community.

The history of Lent, however, is a bit more complicated than the Easter Vigil rites, which are conducted, after all, entirely in the vernacular and with full lay participation as lectors, eucharistic ministers, music ministers, ministers of hospitality, and so forth.

During the first three centuries most Christians prepared for Easter simply by fasting for two and three days beforehand. A short "Lent," indeed.

In some places, however, the "paschal fast" was extended to the entire week before Easter, now known as Holy Week. In Rome itself, the paschal fast probably lasted for three weeks, but by the fourth century it had developed into our modern Lent of forty days.

The conventional belief has been that the 40-day period was modeled on the 40-day fast that Jesus endured in the desert (Luke 4:13), but, more recently, liturgical scholars like Nathan Mitchell of the University of Notre Dame have concluded that "the development of Lent was also influenced by another 40-day fasting tradition, an ascetical one based on imitation of Jesus' life, which began immediately after the feast of Epiphany [in early January]..." ("Lent," The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism).

This post-Epiphany fast, with its emphasis on prayer and penance, was especially popular among monks, Mitchell reports. Nevertheless, these penitential themes did not become dominant until the original conception of Lent, as a period of spiritual and catechetical formation in preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil, began to recede in the fifth and sixth centuries. This was likely the result of the growing practice of baptizing infants.

It took many more centuries --- and the liturgical renewal that came to full flowering at the Second Vatican Council --- to bring about a restoration of this original meaning of the Lenten season as a preparation for Easter.

The centerpieces of this retrieval effort were the restoration of the rites of Holy Week by Pope Pius XII in 1956 and the conciliar renewal of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults in the following decade.

But the connection between "Lent" and "spring" still works, too.

Father Richard P. McBrien is the Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.