Plans for Lent 2015

Ash Wednesday is this coming Wednesday as I post. Since I've been out of new churches to blog about for a while, I thought I'd write about my plans for Lent this Sunday. In preparation for Easter, the Church recommends certain activities during Lent: Praying, Fasting, and Almsgiving. I've thrown in a little bonus too!

Praying

I don't have set times for personal prayer which needs to change. I typically get up later than everyone else in the morning, around 6:45 of 7 a.m. (which may not sound late to some people). I will get up 15 or 20 minutes earlier to pray the morning prayer from the Divine Office. Before I go to bed, I will say the night prayer.

Fasting

Fasting typically means abstaining from eating fully during the day. The church requires a strict fast (one regular meal and two smaller non-meals) on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, which is pretty minimal. Most people give up some favorite food or drink every day in Lent as a sacrifice. I recently had a physical and the results were good except that my bad cholesterol is high. It's tempting to give up eggs or cheese for Lent but that will probably cause more suffering for the rest of my family, which is a bit bogus. I've decided to go with strict fasting on every Friday in Lent. Oh, and there's this other fasting which falls under the category of...

Lenten Reading

SciFi Catholic has recently rebooted his blog. One of his old traditions was to fast from fiction during Lent and he'd have a classic non-fiction book recommended as a read-a-long for Lent. This year it's Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and, as a bonus, The Call to Joy by Matthew Kelly (recommended by his parish priest). I like the idea of fasting from fiction but it is clearly impossible for me since I read to the kids all the time. I plan to fast from fiction for my personal reading, which won't be hard for regular books. It will be hard for graphic novels but some digging through the county library's on-line catalog has turned up a handful of non-fiction graphic novels, including some books of the Bible. And I'll read the Meditations but probably not Call to Joy.

If you aren't hard core enough to give up fiction, Julie at Happy Catholic has an excellent list of thought provoking and spiritually valuable novels. She also has a list of non-fiction for Lenten reading.

Almsgiving

We haven't worked this out ahead of time but will be giving money to charities for the poor. And we will finally sign up for direct debit with our parish so we don't have to scramble on Sunday mornings during the collection (though we certainly will still give the children some cash to put in, just as a good example and as it's fun for them).

The other big change starting in Lent is I've decided to stop reposting old blogs of churches on Sundays. The European backlog of churches finished up a couple of weeks ago and we haven't been visiting as many new places here in America. We still will visit churches and I will post about them. But there will be Sundays with no posts (though I may post a review of a spiritual book or movie on Sundays, we shall see).