Plans for Lent 2020

It's Ash Wednesday again, a day "of fasting and abstinence," as described in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2043.  Fasting is eating much less food than you normally would; abstinence in this context is not eating meat. The point of this penance is not to punish yourself. It's to "acquire mastery over our instincts and freedom of heart." Rather than being led around by our appetites, we practice saying "no" to them so that we are free to focus on other, more important things. Eating food is important but not the most important thing in our lives. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are the two prescribed days for fast and abstinence in America, with the Fridays in Lent only requiring abstinence. So the obligation is not so great. Often, people add other days for themselves or make other sacrifices, the classical "giving up something for Lent." My plan for this year is..... I will do my usual fast from graphic novels (though, also as usual, I have enough backlog of blog posts to last until Easter).

The other traditional practice in Lent (in addition to fasting) are prayer and almsgiving. For prayer, I will pray the rosary daily. It's a beautiful prayer that I haven't done in far too long. The archdiocese sent us a little black book with daily meditations for Lent. I'll read that too.

For almsgiving, we will continue to buy something extra for the local food pantry when we shop for groceries.

For spiritual reading, I will start Friar Thomas D'Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works by James A. Weisheipl, O.P. The book is fairly big--405 pages of text and another 82 of notes, bibliography, and index. Ten pages a day will make it easy to finish during the forty days of Lent. If I finish early, I'll probably read something shorter. Maybe I'll reread Thomas More's The Sadness of Christ, a book of reflections on the passion of Christ.

We don't have any really big plans this year for Lent, just some simple stuff to keep us going down the right road.