Courtney McGrailWebwatch
Archbishop Eamon Martin has launched a new web feature and Facebook page to assist Catholics through Lent. Catholicbishops.ie and the Facebook page will feature Pope Francis’ Lenten message and tweets, along with prayers and reflections, suggestions on and explanations of Lenten practices, and details of events and Trócaire’s Lenten campaign.
Saying “I love the phrase which Pope Francis uses in his message for Lent this year and where he describes Lent as a time for ‘formation of the heart’”, the archbishop invites everyone “to look into their heart, see the things which might be closing our heart to God’s love and make a special effort to open ourselves up to the grace that God offers during this Lenten season”.
Lenten themes abound across the Catholic internet, with Sr Catherine Wybourne of ibenedictines.org offering a useful history of diverse Lenten practices, and describing prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as “the foundation of our Lent”. As fasting is “probably the most obvious to ourselves and others”, she says “it is worth thinking what our fast should be”.
Negative terms
Venturing that “this year our fasting could include an element of denying ourselves the easy solution of thinking of others as different, ‘other’, so that we pray for them as for ourselves”, she points outs that while Lent can often be seen in negative terms, we tend to overlook how the traditional Lenten practices “unlock great spiritual power” and “they enable us to stand aside, so to say, and allow Christ to be all in all”.
As an obviously positive Lenten practice she suggests the 1,500-year-old Benedictine practice of the Lent Book, where a book of the Bible chosen for one by another is read straight through in a slow and prayerful way, meditating on God’s word and allowing him to speak.
“Don’t be surprised if you feel bored or feel you are getting nothing from the reading”, she cautions, reassuring her readers that “sometimes it can take weeks, months, even years for something to percolate”.
Mary Kate of hislittleflower throughconcrete.tumblr.com points out on the eve of Eating Disorders Week that people with eating disorders, including herself, “get tempted to abuse Lent or use it as an excuse to engage in behaviours”.
Explaining that “if you are struggling with or are in recovery for an eating disorder, you can get a dispensation from a priest to fast during Lent in ways other than food restrictions,” she suggests fasting from things other than food, saying that “God doesn’t want to jeopardise your recovery”.
Newcastle, Co. Dublin’s Fr Aidan Kieran is quoted at faithinourfamilies.com as taking inspiration from St Thérèse of Lisieux by proposing a “Little Way of Fasting”.
Recognising that Lent is less a test of endurance or discipline than it is one of love, he stresses that in even the smallest of sacrifices, “fasting must always be accompanied by prayer, and must be done as an act of love for the Lord”.
This way, he says, “rather than a miserable endurance test” fasting becomes “a wonderfully joyful act”.
On the newly relaunched godzdogz.op.org Br Jordan Scott OP writes that Ash Wednesday is really the beginning of the preparation for Good Friday, when God brought forth the purest light from a place of “immense suffering, of needless cruelty, of pointless hate”.
Recalling how we are called to become, through Christ and his Cross, “one with that act of love which made us, sustains us and saves us”, he suggests that “perhaps we might make a particular effort this Lent to make sacrifices for others”, saying that “maybe then we’ll begin to capture a sense of what it means to love, and indeed, to be loved, which is after all the first step to Calvary”.