This is what Lent used to be:
The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer—through prayer, penance, repentance, almsgiving, and self-denial. Its institutional purpose is heightened in the annual commemoration of Holy Week, marking the death and resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events of the Passion of Christ on Good Friday, which then culminates in the celebration on Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
During Lent, many of the faithful commit to fasting or giving up certain types of luxuries as a form of penitence.
Now, it can be anything from a windmill tilting extravaganza of combating anthropogenic global warming to the Diocese of Niagara’s invitation to have another shot at building a collectivist utopia :
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Regarding Lent.
I once knew a gentleman of Hibernian ancestry whose idea of observing Lent was to avoid attending Mass.
Also one of my supervisors at work, who was a staunch Roman Catholic, used to give up drinking and smoking.
The consensus of opinion was, though, that for him to really observe Lent,it would have been even better had he given up being a pain in the A***, as well.
My husband and I talked about Lent over breakfast this morning. I had mentioned yesterday a couple of things I was giving up — the point of which, it seems to me, is both to move sacrifice out of the theoretical and into the tangible and to re-orientate ourselves away from the frivolous and the ordinary, for the sake of either permanent change or psychological rest. This morning, I said I thought it was a useful practice to not only give up something, but to add doing or having as an object of prayer something that’s not what we normally do — to complete the reorientation not only away from the old but toward the new.
Something I am devoting prayer to this Lent is the future of the Church and the West. These are strange and difficult, even dangerous and psychotic, times. Christianity has created a glorious civilization and has so much to offer the world. It’s exactly what masses of people are hungry for but don’t know it. The more we know of our own heritage, the better able we are to educate others. But, we have to actually believe change is possible before we can manifest it. To have a little fun with this, I removed certain features not original to Haggia Sophia via photo-shop yesterday; it was like removing an annoying moustache drawn on the Mona Lisa. It was amazing the grim tension that goes out of that architecture to manifest a confident and magnificent repose instead.
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. — Yeats
To sit upon a golden bow to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing , or to come?
Our Bishop Don has asked us to do two things for Lent:
To take a special time of, “silence”, each day, to hear, “that still small voice”.
And for each congregation to take on a “special activity”. Ours is to pray each Tuesday as a group, or at home, to seek what/how the Lord wants us to help others.
So we too are “resting”, in silence, and in prayer.
I understand Yeats was writing of a handcrafted tree in the Emperor’s palace, made of gold and silver, with artificial birds upon it that sang for the drowsy Emperor,
to keep him awake.