Lent - The Traditional Practices: Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving

 The word ‘Lent’ comes from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘springtime’.  How appropriate this is because Lent is a forty day retreat in which we do some spring cleaning in our spiritual life and prepare through prayer, fasting, and generous giving to the poor and needy, for the great feast of Easter.

Prayer
The God of love and compassion continually desires to speak to our hearts.  Lent is a time to quiet down and give God a chance to speak in the silence.  Opening our hearts and minds to God is the essence of prayer.  However, bringing a contemplative awareness of God's presence and making an effort to be conscious of God coming to us in people, places and events is just as important.  It is a simple thing to wake up each morning and for a few moments to ask the Lord to bless this day with loving care.
Simply the desire to pray is a prayer, and all of us are just beginning to allow God to break into our lives in whatever each day brings. Coming to daily Mass, offering prayer before meals, the Rosary, quiet contemplation; all renew our lives. At the end of each day just take five minutes to look back at all that took place; conversations we had, people that we met, and how God revealed his love to us.

Fasting
     As a child I remember being asked by my parents: "what are you giving up for Lent?"-a question that implied forgoing candy or desserts.  The Ash Wednesday and Good Friday requirements (60 + not required) to abstain from meat and eat one full meal on those days, with the other two meals combined not equaling a full meal, is a practice designed to put us in solidarity with the poor of the world.
1.5 billion people live on a little more than a dollar a day.  20,000 children starve to death each day around the world.  Most of the world's population goes to bed hungry at night and suffers from malnutrition.  Fasting aids our prayer.  It makes it easier to listen to God more openly and heightens our consciousness of God's presence and action in our lives.  Global awareness changes our perspective on life when we become physically aware in a simple gesture of fasting of people who have far less than we can imagine.  Fasting is a great cure for self-pity.

Almsgiving
     Good stewards place God first.  We do not give God and our neighbor the leftovers of our week whether this includes our time, our talent or our financial resources.  Generosity is an attitude of gratitude.  No matter how much we have, everything is a gift and given to us by God to be shared; given away in love.  Human beings need to give in order to find themselves.  The forty days of Lent are a wonderful time to renew the practice of self-sacrificing generosity to our parish, our diocese and the community in which we live.  This is a time of great economic hardship throughout our nation.  In our local area we are serving more people than ever before through our outreach, food pantry, and clothing store.  Consider increasing your weekly offertory in our collection basket during the Lenten season.  Returning the first hour of your work week as a gift back to God is a virtuous practice.

     “If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday...."  (Isaiah 58)

Peace and love,
Father Bruce