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Special announcement for this week: Living Memento Mori is only $3 on Ave Maria Press right now - this is the perfect time to pick up your own copy!
Can you believe it’s already time for Lent to begin again?
Emily always loved to talk about the sense of renewal and what is truly means to remove distractions and recommit your focus on the Lord in the weeks leading up to Passover.
This is not a time where we fast to lose weight or post our ashes on social media to gain likes, but rather, fasting is a time rededicated to prayer, reading the Word, drawing closer to the Lord in worship, and volunteering. The ashes area symbol meant to remind us to soberly consider our own mortality. This is not a time to tell the world what you’re giving up and boast or complain of the hardships of fasting, but we should instead follow the words in Matthew 6:16 that say, "When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting".
Remember, fasting is not to be on display for men, but a voluntary offering to our Father in repentance and dedication of our love to Him.
Below you’ll find a couple past Lenten related blog posts, written by Emily, that have resources for your benefit and also a shout out to her other book she wrote, Catholic 101 (learn more in the 2018 post). We pulled a passage (pages 59-60) you can read below as well that goes through the Three Pillars of Lent.
Woman with Ash Wednesday cross on forehead.
Lent: Overview and the Three Pillars
Lent is probably not going to win the “favorite liturgical season” contest, but the older I get, the more I like, appreciate, and need Lent. It’s spring cleaning for the soul. The English word “Lent” is from the Old English word lenten meaning “spring season”, so it’s appropriate to think of it this way. It’s the annual time to get the dust, cobwebs, and trash out of our soul, and focus anew on making it a cleaner, tidier, and more welcoming place for God to dwell.
As a liturgical season, Lent lasts from Ash Wednesday to the afternoon of Holy Thursday. Since the date of Easter is movable84, unlike Christmas, Lent can either begin quite early (the beginning of February) or rather late (March). It is 40 days, representative of the time Christ spent in the desert before he began his public ministry. As we’ve seen, 40 is an important number in Catholicism.
But Lent is, first and foremost, a penitential season, which is probably why it gets a bad rap. No one really likes penance—at least no one who is psychologically normal.
But the Bible, and Jesus, are pretty clear on the need for penance. Penance can mean many things, but in Lent the Church gives us the three pillars—prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—to help guide us in our practice of penance fitting for the season.
Prayer Lent is an excellent time to improve your prayer life. Maybe that means beginning to pray regularly—in the morning before breakfast, before you go to bed, a rosary after dinner. Maybe it means attending Mass during your lunch hour. You could consider adding a holy hour once a week, or once a month. There are so many ways to deepen your prayer life that you really can’t choose wrong. The only wrong choice would be to do nothing.
Almsgiving means giving money or goods to the poor, either directly (bringing canned goods to a food pantry, donating clothes to a shelter) or indirectly through a 60 charity or church. (putting money in the church poor box, sponsoring a child overseas, donating money or items to help refugees.) This is part of Catholic life anyway, but it takes on a special significance during Lent. We should try to give more, so that it’s really a sacrifice, that we’re really giving something up to help other people.
Fasting means eating less food on a given day. For American Catholics, that means one full meal and two meals that, together, do not equal the one full meal. (We’ll talk more in detail about almsgiving and fasting in the next section, as well as abstinence, the sibling of fasting.)
The forty days of Lent can be a powerful time in your spiritual life—but only if you take the time to prepare for it and think about what you want to do with it. Instead of dreading it, see it as an opportunity to progress in your prayer life, and to get to know Jesus better.
We just want to give one more reminder that Emily’s book, Living Memento Mori, makes a great companion to this Lenten season and we hope you’ll pick up your copy to gain a new perspective as you walk through the next 6 weeks.
Pick up a copy of Emily’s book:
Amazon
Ave Maria Press
Seton Shrine