lent
Lent Meditations: Preface and Information
Daily Meditations for lent from The Devout Year by Richard Clarke SJ (1889). Short meditations combined with scripture allow you to deepen your lent and spiritual life and feed your contemplative life. Every meditation is listed on this page.
Ignoring the “Fast” Track: Has Traditional Lent observance become optional?
Ash Wednesday is upon us. The day is not so important as its symbolism as the entryway into the great time of penance. We go forth gird with fasting and abstinence into the Lenten season, foreheads marked with a cross of the dust to which we shall return at journey’s end. Solemn stuff. It is a…
No Pain, No Gain
“What are you doing to me!” my son yelled at the crucifix in his room. “I don’t think complaining about not eating between meals on a fast day to One who is nailed to a cross is a good tactic,” I replied. Yes, this conversation was about Ash Wednesday and the fast. I’d just reminded…
Lent: Crush the heads of invisible dragons
From the Melkite weekday services in Lent, known as the Presanctified Liturgy, the closing prayer: ALMIGHTY LORD who created the whole universe in wisdom; who by your ineffable providence and great goodness have brought us to these salutary days for the purification of our souls and bodies, for the control of our passions and for hope…
Father Hardon on Lent and his 7 Rules of Penance
Fr. Hardon gives the basis of penance as a Divine Law that each of us must do, or perish. We may voluntarily do penance now – with his 7 rules of penance – or forcefully have it done to us later.
Shades of Grey
The Lakeview neighborhood is an attractive area of Chicago’s north side. It seems as if it had always been a popular part of town. Though I didn’t realize it at the time we were dating, my future wife lived on Pine Grove and Diversey–the same street and block where Charlie Chaplin lived 80 years earlier. Typical of the last…
So What is Sexagesima Anyway? (the real secret to easy grace)
I never realized when I studied the Illiad and the Odyssey in latin in high school just how much my perceptions of words from latin were forever changed. I take for granted that latin words sound completely different to someone not familiar with latin. Recently, I was talking to someone and mentioned that Sexagesima Sunday was approaching. They…
Ash Wednesday–Station at S. Sabina
The traditional devotion of the Roman Lenten Stations (or the Stational Churches of Rome), allows us to unite our hearts and minds in our Lenten devotions with the Church of Rome as we spiritually visit the ancient churches and basilicas of the City (Stationalium Ecclesiarum Urbis visitatio). For your devotional life this Lent, consider making…
Lent Preparation: Mite Boxes and Almsgiving
Yesterday, I received in the mail a very simple little device: a mite box. Meant to be like a little donations box in the church, the mite box is perfect to be placed in the home during lent in an area where it will be seen as a way to remind us during lent that we…
