Keeping Holy Week Holy

Dear Theophilous,

It seems like only yesterday we were surprised by the fact that, yet again, Lent had snuck up on us, and we weren’t ready to make our Lenten sacrifice. Ash Wednesday was upon us, we hadn’t given Lent any thought, and we were left scrambling to decide what to sacrifice. We all know that nothing good comes when that happens, we fall back on the old standbys (chocolate, chips, …), which seem doomed to fail from the start – just like last Lent.

Here we are, 5 weeks later, and now Holy Week has snuck up on us. The holiest time of the year. Yet, if we have prepared for Holy Week the same way we have prepared for Lent (as in, not at all), then we can expect to get the same out of our Holy Week… nothing at all.

Like any major event in our lives – we need to plan ahead.

Since Holy Week is only a few days away, I thought to share a couple of ideas on how to make Holy Week a time of prayerful preparation for the great feast of Easter.

Easter Feast

Not only is Easter the greatest feast of the liturgical year, it is also a time for family and friends to get together to celebrate. Everyone loves a grand feast surrounded by loved ones, with laughter and merriment as the sound track, and the egg hunt as the opening act. A day of this magnitude requires lots of planning and preparation – get as much done beforehand as possible. Having everything ready to go before Holy Wee begins will not only allow you to relax and enjoy the great feast, but it will also allow you to concentrate on the totality of Easter from Passion to Resurrection.

There is no possible way to meditate on the great gift of the Eucharist at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday if one is scurrying around town for last minute items before all the stores shut down for the weekend. You will not be able to ponder on the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross if your mind is mulling over Sunday’s menu. Finally, if there is any Sunday you should linger on your knees in thanksgiving and wonderment at the God’s greatness instead of rushing home to get the ham in the oven, it’s Easter Sunday.

Penitential Preparation

As Catholics, we are called to avail ourselves of the sacrament of Reconciliation at least once a year. Normally, it is strongly encouraged to make a good Confession during the season of Lent. Many parishes will organize an evening penitential service, with a liturgy of the word, followed by Confession, where the pastors of neighbouring parishes will come to help out (and I’m sure the favour is returned). Annually the Archdiocese of Toronto will have a Day of Confession, where parish priests will spend the majority of the day in the Confessional, negating the excuse that regularly scheduled Reconciliation doesn’t fit into your routine.

If for whatever reason you haven’t made it to Confession this lent (like myself), make plans to get there this weekend – times are usually posted on your parish website.

Prayer Plan

Life is busy enough without throwing a major holiday into the mix. I find that if I don’t have a plan for a daily prayer routine, I’ll find myself dropping exhausted into bed without having once stopped to talk with our Lord. If we really want to take away some spiritual nourishment this Holy Week, then it’s time to step it up a notch.

A few ideas of how to supplement your prayer life during Holy Week might include:

Ø  Praying the Sorrowful Mysteries daily

Ø  Daily meditation on the Stations of the Cross (or just a few each day)

Ø  Praying the Divine Mercy chaplet at 3pm daily

The idea is to focus on Christ’s sacrifice for us so as to make the magnitude of His Passion and Resurrection that much more powerful.

Family Support

Our faith is a family affair, and it’s our responsibility to get our spouses, children, parents, brothers & sisters, etc. to heaven. With this in mind, we need to keep them in the loop of our Holy Week plans. First and foremost, this is to encourage them to grow closer to Christ through a deeper meditation on his Passion and Resurrection. Of equal importance, is to communicate these plans to those closest to you who will be affected by them so that they can be respectful of your own preparation for Good Friday and Easter. There are enough distractions going on in the preparations for the greatest feast of the year, they don’t need to be complicated by any petty disputes that arise from miscommunications and misunderstandings.

The seven days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday are meant to be a flurry of spiritual activity and not dedicated to a worldly business. It is a time to prepare our souls for the magnitude of Christ’s Passion, and not simply our homes for the multitudes who will come for dinner. By being ready for Holy Week, we will be able to properly meditate upon the greatness of Christ’s sacrifice and His triumph over death.

May you and your family have a prayerful and prayer-filled Holy Week that truly merits its name.

Lenten Sacrifice = Easter Habit

Dear Theophilous,

Sometimes I think it’s worse than Christmas… Every year Lent sneaks up on me, and I feel unprepared; left scrambling to put together a Lenten sacrifice. Forced to make a decision on Ash Wednesday, I either fall back on traditional favourites (chocolate & booze), or I try to become an aesthetic monk overnight. Much like the Christmas gifts purchased on December 24^th, these last minute Lenten ideas are doomed to fail from the start.

So, with a week to go before Ash Wednesday, I’m beginning in earnest to think about how best to use Lent to bend my own stiff-necked will towards God’s. As I have done the past few years, I want to build my sacrifice on the 3 Pillars of Lent: Prayer, Fasting and Sacrifice. And like every year, I have a hard time figuring out where to start.

This year, however, as my preparation for Lent has been percolating in the back of my mind over the past couple of weeks, the Holy Spirit has continually whispered that I need to use Lent to look beyond Easter. At first this idea seemed silly, Lent is a time to prepare for Easter, and the sacrifice is supposed to end with the greatest feast in the Catholic calendar. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Lent is supposed to be a life changing experience; and how can our sacrifice have any value if we simply slip back into our old habits once the 40 days are over?

So this year I am planning my Lent with an eye to beyond Easter. By leaning on the Three Pillars of Lent, I hope to make changes that after 40 days will become habit.

Prayer

As those who have followed this blog over the years know, I’m quite honest about how my prayer life tends to ebb and flow like ocean tides. There are times (weeks and months even) where I can be on a spiritual high; while there are other points in the year when I beat myself up for letting my prayer life slip. I find this ebb and flow of prayer life tends to follow the seasons, and it’s during the dark days of winter that I fall into the dark days of my soul. I need an extra push to get out of bed before the sun rises in the morning, as well as a (not so) gentle nudge to pull on boots and parka to walk the dogs and say my Rosary. It’s as though my prayer get-up-and-go got-up-and-went with the end of the Christmas season.

Although Lent is meant to be a season of barren preparation to mirror Christ’s 40 days in the desert, I see it as a season of renewal in my prayer life. Lent is a time to take up once again all of those prayer promises I have made throughout the year, yet have let wane. I won’t go out of my way to start any new prayer practices during Lent; I’ve already done that sporadically throughout the year. What I will do, however, is make good on those promises, hopefully making prayer habits that will endure day 41 and beyond.

Fasting

Much like my prayer life, when it comes to fasting I all too often make promises that I can’t keep, so Lent is also a time of renewal of lost habits along with a season specific sacrifice. Recently, I have tried to take on the Early Christian tradition of fasting on both Wednesdays and Fridays – something that is easy enough to do while busy at work; an all-together much more difficult beast to tame once I get home or on holidays.

Although fasting can take on many different forms, and the rules put out by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops are probably purposefully vague (“Fasting means cutting down on the amount and richness of our food and drink”), on days of fasting I try to limit myself to 2 small meals (usually breakfast and lunch) and one medium-sized meal (dinner). My Achilles heal is snacking. Getting home from school ravenous, I’ll look to the cupboard to see what can tie me over until dinner. The problem is, once the first snack is munched, the floodgates open and I can’t stop until I feel guilty having taken seconds at supper. The only strategy I find that works is to avoid the temptation to sin, keeping the cupboards bare.

The other challenge I find during times of fasting are weekends and holidays. There is always that awkward moment when visiting friends or family when I need to explain why I’m not eating, or at least not eating as much as I usually do. As I look forward into lent, however, I see this as a chance to witness and explain the faith, as well as an opportunity to strengthen my Christian resolve. If I can be strong is something as small as fasting, I’ll be all the more ready when God calls on me for a bigger sacrifice.

Almsgiving

Charitable giving seems like the forgotten Lenten Pillar. Everyone is so focussed on what they are giving up for Lent, they forget that there can be a positive side to this season of sacrifice, and we can do something to help our fellow human. In past years my Lenten resolve has been to put a certain sum of money into the poor box on a weekly basis. Happily, this has become a habit that has extended beyond the Lenten season, so I can no longer lean on this as part of my Lenten sacrifice. So now I need to get creative…

Having prayed on this aspect of my Lent for this year, I have thought to link my Lenten fasting to almsgiving. Lately, as a family, we have become more and more susceptible to the habit of eating out. Over busy and over tired, we will quickly fall for the quick solution of eating out instead of preparing even the simplest of meals at home. This year (with my family’s cooperation, of course), I would like us to fast from eating out, and using the money we save (which has the potential to be considerable) for almsgiving. Hopefully this too will become a habit once Lent is over.

So, my dear Theophilous, I encourage you to take this last week before Lent begins to prayerfully think about the sacrifices of Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving that you want to undertake. When preparing for your Lent this year, have and eye to beyond Easter so that your Lenten Sacrifice can become an Easter Habit.

Roll up the Rim for Lent

Dear Theophilous,

There can be no virtue without temptation.

In his brilliance St. Augustine gave us many quotes, but lately this has become one of my favourites. Each time the notion to sin pops to mind, I silently whisper this mantra, and I feel my will strengthened. If I’m to be honest, though, there are times when I need to shout it to save myself.

In a similar vein, it has been an ongoing joke in our home over the years that we know when Lent has arrived, because it’s also time to Roll up the Rim to Win!

People from across Canada will understand the reference to the annual promotional event by the nation’s best-loved coffee shop (and cultural institution). Through February and March every year, Tim Hortons restaurants offer their clients the chance to win one of millions of prizes (ranging from free coffees and donuts to a free car) by simply looking under the rim of their throwaway paper cup.

The inside joke in our home is that this promotion always coincides with the penitential season of Lent – a time when Catholics are called to cut back and sacrifice as a way to prepare for Christ’s Passion and enjoin ourselves to His suffering on the Cross. Timmies seems set on derailing our efforts as our next up will be the big winner, and if it isn’t, at least we’ll be assuaged by the fact that we’ve won a free sweet.

What’s a poor, penitent Catholic who’s trying to cut back on their caffeine or calorie intake to do?

There is no virtue without temptation.

The suburban Catholic high school where I teach has come up with an ingenious way to take part in this yearly slice of Canadiana while still heeding Christ’s call to the Corporal Works of Mercy. There’s a basket in the main office for winning coffee cup rims, which are then donated to a local homeless shelter. Each week a dozen or so coffees and donuts go to those who need them most. In the years that the school has been collecting winning rims, no one has ever donated a car, but I’m sure the shelter would never say no to the winner keeping the car and making a cash donation of 10% of its worth.

If there isn’t such a basket at your workplace yet, dear Theophilous, I would challenge you to put one out. Not only would the excited water cooler chatter of who’s coffee was a winner continue, there would be the added joyful glow of know the winnings were going to those who need it while our Lenten sacrifices remain intact.

Getting Ready for Lent

Dear Theophilous,

Special events have a habit of sneaking up on us. There never seems to be enough time to get ready for the dinner party we’re throwing Saturday evening. As a guy, Valentine’s Day (the secular version) is my annual downfall. There’s also the quintessential Advent question: “Are you ready for Christmas?”

The panic that surges as these events approach is usually the result of a lack of foresight and preparedness. And each time I’m in the frenzied thick of getting things done last minute, I promise myself that next time will be different.

Every year, Lent has a way of sneaking up on me as well.

Maybe it’s because Easter is a moveable feast (and thus Ash Wednesday and Lent are never the same date). Perhaps it’s because life is hectic this time of year with the transition of semesters at school. It could be that the dark doldrums of winter have me thinking of far-off places and not the liturgical seasons.

I wake up one morning and realize it’s Ash Wednesday and that Lent has begun. My mind races with questions such as What to give up? Or How to fast with a fridge full of food? And most importantly, How will my life be different this Lent from years gone by? I’ve found through the years that my rocky start to Lent has my efforts sputter out long before Holy Week.

With Lent 2016 only 2 weeks away (or closer, depending on when you read this), I’ve begun to prepare myself for this penitential season, and I’m sharing them here in the hopes that you will avoid the pitfall of not being prepared and then chastising yourself for a Lent unfulfilled.

Meditating on my Lenten Sacrifice

Lent is a time of penitential sacrifice when we traditionally give something up for the 40 days before Easter. Like many, I don’t usually give this any thought until Ash Wednesday. I end up scrambling to think of a suitable sacrifice, trying to steer clear of usual’s such as chips, chocolate or alcohol. The whole point of our Lenten sacrifice is to better ourselves (so I tell my students that giving up homework is not a valid choice); it has to be sacrificial; it has to hurt. I’m just beginning to think of my sacrifice for this year, and traditionally, it’s not something I share with others – the Father knows.

Preparing the Fast

My waistline is proof that I love cold turkey. That said, I hate going cold turkey. Traditionally we are called to fast throughout Lent (1 main meal and 2 small meals a day – no snacking), with more concerted fasts on Wednesdays and Fridays; complete fasts on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; plus the abstention from meat on all Friday’s during Lent. I need to work up to lowering my calorie intake. I also know my weaknesses when it comes to fasting (I’m never more hungry than when I’m purposefully fasting). The hardest part of the fast for me is avoiding temptation, so there will be a concerted effort over the next couple of weeks to empty the cupboards, keeping on hand only what is necessary. It’s no wonder that the day before Lent begins is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) – it’s a gluttonous affair to clear the larder.

Clearing the Calendar

Lent isn’t meant to be easy. It involves self-sacrifice as we meditate on the sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross. Thankfully Lent is not a season we are meant to go through alone. Knowing that we need help on our journey, many parishes offer different events to help focus our attention on Christ; join our suffering to His; and take comfort in the company of our fellow Christians. Check your parish bulletin or website for the dates and times for Stations of the Cross, Eucharistic Adoration and Poverty Meals. These are all great ways to sustain your efforts through the 40 days of Lent, so make room for them on your calendar now before other things come up and you get to Easter wishing you had set the time aside.

Throughout your Lenten journey, dear Theophilous, remember that you are not alone. Remember that Christ walks with you always. When the road seems hard, think of the path to Calvary. Know that I am praying for you, and I humbly ask for your prayers in return.