Lent Is Coming! Or Some Ideas To Get Ash Wednesday Ready…

Lent is coming, y'all! We are down to less than a week before Ash Wednesday when we need to have our Lenten Disciplines for this year set. So I'm sharing how our family creates a penitential atmosphere in our home during Lent and our philosophy for discerning the year’s sacrifices.

I know how annoying it can be to have to click through 15 different linked article to read someone’s views on a topic of interest. Thus I’m going to attempt to prevent that here by covering as much about our take on Lent as I can in this single post.

First off, the following are 4 overall action items to keep in mind for final days before Lent begins. I shared it earlier this week on Instagram and like to think of it as a bare-bones outline for “Lent Prep at a Glance.”

A few ways we can all prepare for Lent:

Make a family appointment for confessions.

Mortal sin kills ours souls. It is like the plaque that blocks the grace-filled blood from the arteries of our souls. And we don’t want any sin impeding the grace and merit of our Lenten penance. For most of us Lent is when we are able to offer up the greatest amount of sacrifice and we don't want to accidentally squander it because of poor planning. So give your parish a call if they don’t keep regular confession times. The Saturday before Ash Wednesday works well.

Pick and post all the family and individual penances.

For our family Lenten Disciplines consist of amendments of life, sacrifices to give up, and crosses to take up in their place. Post your family's list of all penances at home in a prominent place as a “Memento Lento” to remember them. (No, "Lento" is not the Latin word for Lent - Quadragesima is - but my kids love that it rhymes and the connection with Memento Mori ) The refrigerator gets a lot of traffic here and may be a good option for you family as well. Wearing a crucifix, or sacrifice bead bracelet can help keep your penances in mind each day too.

Set your family up for Lenten success by removing temptations while gathering encouragement and reinforcements.

Join in the spirit of Shrovetide (& Mardi Gras) by using up or getting rid of your decided sacrifice of food, media, etc... Likewise get all you will need for the crosses of more prayer, meditation, etc, you chose to replace them. Fasting during Lent was much stricter before laxity was slowly introduced beginning with the Reformation. In addition to meat, no animal product like eggs, diary, broth, or fat were widely allowed. Without refrigeration to preserve them, these foods were either consumed or wasted which led to all the Pre-lent partying and sweets to use up these luxuries.

Create a penitential atmosphere in your home with both visible and intangible reminders of the season. We want our children to fully participate in all the seasons of the Church, not only the easy days of fun and dessert. Just like eating a diet of only cake hurts our bodies, feasting without fasting and sacrifice hurts our souls. Things like swapping, secular music for sacred, enjoying Catholic books instead of other media, and having symbols of the passion, like a cross, nails, and crown of thorns, on the dinning table, are some ideas from our home.

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Lent is a time set aside for penance and more intentionally uniting our sufferings with those of Christ on the cross, crucifying our flesh in order to prepare our souls for the our greatest liturgical celebration of the year: Easter. This preparation, thought varying in length and how it was counted, was believed by the early saints Pope Leo the Great and Jerome to be a practice handed down by the disciples themselves. Our goal with this voluntary preparation through penance is detachment from things of the world in order that we may reorder our affections back to their proper hierarchy with God at the top, or as St. Augustine called the practice “Ordo Amoris.”

We can’t expect one Lent to make us perfect saints. But, if we take the season of Lent and the gift of penance seriously, each year we can build upon them through the successes and learn from the flops. Through the years we will grow in holiness leading to that constant recollection to God that we strive for. And really that is what the little, day to day sacrifices of Lent come down to: a striving towards God and not the perfection of checking off all the boxes. Don’t let the stumbles or falls of forgetting a penance make you stop running in the direction of sanctity and the beatific vision of God in heaven. Look to St. Paul, get up, shake off the dust, and finish the race.

Because we want every Lent to change our family’s souls permanently instead of for only 46 days, we are deliberate and specific about the family and personal disciplines we select. Each year our parish provides a Lent worksheet to help individuals determine their penances, and that is what we adapted for our own family’s discernment.

Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving have long been the exemplary forms of Christian penance going back to the scriptures. And in our home we make it a point to include all three types as part of our sacrifices in various ways. Additionally, our family and individual Lenten disciplines fall into 3 categories of kind: Amendments of Life, Sacrifices to give up, and Crosses to take up. Here is bit more clarification on what these groups are:

1. Amendments of Life

These penances are the permanent removal of things, activities, or habits that are separating us from God, through the cultivation of corresponding virtue. What is coming in between us growing closer to Him? This can be an habitual sin like envy where we need to unfollow a specific Instagram account that fuels ingratitude and in it’s place take time to thank God for his blessings in our life. Alternatively, an amendment of life could also be diligently putting stricter limits on bedtime so that getting everyone up and out the door for Mass is a peaceful given instead of a biweekly miracle.

2. Sacrifices to Give Up

For our family, sacrifices are the run of the mill type of Lenten penances most people are familiar with. They are the enjoyable foods, activities, etc... we give up as seasonal penances and that return with Easter. We look at what are some things that are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but to which we may have formed an unhealthy attachment. Some adult examples are not using the dishwasher, baking instead of buying bread, not eating out, and taking cold showers. However when it comes to individual sacrifices for our little ones, things like putting aside a favorite toy, picture book, board game, or food, are more typical choices. Remember that in addition to uniting ourselves to Christ’s passion, the major purpose of denying ourselves with penance is to help us build up our self control muscles in order to withstand greater temptations. The hope of more muscles, even spiritual ones, are a great motivator for all our little boys. On the occasions when they try to talk us into giving in to our penances just a little we remind them, “We’re saying no to little things now, so that we have the strength of big muscles to say no to big sins later.”

3. Crosses to Take Up

While many have probably participated in a combination of the two categories above, this final group is probable the least familiar. In short it is the mindful replacement of our chosen sacrifices with new actions that are more beneficial for our souls and their relationship with God. Our inspiration for this practice were Christ’s words from Matthew 16:24, “Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” paired with the aristotelian ideal that “nature abhors a vacuum.” When we get rid of something in our lives that space of time, or in our bellies, naturally longs to be filled. Having an act of charity in place of our sacrifices has really helped us stand firm in times of weakness. Of course this substitute can be decided upon in the moment of temptation, but we have had more fruitful Lents when we take a little time to think ahead and come up with an alternative to purposefully reach for and that objectively does us more good. These crosses may also be a permanent addition or temporary based on whether they are related to an amendment of life or seasonal sacrifice. Is there a religious devotion or pious practice that needs to be added to your family’s liturgy of life like the Daily Rosary or a making a Morning Offering? Lent is a perfect time to add these in place as a cross for one of those amended poor habits from above. Some simple examples of other crosses are meal planning and grocery shopping for meatless meals in lieu of scrambling for something in the pantry the first Friday of Lent, packing a salad for Wednesday lunch instead of trying to find a meatless meal out, picking out a few religious audiobooks or picture books for afternoon quiet time to stand in for the usual music, or added prayers - like the seasonal Marian antiphon - before bedtime when we often check our email one more time for the day.

Now all that nitty gritty of differentiation is fine and good and helpful when discerning an approach to Lent, but what about the traditional penances of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? More specifically how do they fit into the context of busy family life? In our house these fall into our annual family penances that make up the look and feel of Lent within our home and add to the overall penitential atmosphere we try to foster during the season.

As I mentioned earlier we shape the penitential atmosphere in our home during Lent with both things that we can physically see and the daily activities we do as reminders of the season. Some of the visuals we use are the Memento Lento of our Lenten Disciplines on the refrigerator, the same violet color for our tablecloth and mantle family altar decorations as the Church's liturgical color for Lent, related quotes on sacrifice or the Passion from the saints, burlap as a reminder of the Biblical penance of sackcloth and ashes, calendars or countdowns to mark the 40 days, and life-like recreations of the implements used for the crucifixion of Christ including a wooden cross, and a life-size crown of thorns and nails for the dinning table. (I'm listing these all to help y'all but just as much to jog my poor memory too.)

In the traditional and Ordinariate calendars, though it was removed from the New calendar in 1969, there is a liturgical season called Shrovetide. It is a 3 Sunday span to make preparations for Lent, seek our confession, and cement the Lenten Disciplines for the present year. In our home each of these weeks is devoted to discerning the inclusion of its own penance of prayer, fasting, or almsgiving for the coming Lent. Splitting the planning up helps me not be overwhelmed with possibilities and be more realistic with what we will actually be able to stick to for the whole season.

When it comes to the intangible aspects of our home's penitential atmosphere, the activities that mark our Lenten days are mainly forms of prayer, fasting, and, almsgiving with a few pious practices as well. I've separated what we've done in the past by type. And to be clear, and hopefully encouraging, we don't do all of these devotions every year. It changes depending on our family's season of life: are we packing for a move, whether we have a new baby, if the kids are all healthy, etc.

Prayer:

We have said different prayers throughout our Lenten days as crosses taken up for other things. Some we already knew while others had to be taught to the kids. Don't be discouraged if a prayer you want to include is new to your family, prayer is not more efficacious because it is memorized. And in the years we have to pare down to just one type of penance, as the most important of all 3, adding prayers is what we always choose to keep .

Friday Lenten Votive Masses
Friday Stations of the Cross
Bedtime Ave Regina Caelorum
Dinnertime Hail Queen of Heaven (English Ave Regina Caelorum)
Breakfast teaching of the Morning Offering
St. Clare's Litany of the 5 Wounds
Sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary
The Passiontide Rosary
St. Bridget of Sweden’s 7 Sorrows daily devotion
The Divine Mercy Chaplet
Bedtime teaching of examination of conscience

Fasting:

St. Gregory the Great describes the traditional Lenten Fast as “a title of the whole year." And St. Thomas Aquinas had a whole section devoted to the spiritual necessity of fasting and how it is the best way to get all our passions under control in his Summa Theologiae. In the Matthew 17:20 Christ also lauds fasting by explaining to the disciples that certain demons are, "... not cast out but by prayer and fasting." My point here is that fasting is a virtuous, spiritually efficacious penance that all healthy Christians should endeavor to do. However... with nurturing an unborn baby or nursing a new baby every Lent of our marriage, our family fasting has been less than ideal for my Thomist heart. Even at its strictest observance during the middle ages with black fasts, where eating didn't happen until 3pm and no meat was included, the Church has _never_ called mothers in the family way or nursing to fast. Therefore at this point, with the ages of our children, all we can consistently do is choose from penances like the following:

making simple, austere meals, like soup for Friday supper
fast and abstain from meat on the 2 currently required days of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. (1 full meal and 2 collations - snacks - for those 18 - 69 years for fasting and 14 year for abstinence)
cut out snacks
give up my Town Day Dr. Pepper
say no to second helpings
pass on sweet treats when it’s not a Solemnity
drink only water
continue to forgo meat on Fridays
spouses go meatless on Wednesdays

Almsgiving:

When you're broke as a joke this category gets creative with corporal works of mercies and tithes of talents and time. For us, part of this is going through our home with a heart to give away what we don't need, so that it can bless others. We use Philippians 4:8 as our guide in this process. "For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy, whatsoever lovely, whatsoever of good fame, if there be any virtue, if any praise of discipline, think on these things."

Another way set aside to help the kids with almsgiving is similar to our Advent Christkindl Crib. Here instead of their acts of charity providing hay to soften to Christ's manger, each voluntary act of charity let's them give a penny alm to our Sacrifice Jar. Like Christ's multiplication of the loaves and fishes and our little sacrifices when united with His Passion, on Easter the pennies are multiplied into dollar bills. Finally to continue the giving through Eastertide, and because we don't want our children seeking an earthly reward for their good works when our treasure should be stored up in heaven, they don't get to keep the money for themselves but rather go on special trips to pick out and deliver food to the sisters of our local Carmelite Convent.

Pious Devotions:

These are the crosses we take up that also help give our home a penitential atmosphere and make the season memorable for our children, but that don't necessarily fit into the categories of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.