Lent always seems to suddenly appear out of nowhere and on Ash Wednesday we are scrambling for what we want to focus on this year! This Ash Wednesday is the 14th February which makes it all feel very close to Christmas, especially if you haven’t had a chance to put away your tree yet.
The Church, in the old calendar, has something of a ‘warning bell’ that Lent is coming built into the liturgy. It is the season that begins with Septuagesima Sunday, approx 90 days before Easter. It gradually sets the tone for this penitential time with prayers, readings and with the absence of the ‘Alleluia’ which doesn’t return until Easter. It is a period to give people time to discern with intention the penances they wish to take up. It is a bit of a shame that we don’t have this in our current form really, as it would be very useful to alleviate all the penance panic.
There are three areas that the Church traditionally asks us to look at during Lent:
Prayer,
Fasting,
and Almsgiving.
We will be posting in the next few weeks some reflections on these as well as other topics to help you with discerning what will help bring you personally closer to Christ this Lent. It’s not just a time to try a new diet!
For now we just wanted to share a couple of things to help you kick start your Lenten preparation, your own ‘warning bell’ if you will.
In Melbourne there will be an Anima Lenten Retreat this year on the 17th March at Nazareth House in Camberwell. Save the date for now and we will be posting more about it as we get closer. Let us know if you know of any other Lenten Retreats that you would like to let others know about.
We are also in the planning stages for a Online Lenten Retreat similar to our Online Advent Retreat of last year. If you didn’t sign up to our advent retreat and would like to sign up to this one please click here.
Blessed Is She always does a beautiful job of their prayer journals and this year it is called She Who Believes which focuses on women in scripture. It can be a little on the pricey side as the shipping costs are pretty high to Australia so they do have this digital option which helps with keeping the cost down. You could even go down to Office Works to get it printed and bound so it is less ‘screen time’ for yourself.
Take up and Read is a relatively new venture where they encourage women to read scripture and guide you in a journal style through lectio divina. They have a really wonderful journal for Lent called Above All. You would need to buy it soon to get it in time for Ash Wednesday from the US. The same would go for if you were ordering a hardcopy version of the Blessed Is She journal.
We hope that this post is helpful and that we can continue in supporting you as you grow in faith, hope and love of Christ.
~ Monica – From the Anima Team