Our Lenten journey together as a parish begins Wednesday when we wear ashes to remind us of our mortality, acknowledge our sinfulness, and humble ourselves to allow the suffering, dying and rising of Jesus to become our focus for 40 days. The tendency is to set prayer, fasting, and almsgiving goals that we can’t sustain throughout Lent. I think it’s more important to set goals that are attainable and that leave us wanting to do more.
Allow me to make some suggestions about Lenten practices:
1. Keep it simple: go to daily Mass when you can
2. Keep it sacred: find that place in your home where it’s easy to pray
3. Keep it slow: pull back from an activity that’s not essential and just sit with God
4. Keep it smart: don’t give up something that’s going to cause you to be miserable
5. Keep it stark: give up something that enhances your longing for God
6. Keep it sin-free: go to Confession at the beginning of Lent to get a clean start
7. Keep it surprising: try different things like new ways of praying that keep the conversation with God going
The Saint Aloysius “Ashes to Easter” booklet will provide you with some wonderful opportunities for prayer, worship, confession, charity, service and more right here in the parish. It will be available in church next week and will be posted on our website. I recommend that you read the entire publication right away and highlight the things that you plan to attend.
One last thing. Consider a “Technology Fast” this Lent. It’s simple but challenging: You and the ones you love make a pledge to keep cell phones and other devices away from the table. Eat together, talk, play board games, color in coloring books, draw, paint, cook together, play cards, and enjoy being fully present to one another. The first one to go away from the table and pick up a phone does the dishes, takes out the trash, or performs some other not-so-fun task.
Our fasting from the cell phones that consume our day allows us to discover the God we find in silence and in those around us.
Lenten blessings,
Welcome to the Saint Aloysius! Our parish was founded in 1896 to serve the Catholic families that were settling in the greater New Canaan area.