It’s Lent again! I love the season of Lent because it is the way to the cross, the Via Crucis, and Good Friday is my favorite day of the year.
Good Friday is when I sorrow/happy cry through the experience of what God did for us so that our original created state, which was very good, could be “surpassed only by the glory of the new creation in Christ. (Catechism, 374)”
I love that the Lenten journey changes as I mature and that I have been blessed to live this journey long enough to look back. From giving up sweets, to curbing cussing in high school, to volunteering more, to eating only three foods (eggs, cheese, and tortillas), I have worked on myself, given my own personal sacrifice and allowed God to use this time to help me grow. Lent allows us to meet God where we are and offer a sacrifice that is personal.
I also feel that as I get older, I have a greater sense of urgency to refine myself, to slough off the things of the world so that I can confidently say I am prepared to meet my maker. Jesus tells us in the Gospels several times that we will not know the hour that death will come. I don’t want to find myself still working out a kink if I could have used my time to prepare my heart and keep my lamp lit as I await the Bridegroom.
This urgency puts a greater emphasis on my Lenten activity. What if this was my last Lent? What would I work on if this was my last season to prepare my soul for eternal life?
With that in mind, it was a little harder to find something this year 😹. We don’t watch really any tv, I’m not on social media much anymore, and we don’t eat sweets regularly. Daily prayer and tithing are staples for the entirely of my adult life 🙏🏾. We are going to confession regularly (even when I get yelled at (literally) for my kids being irreverent), praying the rosary regularly and attending daily Mass when I can, which is such a blessing! But what I do have, my most precious commodity, is time.
So this year I’m working on increasing time in silence with God. This isn’t time spent talking to God, but rather sitting with the Spirit and being a blank slate for His words. I set a timer on my phone so that I am not distracted by managing that and off I go. I’m starting with 5-10 minutes a day and hoping I can get to a half hour or even one hour by Easter. As St. Francis de Sales said:
Everyone of us needs half an hour of prayer every day, except when we are busy—then we need an hour.
St. Francis de Sales
I’m also doing the Hallow Lenten reflections and the focus on humility really resonates with me. I’ve dug out the litany of humility and will be concluding my silence with it. If there’s anything about being raised in this culture that I wish I could change, it is the feeling of entitlement that things would go my way, the desire to remove all suffering in my life, the feeling that others wrong me and I am the victim, and the feeling that I deserve justice or am better than others for whatever reason. It’s something I want to start digging myself out of and hopefully instill in my children before that attitude of arrogance, of pride, of deserving, or superiority, is cemented into the foundation of their being.
I wish all the best in their growing and journey, and that we become as “Holy as we should”!
Let us pray:
Litany of Humility
O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, Hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed,
Deliver me, Jesus.
From the desire of being loved…
From the desire of being extolled …
From the desire of being honored …
From the desire of being praised …
From the desire of being preferred to others…
From the desire of being consulted …
From the desire of being approved …
From the fear of being humiliated …
From the fear of being despised…
From the fear of suffering rebukes …
From the fear of being calumniated …
From the fear of being forgotten …
From the fear of being ridiculed …
From the fear of being wronged …
From the fear of being suspected …
That others may be loved more than I,
Jesus, grant me the grace to desire it.
That others may be esteemed more than I …
That, in the opinion of the world,
others may increase and I may decrease …
That others may be chosen and I set aside …
That others may be praised and I unnoticed …
That others may be preferred to me in everything…
That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should…