Skip to main content

Oops

Sorry folks, forgot to blog yesterday!  Thankfully, I know that if I ask forgiveness, it will be granted.  I have been told that Sundays in Lent are "feast days", when you are allowed to eat normally, so it would have made more sense to have forgotten today.  I love the fact that the sabbath principle - resting on the 7th day - applies to Lent too.

I'm going on holiday for a few days (writing this in Ebbsfleet Station) and I'm not sure how much access to wifi I will have, so it may be an extended "feast".  In the meantime, folks, what are you giving up/taking up for Lent?  How is it going?  Or are you refusing to give up anything on principle?

Comments

  1. ReaderPenny27 March 2014 at 02:53

    Chris and I are both fasting 2 days a week for Lent, as part of the End Hunger Fast, and in solidarity with those who are hungry every day. But deciding what 'fasting' meant has been interesting. We settled on just 2 bread rolls, 2 cups of tea and as much water as we need. Which is luxury compared to lots of people, and yet still we struggle with our desire for more food come 9pm. It's an interesting discipline though, and leading to wider thinking about food, not wasting it, not spending so much on it, etc. on our non-fasting days.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Emma9 April 2014 at 14:56

    Penny, I only read this yesterday - somehow missed it amidst all the other notifications in my inbox. I'm really challenged by yours and Chris's discipline. I'm going to write about fasting in my blog post tomorrow. Personally I find it the hardest of the spiritual disciplines - even harder than silence (!). Let me know how you both get on.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple f...
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...
4 comments
Read more

Broken at the altar

A new drama series by Jimmy McGovern finished a couple of weeks ago on the BBC. Broken  tells the story of Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Kerrigan, a broken person ministering to other broken people in an unnamed northern city. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and I would encourage you to watch it - only be prepared for a few grim hours. I'll try to avoid spoilers here. Michael has a problem: whenever he celebrates Mass (which I think in the Roman Catholic Church is every day), he has flashbacks. At the moment of consecration - the point at which, Catholics believe, the bread and wine physically become for us the body and blood of Christ - he remembers every shameful thing he's ever done, and every shameful thing that has been done to him. We see his mother screaming at him that he's a dirty, filthy little boy; young women crying because he has treated them badly; mistakes he has made as a priest; people he has let down. His voice falters and he struggles ...
2 comments
Read more