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. 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. 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...

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...

Do not fear

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash     When I was 15 years old there was a particularly unpleasant murder which was splashed all over the news. The culprits were identified, given long prison sentences and, many years later, new identities upon their release. I remember watching news footage of the defendants being brought to trial in a prison van, angry crowds screaming abuse as it drove past. My mother's perspective on this was interesting. "We all have darkness inside us," she explained. "It's easier to scream at it in someone else than to face our own." Today is All Hallows' Eve: for the past week, pumpkins, skeletons, witches and ghosts have loomed at us out of shop windows, from supermarket shelves and strung up as decorations outside homes. Tonight it reaches its peak as many of us, adults and children, dress up in the things we most fear. Axe murderers, which come to mind whenever we're alone in the house and hear a creak on the stai...