How do you prepare for Lent? Or does it involve little more than a glance at the calendar to notice a “holiday” has popped up at mid-week?
Over the past several days, I’ve been pondering doing things differently on this site. If I did, what would that involve? Most of the traffic here still comes from people looking for funeral and wedding readings. Planning for such takes place out of season and in.
For you regular readers, we’ll continue with documents. I have a pause planned for Ash Wednesday. The queue is set up to resume Thursday.
I hope to post more of the Reconciliation Lectionary, since those essays might be vaguely applicable to the season. If I can convince Fran and Liam to write a few, all the better.
I pondered a series on the 1988 Circular Letter Concerning the Preparation and Celebration of the Easter Feasts. It’s not a terribly long document, and if I planned it well, I could intersperse it along the ninety days when the content was relevant to the time described.
As long as we’re studying documents on that level, another thought would be to look at the 2000 Circular Letter on Penance. I heard from a few quarters way back then that parish clergy were speaking to bishops about letting things loosen up for form III as part of the observance of the jubilee year. We all know how that turned out, both the suggestion and the swarming back of people to confession in the years since.
Personally, I’ve also been watchful of the tone of my criticism on this site. You regular readers get something skewed from my real-life person. Obviously, I can be more outspoken and opinionated on this site compared to the pastoral setting. My internet presence is likely due to the combination of increasing pushback against Vatican II, combined with the need to be more circumspect (if not “pastoral”) in my day job.
Still, it is difficult to see the Church spin its wheels in futility when I think we could be accomplishing more. A lot of the snark you read here is reactive to the missed opportunities due to cowardice, immorality, cattiness, and general fear of getting out to the frontiers of faith.
I’m heading off to a long day at the parish, ranging from interviewing a prospective peer minister with my colleagues this morning to teaching a class on our parish’s series Catholicism 101.
Other Catholic media outlets offer a Lenten Reflection feature. I’m going to pray about that today. If it seems a good path to go, I may add a daily feature and program it for very early morning, so as to coincide for breakfast for our European visitors. Scripture, saints, music: whatever strikes me inspirationally.
Catholic Sensibility 