To Pray
We are so busy each day in our life with work, family, and achieving our goals. These are all good and important things, but the trouble is that we rarely raise our minds and hearts to God.
Prayer cultivates a friendship with God. We can’t leave behind everything else in our lives—in fact, all of that should be related to God—but prayer is explicitly tuning into our friendship and relationship with God.
What’s the best way to improve our prayer? Thomas Merton, the spiritual writer, tells us to simply “take the time”.
During Lent we can step up our frequency and intensity of prayer. Suggestions: praying the Rosary, praying the Jesus prayer (repeating over and over “Lord, Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner “), talking about your day to God, asking for His help and mercy, going to Mass during the week, reflecting on the gospel, or anything like that.
To Fast
Reminder: Catholics are not Puritans, Gnostic, or dualists. Catholics do not despise the body, and Catholics do not think the natural desires for food and drink and sex and pleasure are bad things. So fasting has nothing to do with this.
Learning from Thomas Merton; he compares the pleasures of food, drink and sex, like kids who want what they want when they want it—”Give it to me.. I want this and I want it now..”.
Good parents will caution the desires of their kids and control them, so this is what we can do for ourselves with fasting.
Food, drink and sex are naturally good desires for us precisely because they are desires for life. They keep us and our species alive, so they are very powerful.
Fasting allows us to discipline these desires so that the deeper hungers of the heart and the soul can emerge.
To Give Alms
Giving alms is a concrete way to express love. Love, the greatest of the theological virtues, means to will the good of the other. By giving to the poor, we are expressing love in a really strong way. This doesn’t just include helping the economically poor, but also to any neighbor or anyone around us who is in need of help.
Even at Church, the collection is actually an essential part of the Mass. It’s an opportunity to give alms as we prepare to join in the sacrifice of Christ at the time of the Eucharist.
During Lent we are called to give alms by helping through service and/or increasing our generosity to others. We can do this by tipping higher at restaurants, carrying loose change or bills specifically to give to people who are begging on the street, setting up a jar to put money in every time you leave the house that will end up going to charity, or really any way that reminds you of your obligation to the poor.
Focus on one of the the corporal works of mercy:
- Feed the hungry
- Give Drink to the thirsty
- Shelter the homeless
- Visit the sick
- Visit the prisoners
- Bury the dead
- Give alms to the poor
Do not allow yourself to come to the end of Lent and say that you didn’t do much. Don’t let that happen. Pray, fast, and give alms.
Friends, we come now to one of the most important periods of the liturgical year: Lent. During this time of preparation, the Church asks us to cultivate a deeper friendship with God through prayer, to control and reorder our desires for physical goods through fasting, and to show our love in the concrete way of giving alms.