What is your Lenten Practice?

My native part of the world when I was growing up - Southwest of Cleveland, Ohio - was significantly Roman Catholic territory.  Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Slovenian, Slovakian, Romanian, Hungarian…all these Catholic kids whose families had settled in the suburbs after leaving the old ethnic neighborhoods in Cleveland proper.   Lots of them went to parochial school but many went to public school too.   And so a common public school lunchroom conversation in my childhood at this time of the year involved, of all things, a conversation about Lent.  

“What are you giving up for Lent this year?” One kid would ask another.   The answers were sort of inevitable for a bunch of elementary and middle schoolers: chocolate, soda, video games, TV.   As a non-Catholic, I kept quiet.   But now, as an Episcopalian adult, this is a question I find myself asking every year.   What am I giving up for Lent?   Or, to put it slightly differently, how will Lent be special this year?

The Lenten season begins on Ash Wednesday - as our foreheads are smudged with ashes and we contemplate our mortality, how we are all of us “dust, and to dust we shall return.”   In light of our mortality and to prepare for Easter, we take a good hard look at our lives.   How are we living?  Where are we living as God would have us live?  And where are we falling down or falling short?   What can we do better?   A priest I used to work with didn’t give anything up for Lent, he took something on.   Practicing in these 40 days a new habit of holiness or wholeness, attempting to move more in the direction of God and God’s purposes, to follow Jesus anew in practical terms, through a fresh something or other that he would try to incorporate into his days.

Our bishop has set out a spiritual focus for our diocese this year: Christian connection.   To connect and to connect more deeply with our fellow Christians in the diocese.  And I wonder if we might number it among our own Lenten disciplines this year.   To seek to connect with those who walk the way of Jesus with us.   To make a point of calling, emailing, texting, having lunch or coffee with our fellow parishioners here at Saint Elisabeth’s.   Seeking to get to know someone you don’t know very well or to go deeper in conversation with someone you do.   And beyond our parish perhaps this Lent you’ll seek to connect with our fellow Episcopalians in the Diocese of Chicago.  Perhaps you’ll join me and the St. Elisabeth’s team at the Leadership Summit in March or come with me to worship with our friends from the Evanston Deanery at the Easter Vigil. 

Whatever you’re giving up or taking on this Lent, may your practice draw you ever closer to God and closer to those around you as we strive to journey together following in the footsteps of the Lord.

Faithfully, The Rev. Adam Spencer, Rector