Making the best of your LENT

“What are you giving up for Lent this year?” Answering this question has become a typical experience for the average practicing Catholic. Growing up, my family’s communal Lenten penance was giving up popcorn. Throughout the rest of the year, we would often go to vigil Mass Saturday evening, go grocery shopping afterwards, and make a stop at the local Blockbuster video store to rent a movie to watch together that weekend. We would suspend the movie practice during Lent because, let’s be honest, it’s no fun to watch a movie without popcorn!

As I grew older, especially during my seminary years, I came to a deeper understanding of Lenten spiritual practices. With the ease of access to online Catholic resources, it seemed that many other Catholics were also rediscovering the great treasury of the Church’s spiritual life. Now there are so many programs, apps, and books to aid Catholics in their Lenten disciplines. With the sheer number of resources available, how does one make the best of Lent? The answer to this question will be different from person to person and will require dedicated time in prayer. Nonetheless, the question is worth devoting time to so that our journey with Jesus in the desert can be more profound from year to year.

Lent is a natural time to hit the reset button on our New Year’s resolutions, so revisiting them is not a bad idea. However, it is important not to neglect the pillars of Lenten discipline: Prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Our New Year’s resolutions are normally intended to help us become better people, and these three pillars can help accomplish that goal. Prayer helps us to experience deeper communion with God. Fasting helps to distance us from whatever holds us back from being better Christians. Almsgiving helps us to be more aware of the needs of Christ’s body: The Universal Church. With that, let’s look at some suggestions to make this Lent the best one yet!

First, it is very important for us to set goals. If we do not have any idea of our destination, how can we possibly know where we’re going? Goals help us to visualize the personal growth we wish to achieve. However, we can’t just set any goals. Our goals must be realistic and manageable. If there’s one thing that prevents achieving any type of goal, it’s the failure to identify realistic expectations from unrealistic expectations. I find this to be the case especially for people who struggle with scrupulosity … and I’m one of them! Being overly scrupulous can rob us of both our sense of goodness as God’s creatures and the sense of freedom from sin and death for which our savior fought so hard. Sometimes, the change we wish to accomplish is so great that we bite off more than we can chew until we become so overwhelmed at the perceived lack of progress. It’s okay to dream big and have big goals, but we should identify smaller goals as steppingstones to accomplish the big goals.

Second, don’t let your penance turn you into a penance for others! One of my favorite tips about fasting comes from Jesus himself in the Gospel of Matthew: “And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites” (Matthew 6:16). Imagine if Jesus would have gone a step further and admonished us not to be dismal! This is easier said than done, of course. However, one of the purposes of Lent penances is to teach us both discipline and self-control, and these two themes recur constantly in the liturgy throughout the season. If your penances are making you irritable to those around you as opposed to making you better, then it may be necessary to reevaluate the penances you have taken upon yourself.

Speaking of reevaluation, this is another important aspect of the Christian spiritual life in general. Taking time to evaluate our lives is the goal of an examination of conscience. The church recommends this practice so much that she incorporates it daily into the Liturgy of the Hours during the office of Compline or Night Prayer. A necessary component of an examination of conscience is being honest both with God and with ourselves. No one likes admitting their faults, but repentance is a necessary part of being baptized into Christ’s life, death and resurrection. From there, we must be willing to make necessary changes. This requires flexibility on our part. Not only must we acknowledge our shortcomings, but we also have to accept them. To err is to be human after all. It is okay in our reevaluation of our penances to say to ourselves “this is not working.” That being said, we shouldn’t abandon our penances simply because of laziness. We should give as much effort to keeping our Lent disciplines as Gen Z-ers do to preserving their Snapchat streaks!

If we truly desire to accomplish everything mentioned above, it is extremely important that we be intentional about our Lenten disciplines. One of my favorite ways to help me achieve my own goals is using a planner. After all, as Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Using a planner does more than help us to schedule our day. A good planner can also help us to organize our goals, thoughts and so much more. The planner I use helps me to track the different areas of comprehensive fitness (physical, social, spiritual and mental), list blessings that I receive daily, and process both my successes and failures. To that end, finding the right planner can be a daunting a task as there are so many planners out there. Finding the planner that’s perfect for you will probably require some trial-and-error; it certainly did for me! Some suggested planners are the Blessed is She planners for women, Monk Manual and The Saintmaker.

Finally, I think it’s important to remember that Jesus’ own 40 days in the desert was a time of challenge and temptation. It was during this vulnerable time that Satan appeared to him with the intention of causing him to fall. As far as liturgical seasons go, Lent is absolutely a marathon. From the time it starts we want it to be over! However, just as with running an actual marathon, we can always find reasons to be grateful for the journey. Intense periods of challenges can become great sources of confidence to face the future because of what we’re able to accomplish in the present. As with everything else liturgical that we celebrate as Catholics, Lent is a special time for us to participate in the life of Christ. For it is by participating in his suffering and death that we are able to join him in his rising. We should strive to make each Lent better than the one before. Let’s make this year’s Lent the best one yet!

(Father Daniel Duplantis is associate pastor of the Cathedral of St. Francis de Sales in Houma.) BC