We stand at the advent of Passiontide–that often forgotten, but intense time that occurs just prior to the beginning of Holy Week. In some churches, all the statues and crucifixes are covered, and the absence of these signs make our worship space seem even more barren and forsaken. But that’s actually the point. Passiontide is about stripping away anything, even good things like a crucifix, that might prevent us from being open to entering into the darkness and hopelessness and abandonment of the Way of the Cross. And the Way of the Cross is becoming more apparent with each passing […]
Lenten disciplines
4 posts
Recently I wrote an article for the One Voice, my diocesan newspaper, about Curtis Martin’s latest book, Making Missionary Disciples: How to Live the Method Modeled by the Master. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Curtis, he is the founder and chief executive officer of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS) which began two decades ago in January, 1998 as a pilot program at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, with two staff members and twenty-four students. Through God’s grace, FOCUS is now on more than one hundred fifty campuses with over 700 missionaries and supporting staff. Primarily […]
We are now a week into the Lenten season, I am frequently hearing from those around me, “I just can’t seem to stick to my Lenten resolutions.” I can easily identify with this frustration since I have often struggled with this issue myself in the past, but I wasn’t quite sure exactly why that was. My insight about this began to come about as I read an article entitled, “Why is it So Hard to Stick to Good Habits?” by James Clear, author of the book, Atomic Habits. In this article, he talks about how we tend to want to do life-changing things, but we […]
Oh, No! I Ate Meat On A Friday of Lent! So did I just ruin my entire Lent? In a word, no. No, your Lent has not been ruined. In fact, I would contend that you have actually been given an opportunity to have an even MORE grace-filled Lent than if you hadn’t eaten meat on a Friday. How so? Will get back to this in a moment. First though, we need to do an interior check on whether we actually forgot about not eating meat on a Friday of Lent, or whether we intentionally chose to “forget.” If your […]