Lent Reminders

Friends 

    Peace be with you. 

    Just as a reminder, this Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, a day of fasting and abstinence in the Catholic Church. This comes from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

    “Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are obligatory days of fasting and abstinence for Catholics. In addition, Fridays during Lent are obligatory days of abstinence.

For members of the Latin Catholic Church, the norms on fasting are obligatory from age 18 until age 59. When fasting, a person is permitted to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The norms concerning abstinence from meat are binding upon members of the Latin Catholic Church from age 14 onwards.”

    In other words, as a Church, if we are over 14 years old, we abstain from eating meat on Fridays during lent. But on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, we fast from one full meal if we are between 18 and 59 and we are healthy enough to do so. The way the church suggests doing this is to eat one full meal and two smaller meals that wouldn’t equal the larger meal, so that we effectively skip one meal. These are the practices we do as a community. We should be doing other acts of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as well, perhaps as a family and/or as individuals. For instance, for as many years as I can remember, my family has fasted from eating popcorn during lent. That may not sound like a big sacrifice but we eat popcorn nearly every Sunday night. It’s a tradition we’ve maintained since I was very young and, in general, the members of my family still do it. But not during lent. 

One challenge is not to confuse fasting and abstinence, however. Abstaining simply means skipping some aspect of a meal, in our case meat, whereas fasting means skipping a meal entirely. You can decide to fast as an individual on Fridays if you want but abstaining from meat is our communal, church, practice. It’s a group sacrifice that we do in solidarity with one another and with the poor. The old rationale was the poor can always get a fishing pole so fish was the food for the poor. I know that’s hard to believe when you come to our fish fry because the fish tastes so good but the good thing about our fish fry is that it brings us together as a community. We are literally abstaining together. 

Please know of my prayers for you. And pray for me too.