In my youth Lent meant giving up favorite foods like bread or chocolate. Catechism taught that fasting and deprivation of something really enjoyable was a good show of Faith.

As time passed I turned to daily praying of the Stations of the Cross, but after a few years the daily repetitions turned into a rote exercise that didn’t feel like I was fulfilling the necessary obligation.

This year I have been doing small daily mediations. One from a booklet provided by our priest Father Bart, another from the Rohr Institute and a daily inspiration that arrives to my inbox daily.

Father’s book is written by Henri J.M. Nouwen, considered to be one of the greatest spiritual writers of our time, Richard Rohr is a priest and the inspirational sayings are interdenominational.

On one day last week Nouwen asks “Can we drink the cup?” Then explains that “drinking our cups means fully appropriating and internalizing what each of us has acknowledged as our life, with all its unique sorrows and joys. And we do this by “listening in silence to the truth of our lives, as we speak in trust with friends about ways we want to grow and as we act in deeds of service”.

Rohr says “Your image, your de facto, operative image of God lives in a symbiotic relationship with your soul and creates what you become. Loving people, forgiving people have always encountered a loving and forgiving God. Cynical people are cynical about the very possibility of any coherent or loving Center to the universe. When you encounter a truly sacred text, the first questions are not “Did this literally happen just as it states. Does my church agree with this? Who is right or wrong here” These are largely ego questions, they try to secure your position, not questions that help you go on a spiritual path of faith and trust. They constrict you, whereas the purpose of the Sacred is to expand you.”

One inspirational message by John Wesley states, “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can, at all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can”.

I love these daily bits of education that touch body and soul and “expand” my thinking. Giving time to meditating dares me to truly change the way I think and react to people and life in general.

It’s not an easy adjustment; drawing inward and outward discipline is hard. I would rather depend on the easy, learned way of thinking and behaving.

Giving up my favorite food was so much easier, saying daily prayers not difficult at all. But actually thinking about what matters in life spiritually takes energy especially if I am to do it honestly and then truly live what I learn.
It wouldn’t be a real Lenten journey if I couldn’t put into practice what it is I want to do.

But as a flawed human being it would be ever so much more pleasurable if I were able to instead write about how disappointed I am at people who are continuously critiquing me and looking for ways to show the community what a mistake they made in voting for me and what a terrible job I am doing representing our town.

However, I am going through this Lenten period working diligently to alter my thought processes so instead I will say that I will continue to learn, continue to care, continue “to do all the good I can, by all the means I can, in all the ways I can, in all the places I can, to all the people I can for as long as I can”. And at the end if I have not been able to make everyone happy, it won’t matter because if I have learned something so far in this life journey it is that although it is a goal I always aspire to it isn’t one that is truly possible.

At the end what is important is that my intentions are pure, that what I want for others is something good, that what I want for my town is a balanced direction that takes into consideration our past and our future and especially the present. That I don’t favour only one way of thinking, that I put everything in common sense perspective and that above all I am working for the good of the whole and that is what this Lenten journey is about, one that I hope to continue all year through if I have truly learned something.