Planning our Lent 2022

It's nearly Lent again.

I said in 2020 that we had the Lent to end all Lents - lockdown came in just as the season began, and continued way longer! - and all the ideas and practices we had looked forward to incorporating into our lives just went by the wayside as we adjusted to having to stay home all the time. In 2021, I wrote a whole series on Lent as I followed a set of meditations.

This year, Lent feels more familiar to us. We have settled into our Catholic life, living liturgically to some extent - certainly keeping Advent, and this now being our third Lent observed as a family; and we even celebrate some feast days and avoid meat on Fridays. Living in that liturgical rhythm is very much a process, a deepening each year as we go: and so it is with Lent.

So, my thoughts for this year...

I had planned to go TV free for Lent in 2020, which of course wasn't feasible when lockdown came, but this year it definitely is and we're going to do it.
In line with my recent drive towards simplicity in all things - possessions, activities, technology - we will really simplify life in this season. And as distractions are removed (not just for the kids: I plan to keep my phone off completely on Sundays, and on weekdays check it no more than 2-3 times a day!) we will allow ourselves to be bored, to be creative, to take things slowly.
With all this subtraction, there will be much free time which I expect will be a challenge at first, but a relief as we settle into a slower pace of life. There will also be additions, though: prayer. We used to pray a family rosary fairly regularly, but haven't done that in a while - for Lent, while it may not happen every single day, we'll try to get back to doing it more often than not. Also, a weekly visit to the Church to follow the Stations of the Cross will help us focus on the proverbial 'reason for the season'. Mass, of course, will also form part of our days as it has been - most mornings we catch an online Mass, but we will aim to catch at least one in-person weekday Mass per week.
Finally, a commitment not to shop except for essentials. I've recently done a lot of clothes shopping as the weather improves (living in hope to be wearing short sleeves before long!) but the truth is, I have everything I need and so do the children.

We have enough.

We are enough.

This season is a pulling back of distractions, in order to focus on what matters. We look forward to it. Before that, however, Pancake Day is coming and the kids certainly look forward to that!

Comments

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

Will Dig Life

Search This Blog