Ash Wednesday is here, and—whoops!—you still don’t know what you’re doing for Lent. Not to worry! I asked my colleagues at Catholic Answers to share some ideas. What follows is a comprehensive list of their replies. Perhaps one will catch your eye!
Here are the responses (some edited for clarity):
- Really pray. For instance, I will repeat a bead or mystery on the Rosary if I haven’t meditated upon it because I was distracted.
- Suffer in silence. Pray for souls who attack, degrade, or mock you in person, in the silence of your heart. Don’t answer fools with their folly. In a word, hold your tongue for forty days.
- Give up alcohol.
- Give up listening to secular music.
- Give up social media.
- If leaving social media cold turkey is too hard, limit yourself to fifteen minutes per day across ALL platforms.
- Put your phone in greyscale.
- Wake up an hour earlier.
- Read the daily Gospel and pray before getting ready for work.
- Before watching TV/movie each day, read a spiritually efficacious book for a designated time. For instance, read for half the time you plan to watch. Before a ninety-minute movie, read for forty-five minutes.
- Consume Catholic media instead of watching your favorite TV show.
- Say a short prayer before a fun activity (a fasting of time rather than a fasting of food). I think there is something to be said for adding a spiritually efficacious act prior to normal activities instead of giving up the normal activity altogether.
- Give up earbuds. I left them on a plane and I quickly realized how I relied on them to escape. I’m replacing that action with more concerted prayer time—specifically the Litany of Humility and the Surrender Novena, at least in the beginning.
- Give up YouTube.
- Giving up wearing jewelry (except wedding rings).
- Give up clothes you never wear and donate them. I’m going for forty pieces of clothing.
- Fast according to the norms before 1966.
- Bring back the frustulum and the collation. (Check out canon 1251 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law).
- Make/renew the Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary.
- One easy one I’m doing is to pay attention to all the people that cross my path this day, and find a quality I can spot in them (truly they are the image of God). Even if I don’t mostly see it—there is something there. This morning, the cashier at McDonalds knows I appreciate his morning cheerfulness! It’s not just a complement—it is recognizing God’s image in the other!
- Pray the rosary on your commute.
- Ask others how you can pray for them.
- Gratitude-journaling each morning and night.
- Tune into Catholic Answers Live and share something you learned with a friend/family member.
- Reflect on an image of one mystery of the holy rosary each night. There are twenty so it’s a good marker for the halfway point of Lent before repeating.
- Don’t tell anybody what your penances are.
I leave you with one humble suggestion. If your gut reaction upon reading an idea is, “Oh man, I could never do that,” then . . . that’s probably the one you should do. That’s part of the spirit of fasting, after all: forcing ourselves to recognize that we depend far more on God than we do on music, caffeine, or Instagram.
Obviously, we shouldn’t do things that are actually harmful—don’t eat only bread and water for forty days if you’re pregnant, or give away forty pieces of clothing if you only own ten. But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, we all know the one legitimate pleasure that we cling to just a little too tightly.