Lent

In the traditional practice of Lent we fast, give alms and pray, but what does that mean to today’s Catholics and their kids? Lent is the time when we as Catholics are urged to make room in our lives for God. As our priest said in Mass recently, if you do not come out of lent a better Catholic than when you entered it, you let the opportunity and the point of Lent go to waste in your life. It is during Lent that we can empty our lives of the things that are not necessary or the little pleasures that can lead us to sin and away from God. We empty these things from our lives and fill the space that they took up with things that draw us closer to God, like prayer, spiritual formation and education. this is really the “fasting” part of lent, along with the physical fasting it is the fasting from unnecessary things that helps us to create new and better routines that are more fulfilling ang pleasing to God. It is the spring cleaning for our souls.

We have tried to prepare our children for Lent by having them really look at sin and what it is in their lives. The commandments are great, but they are not very specific. Our kids will probably never have to confess a murder, by way of knife or Gun, but this does not exclude them from being guilty of the sin. We murder when we make people feel inferior or bullied. it kills the soul of someone when we eviscerate them verbally. This is a very important distinction for our kids to understand. We went over the different types of sins and what they are to the average person. we used the book, “Rooting Out Hidden Faults; How the Particular Examen Conquers Sin”, by James F. McElhone, C.S.C., to explain sin in its particulars and then discuss the virtues that they can practice, pray for’ and grow in order to protect them from falling int these sins. Below is a picture of a quick “vises and virtues” list that we made for the kids to refer to. We can add what might stick out to us and is not already on the list. It is exciting to see what the kids add to matters of conscious as far as things that they are trying to work on.

The worksheet our families completed to help them with their Lenten resolutions.

List of the seven deadly sins and how to combat them.

We found several videos from a Catholic site to help us to understand pride, anger, humility, and meekness. As we sit at the table each evening to pray the rosary, we look back on the day by asking ourselves these questions.

Almsgiving can be overlooked by families with small kids because the kids don’t really make their own money. We have found it useful to have them do chores in order to earn money that they can then place in the “Lent Jar”. Last year we gave the kids kindness coins when ever they did something notably charitable or helpful for some one else. They could offer their kindness coin for the souls in purgatory or whatever they felt called to offer their kindness coin for. those were also placed in a jar so that they could see how many acts of charity were offered up. We can then come up with a sacrifice as a family of something that we can give up and use the money we would have spent on that thing to donate to our church or a charity we all agree on. a few ideas to try are to skip eating out for the whole of Lent and use the money not spent in restaurants, or to eat rice as a meal on Fridays and or Wednesdays during Lent and use the money saved there, for almsgiving.

Prayer is something that we should all be doing every day. If you do not have time to pray, you are too busy! Although life is busy, and we can have days where we are overwhelmed and maybe unable to stick to our formal prayers, but a child sent into the world reinforced with the routine practice of prayer is able to pray during those times anyway, even in an informal personal way they can take time to talk to their creator ask a Saint for guidance. It is important for our kids to have learned prayers that they can lean on in times of struggle. The first and most important being, the prayer we should use to begin all things:

The Sign of the Cross: In the name of the Father, the son, and the holy Ghost. Amen!

Jenny made a list of ideas for daily fasts (spiritual), prayers, and acts of charity that our kids could use to practice their Lenten traditions daily in other ways than the select ways that each family member chose as the focus for their own Lenten journey. She also made this really cool map thru lent that allows the kids to place stickers for each day on the correlating square to show that they have done something in the ways of prayer, fasting and charity for each day of Lent.

The stickers for each day.