MP: Lent
In church on Sunday Rev Terri's topic was Lent. One of the things about a Metropolitan Community Church - we're diverse. At my church just about everyone is some version of LGBTQ, and we all came from different faith backgrounds, so there's a number of former Catholics and Episcopals to whom Lent is something other than that time between Mardi Gras and Easter.
I've never understood Lent, really. It was a strange period in early spring for which the Catholic kids had to give up sweets, and evidently the reason Easter was a holiday about chocolate eggs and jellybeans. (I remember Easter when I was four, and being completely shocked that there was not just searching for the hard-boiled eggs I'd dyed a day or so before, but also candy! I'd managed to conceptualize Easter as being about colored eggs, so the candy was a mysterious delight, but it made no sense at all.)
Lent, evidently, is about renewal. In the Pagan calendar, the year ended back at Halloween (Samhain), and the God gestates within the Goddess, waiting to be born again at Yule. The solstice. Early spring is marked by Imbolic, a time of development and purification, as the new life begins to grow in the earth. The Jewish calendar also places the new year in autumn, and there is the tradition of Yom Kippur, and atonement. Of, for the end of the year and the coming of the next, cleansing oneself psychically and spiritually.
That seems to be what Lent is, too. It's a time to go within, do without, focus on the things that really matter, and strip away the things that don't. Rev. Terri suggested one Lenten practice of hers: every time she touches a doorknob, during the season of Lent, she breathes out the bad stuff, and breathes in the good.
She suggested to us that we take up a Lenten practice, that we write it down on the prayer card and share it with her, and she would, as part of her Lenten practice, pray with us on whatever it is we chose for ourselves.
This is what I wrote:
To face my responsibilities and pay my debts
To remember every time I greet my rats that they show me Divine Love
To write about faith every day, even if it's just one sentence
To say out loud every day, "I am a beloved child of God" (man, I couldn't even type it without crying ><)
We also decorated containers in which to collect our spare change during Lent, to be given to charity at Easter. Here is mine.
Fish Side
Bird Side
I've never understood Lent, really. It was a strange period in early spring for which the Catholic kids had to give up sweets, and evidently the reason Easter was a holiday about chocolate eggs and jellybeans. (I remember Easter when I was four, and being completely shocked that there was not just searching for the hard-boiled eggs I'd dyed a day or so before, but also candy! I'd managed to conceptualize Easter as being about colored eggs, so the candy was a mysterious delight, but it made no sense at all.)
Lent, evidently, is about renewal. In the Pagan calendar, the year ended back at Halloween (Samhain), and the God gestates within the Goddess, waiting to be born again at Yule. The solstice. Early spring is marked by Imbolic, a time of development and purification, as the new life begins to grow in the earth. The Jewish calendar also places the new year in autumn, and there is the tradition of Yom Kippur, and atonement. Of, for the end of the year and the coming of the next, cleansing oneself psychically and spiritually.
That seems to be what Lent is, too. It's a time to go within, do without, focus on the things that really matter, and strip away the things that don't. Rev. Terri suggested one Lenten practice of hers: every time she touches a doorknob, during the season of Lent, she breathes out the bad stuff, and breathes in the good.
She suggested to us that we take up a Lenten practice, that we write it down on the prayer card and share it with her, and she would, as part of her Lenten practice, pray with us on whatever it is we chose for ourselves.
This is what I wrote:
To face my responsibilities and pay my debts
To remember every time I greet my rats that they show me Divine Love
To write about faith every day, even if it's just one sentence
To say out loud every day, "I am a beloved child of God" (man, I couldn't even type it without crying ><)
We also decorated containers in which to collect our spare change during Lent, to be given to charity at Easter. Here is mine.
Fish Side
Bird Side