By Thea Jarvis

(First In A Series)

Traditionally, Lent is a time to stick out our collective chairs, suck in our stomachs, and keep our eyes on the Lord.

Mother Church gives us the Lenten season as a mini-desert experience in which we check the progress of our personal pilgrimages and draw close to the oasis where our living water flows.

But as Lent comes upon us, we 1980’s Christians find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Glutted with Valentines candy, already saturated with the Easter eggs nobody can wait to eat, we leave Fat Tuesday behind us only to discover that we are knee-deep in Lenten ashes before we barely have time to get out of the freezer.

Add to this bizarre seasonal scheduling our own personal timetable of planes to catch and children to drive and houses to keep and errands to run, and well, personally, I’m worn out before I’ve started.

How can we celebrate Lent when our lives are already stuffed with a Pandora’s box of things we never got around to during Advent? Who can think about Lent when there’s a head of cauliflower in the back of the refrigerator left over from New Year’s?

Lent??? You’ve got to be kidding...(Not really. There could be a way.)

If we take Lent one day at a time, instead of a scarifying block of six (count ‘em) weeks of enforced march, we might make it. A day at a time doesn’t necessarily mean facing each morning with a liturgical list of things to do or holy (gasp) places to visit. It can mean very simply tuning in to that part of our lives where our personal oasis can be found; consciously putting our toes in that soothing stream of living water and resting for awhile.

For openers, let’s consider some things we might do to put Lent in a perspective that’s workable, doable and maybe even enjoyable. See if any of these suggestions might be helpful in your own celebration of the season.

1. MAKE TIME FOR YOU AND GOD. Five minutes a day -- before breakfast or bedtime, on your lunch hour, in the tub -- means quality time for prayer. Quiet resting in the Lord’s presence, or prayer of the heart, is meant to cleat the excess baggage from our brain and concentrate on our primary meaningful relationship.

2. PRAY AS YOU GO. Scrabble around in your night table drawer and dig out your old rosary. (It’s still there.) When you’re driving to the office, squeeze in a decade instead of turning on the radio or tape deck. Pretty soon, the rhythm of the prayer will work its wonder and a surprising peacefulness will replace the anxiety you feel about making the next light.

3. PRAY AS YOU RUN. Or walk or dance or weightlift. Many faithful exercisers I know follow the holistic approach to prayer: sound spirit in a sound body. A two-mile hike through your neighborhood is a just-right niche of time for prayer. It’s a little like being under a hair dryer or running the vacuum. Little can interrupt you because you are protected by a barrier of sound. Running up and down hills is another neat, if strenuous, chance to claim some prayer time, because you are protected by a barrier of movement. And since all this spiritual exercise is going on inside your head, you don’t even have to struggle for breath.

4. STOP IN FOR MASS. Of course you can’t make it every morning -- nor every night for that matter. Don’t expect the impossible or you’ll get discouraged. But maybe Wednesday night is pretty flexible: no meetings or practices or homework to keep you busy. Even Friday morning might be good (TGIF and all that), or Tuesday at noontime, in parishes that offer it. There just may be a spot you can carve out for a little extra nourishment at the table where we all are fed.

5. TRY FASTING. We’re not the sackcloth and ashes type to be sure. That seems to have gone out with the advent of television and prime time viewing of people who are fasting without any choice in the matter. But aligning ourselves with the hungry can be a prayerful cleansing and a way to focus on the Lord and his people without the nagging preoccupations of where to eat lunch or what’s for supper or can I sneak a Snickers before the kids get home from school.

6. TRY CREATIVE FASTING. I have a friend who decided to do some fasting while carrying her third child. When she revealed her current spiritual proclivity to myself and others, we grabbed her by the neck, forced food down her throat and filled her in on alternative means to her heavenly goal. Fasting from television, radio, the morning newspaper and that second cup of coffee are possibilities. Cutting conversation about that green-eyed hussy who works in the next office is another idea. This might make the morning coffee break a little dull, but sometimes dull is preferable to destructive. Generally speaking, creative fasting focuses on depriving our senses of those things that often lead us away from, rather than down the road to, Lenten kinship with the Lord. It is often more difficult than fasting from food and, in some cases, more appropriate.

7. RESURRECT THE CORPORAL AND SPIRITUAL WORKS OF MERCY. There really is life beyond the catechism. Corporal and spiritual works of mercy are actually things we do, often quite naturally, for one another. Visiting a friend who is homebound or in the hospital, fixing a casserole for a new mother, praying for a neighbor who is unemployed, welcoming a traveler into our home, phoning someone who is lonely -- all these ordinary acts of kindness are the very works of mercy we, or at least, I considered the domain of the HOLY. What a relief to know it’s something we all can be involved in.

8. RESURRECT THE CORPORAL AND SPIRITUAL WORKS OF MERCY IN YOUR FAMILY. Feeding the hungry might mean having each person in your family share a favorite canned food --pork and beans, ravioli, spaghetti-os -- with the parish or neighborhood food pantry. Clothing the naked could be as simple as a communal cleaning of drawers and closets, setting aside the outgrown and excess for people with little in the way of spring fashionata. Sheltering the homeless might be as natural as inviting a neglected or lonely neighborhood child for dinner and an overnight. Counseling the ignorant is frequently the time an older child spends helping a younger brother or sister with some math homework. Families that intentionally engage in works of mercy see beyond the daily grind and realize how close they are to the Lord’s work.

9. CELEBRATE LENT WITH YOUR FAMILY. Whether your family means all those folks who live under the same roof with you and show up at breakfast every morning, or the good friends you find yourself hanging out with most of the time, there is the opportunity to celebrate Lent together with them. You can bake pretzels (the “little arms” symbolized for our Christian forebears the posture of prayer, arms crossed over the breast), dye beans (purple for sacrifice, with each bean dropped in a dish a symbol of something done for Christ), throw a simple soup or beans and rice party (with the leftover monies you would have paid for a fancy dinner donated to Operation Rice Bowl, Bread for the World or a neighborhood soup kitchen). With a comfortable gathering of family and friends you can pray the Stations of the Cross, read Scripture, hold a Lenten prayer service or simply share a morning prayer. The possibilities are limited only by our imagination.

It’s a start anyway. Certainly you have ideas of your own. Remember that Lent is a journey that has great possibilities if we take it one step at a time. Six weeks is just too long for a short-term planner like me.