Lenten Plans

I have been working on our plans for Lent. As with Christmas, I want this season to be prayer filled but simple. I want to be realistic in what we can accomplish and not get over ambitious. I don't want to fill my eyes with what others,more organized and more crafty that I, are doing but find a source of inspiration and adapt it to our needs. I don't want to reinvent the wheel year after year so I made sure I looked in our shelves and in the faith binder I have been trying to keep up-to-date.

After some at-home and internet searching this is what I have come up with:

From Charlotte I got the idea of tracking our journey to the cross Inspired by Inos Biffi's book The Liturgical Year we are going to focus on an encounter with Jesus each week. Inos Biffi says:

"The path that takes us to Easter is marked by encounters with Jesus."

We are going to take a break from the conversion stories we have been reading. Instead we will focus on one of these encounters by reading and discussing the appropriate Gospel passage

-Week 1: Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman (Jesus as living water)
-Week 2: Jesus' encounter with the man born blind (Jesus as light who illumines the crevices of our hearts and brings our sins and vices to light)
-Week 3: Jesus encounter with Lazarus (Jesus as new life-reconcilation)
-Week 4: Jesus encounter with Peter, who try to discourage him from the path that was set for him (Jesus recommits himself to his mission so we must recommit ourselves to be his disciples)

I will try to depict these in our Lenten journey poster. I will also mark the weekend as oasis in the dessert. Those days were we will take a respite from the Lenten sacrifices

For prayer time, we will use the Divine Mercy Chaplet (also a Charlotte idea) every day except on Fridays when we will do the Stations of the Cross using this book

On Thursdays we will begin to use the subscription to Magnifikids that N. received for Christmas. This promises to be a great resource to prepare for Sunday mass.

There are still some loose ends especially when it comes to the penance and abstinence part. I also need a focus scripture for the fifth week of Lent. I'll give this some more thought and post later.