I just can’t believe that, once again, the time for Lent is here. Again.
Has it been a year already? A little more than a year, I guess. Last year’s pancakes were takeout and brought home to eat in the living room because we were still weeks away from Maribou’s endometriosis being taken care of.
As we sat in the diner eating stacks of pancakes while sitting in a booth, we talked about eating pancakes last year and how crazy it was and how many things went wrong with our various bodies and how, FINALLY, it feels like we’ve turned the corner somewhat. We no longer have doctor appointments every week or so. We no longer have to google words we’ve never heard before. All of the pictures we’ve taken since the beginning of the year have been external.
So what’s the plan for the coming year? I’m going to get another freakin’ cert. We’re going to continue culling our bookshelves. And ease into 2025.
I think I’m going to try to give up buying games again this year *AND* the Metamucil thing. Seriously, if you want to feel years younger after just a week or so with minimal effort? Metamucil.
The days are long but the years are short.
So… what are you giving up for Lent? Or, at least, meditating on?
(And I need another “Oh, I remember that song!” song for the post… here’s one.)
I’m going without carbs, or at least without very many. I’ve already screwed up, but it was work related and would have been awkward if I didn’t try a bite. Can you be damned for a single bite of an empanada? Does it lead to dancing?
And not only do I not remember that song, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.
Happy Lent.Report
That’s weird, I’m *only* eating capybara empanadas every day for lent as a mortification *and* as way to keep the abstinence on Fridays.
I do have a dream of one year eating one thing every day as some religious brothers I knew would do. Like, lentils with sausage from a big pot we make every Saturday… reserving a portion without sausage for next Friday. Every week, every day. Lady Marchmaine says we can do it when all the children have left our stewardship.Report
That sounds like a cool idea but way too complicated for my household especially with the biggest having baseball practice for his travel team on Fridays. I’m staring straight down the barrel of kraft mac and cheese, scrambled eggs, and probably that most traditional of all Lenten cuisine, the filet-o-fish.Report
Well, capybara is hard to source.
But yes, that’s why Lady Marchmaine has a meta-rule that no Lenten obligation can burden another member of the family unduly.
Half my side of the family is Greek Orthodox, so we hear no end of the hardships imposed by their mostly vegan lent; except the reality of Orthodox lent is mostly observed in it’s exception to practicing it’s mostly vegan lent.Report
I wanted to embed “Love and Anger” but they have that one turned off, for some reason. I went for what I am guessing was the 2nd biggest song off of that album (based off of the number of covers of the song that I’ve heard… Maxwell, Sons of Serendip, Ella Henderson… no other song on the album even comes close).Report
I’ll do a few minor mortifications and am looking forward to doing morning prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours. I could, theoretically, never stop doing morning prayer and therefore never need to look forward to picking it up again… but that’s why Lent is Lent. It reminds us that we stopped doing morning prayers for no particular reason.
I’m not doing the Hallow 40 challenge … I checked it out a couple (few?) years ago and thought it was fine, but I’m just not that into listening to people read morning prayer to me. I did like the section I did on St. Francis de Sales — he was a mensch.
On the technology front, I really like that they’ve finally figured out how to get the Hours into an app format — younger generations will no longer understand our references to finding the proper for such and such a day — but in turning it in to an app that keeps track of all the different feasts and saints days for various readings, it has the (necessary) deficit of including absolutely everything that you’re *supposed* to do, including the many things that *nobody* does… so it’s a little distracting to skip this bit, do that bit, and then skip this other bit. What I *really* want is a fully customizable app so I can tell it to drop the Hymn, don’t repeat the antiphon in the middle of the canticle, and drop all of these alternate things in favor of the one that we always use. And, for all that is Holy, the doxology should be: “… as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be…” not that other way some people with questionable aesthetics have substituted. Maybe that’s how I make my billions. If only the algorithm for getting all the proper readings in order wasn’t so impossibly difficult.Report
I did a pre-Lent visit to the Shrine in DC on Saturday for confession then mass as kind of a mini pilgrimage to kick things off.
My battle is going to primarily be against my phone and the evening habit of constantly circling through various sites and social media of no good use to my mental or spiritual health. I found an old Kindle we had gathering dust in the basement and am going to try to use it as a means of just freaking looking at something else.Report
You know what? You inspired me to delete those apps off my devices.
I haven’t given up anything for Lent for years, as I’ve tried to make it more about positive, but this seems like a great step. Plus, I’m reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Absolution and I need to concentrate.
Jay, if you’re looking for some other music for these Lenten posts, I recommend Wynton Marsalis’ magnificent Abyssinian Mass. Here’s a sample: https://youtu.be/8TGW22RK78k?feature=shared.Report
Dude it’s bad! And it’s so easy to find yourself spending hours every night, mentally stressed, all from doing literally nothing. It’s also easy to absent mindedly fall into. At least smoking used to have a kind of social component to it.Report
Here’s Ken Harrelson describing the apps on my phone: https://youtu.be/Gsf4vhK7v7E?feature=shared
Plus, you get to see 2 seconds of the great Mark Buerhle.Report
Well, part of the original lore is that I created the original “Mindless Diversions” sub-blog back in February 2011 in an attempt to create a zone where we didn’t discuss politics or religion (new atheism was still a thing) and could just talk about cool stuff. Video games, movies, television, toys, nostalgia, sports, poker, and whatnot.
Right after that, I saw the movie Rango in the theater. There was a scene where Rango gets thrown from his owner’s car to the side of the road and the song playing is Ave Maria:
It’s just a few seconds of the song, but the song got stuck in my head. So I googled and googled and found a version from Bobby McFerrin that was absolutely amazing. He explained that he was told to learn to sing Bach Preludes as part of his exercises and he sang the Bach Prelude while the audience sang Ave Maria and I thought it was the most amazing version of the song I’d yet heard and I wanted to share it with everybody.
By 2013, I had given up the Wednesday music posts to Glyph and so didn’t want to step on his toes by putting up merely a music post so, instead of ending the post with “So… what are you listening to?”, I ended it with “So… what are you giving up for Lent?”
And then, in 2014, I discovered a version of the song sung by one of the last castratos and I immediately made the joke to myself “well, I’m not giving *THOSE* up for Lent” and, at that point, the yearly Lent post became one talking about Lent proper, rather than merely alluding to it.
And now it’s 11 years later.Report
I’m going to have to dig into those MD posts.Report
That’s a great Bobby McFerrin video… he’s really funny and his singing voice is very impressive.
Plus, there’s one woman in the audience that has got some Ave Maria singing chops.Report