Lent is about identifying our disorders and choosing penances that attack them.

This guide will help us make really valuable choices during Lent that bring us closer to Christ by the time we reach Easter. I've listened to several times and it's already helped me identify a disordered thing in my life that needs attention. Father discusses penance, mortification, and making concrete resolutions "to clean things up in the future." Those are the luggage we need to take on our Lenten journey.

"What we're after during Lent is to remove obstacles to God's grace -- to remove those obstacles from our souls and our lives."

Want the journey to Easter to be fruitful? This is a good starting point? May God pour out His grace on us that we may reach our goal and be able to say, "That was a really fruitful Lent. Thank you, Lord. Help me continue to grow closer to You during the Easter season of celebration." 

Thinking about penance and almsgiving! Charity is better than giving up chocolate!

Meet Fifi LaFoo!

This Lent I'm thinking about penance and almsgiving in a new way. After a homily last Sunday about the Lent's focus being about charity not suffering, I've decided to do penance and almsgiving a little differently. I will still be avoiding sweets and between meal snacks (I'm not much of a snacker anyway.), but I will focus on acts of charity. Sometimes those are harder than skipping the glass of wine or the chocolate bar. And giving up your time to serve someone difficult can certainly be a penance.

Almsgiving is taking on a different look too. Mother Teresa used to talk about the loneliness of many souls and their need for love. I've mentioned my sister, Jeanne, before who is in deteriorating health in a nursing home in Frederick, MD. It's a round trip of over three hours to travel from the Valley for a visit. And I confess, I'm not one of those folks who loves to hop in the car and take a drive. Nevertheless, my husband and I have embraced that trip for Lent increasing our visits from about once a month to once a week instead. We pray several rosaries which makes the trip fulfill all three Lenten practices. It's not an easy visit since my sister is depressed and often hostile and angry. It shows in her treatment of both family and staff. And I confess that I have often let Jeanne's mood and ill treatment infect me with resentment and impatience. Mea culpa. That's when I need to remember that feelings need to be under the control of the intellect and the will, something with which I've struggled all my life.

Advent Time Out: Entering the Dark Silence and Searching for the Light

Dear Readers,

How grateful I am for all of you, both those who encourage Susan and me and those who think we are on the road to hell and deserve eternal punishment. 

"All things work together for good to those who love the Lord and serve according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28)

Monday Morning: Another Week to Serve the Lord

Give up a glass of wine with dinner?

My thoughts are all over the place this morning -- this very early morning. Sleep and I have become strangers. Last week I had multiple four-hour nights. It reminded me of Fr. John Hardon, that zealous Jesuit beloved by so many, who rarely slept more than four hours a night. His superior had to order him to do that.

When I ask myself why I'm having sleep issues again, I remember how negligent I am at voluntary penance. I generally practice temperance, but fasting? Give up that Hershey kiss or that glass of Merlot with dinner? Well...maybe I can give it up for the next thirty minutes.

Jesus and the devil go to confession, get the same penance

Jesus goes into the confessional and tells the priest that He's perfect, that He's like God, that in fact He is God and likes babies and people and animals and the beautiful world He created, that He tries to guide each person to heaven, that He wants sinners to amend their lives and live with Him in heaven forever. 

The priest thinks, "Hmmmm - a bit prideful, isn't He. Pride is definitely a sin," so he gives Jesus His penance: "Do an act of mercy." Jesus then goes out of the confessional to heal the sick, make the blind see and the deaf hear. He raises the dead and then does the most merciful act of all - He dies on the cross so that we can be redeemed and live in heaven with Him for eternity.

The devil then goes into the confessional and tells the priest that he has compassion for all people and their rights, that he is a devoted social justice warrior, that he accompanies people on their earthly journey encouraging them to fight for their rights whatever they might be - the right to move about freely from country to country, the right to be themselves or change themselves into whatever they dream themselves to be, the right to be free from all burdens and authority, the right to think and speak as they want.

Time for New (Liturgical) Year Resolutions

It's the last day of the liturgical year. Advent begins with the vigil tomorrow for the First Sunday of Advent and we trade the green of ordinary time for the purple of the penitential Advent season.

And what a great sermon we got at Mass this morning from Fr. Ley. He urged us to look back and thank God for the blessings of the old year, ask forgiveness for our failures and make a firm purpose of amendment, and make some resolutions for the new year. He gave a few examples: being on time for Mass (He always pauses when late comers walk in until they're seated.), examining our prayer life to make sure we are giving time to Our Blessed Lord, and he especially recommended beginning the new liturgical year with a clean slate by going to Confession. Sounds like a great suggestion to me. But we are out and about all weekend so Confession is on my schedule for the 9th. I think that's a good way to celebrate the feast of St. Juan Diego.

A Good Lenten Message to Priests: Hear Confessions!

“Wait for faithful in the confessional,” Apostolic Penitentiary tells priests

Remember St. Jean Vianney who spent most of his day in the confessional:

My children, we cannot comprehend the goodness of God towards us in instituting this great Sacrament of Penance. If we had had a favour to ask of Our Lord, we should never have thought of asking Him that. But He foresaw our frailty and our inconstancy in well-doing, and His love induced Him to do what we should not have dared to ask. If one said to those poor lost souls that have been so long in Hell, "We are going to place a priest at the gate of Hell: all those who wish to confess have only to go out, " do you think, my children, that a single one would remain? The most guilty would not be afraid of telling their sins, nor even of telling them before all the world. Oh, how soon Hell would be a desert, and how Heaven would be peopled! Well, we have the time and the means, which those poor lost souls have not. And I am quite sure that those wretched ones say in Hell, "O accursed priest! if I had never known you, I should not be so guilty!" (Read more from this great saint here.)

Padre Pio was also a prisoner of the confessional:

"God runs after the most stubborn souls. They cost him too much to abandon them." 

"It is a tremendous responsibility to sit in the tribunal of the confessional." (Read more here.)

Thank God for "The light is on for you" initiative. Every Wednesday evening at every church in the Diocese of Arlington and Washington, D.C. a priest waits to hear confessions.

• Find a convenient Confession time in the Diocese of Arlington
• Find a convenient Confession time in the Archdiocese of Washington  

My God Have Mercy on Us: Human Cloning Begins

Barbaric: Scientists Clone Human Embryo for the First Time

The cloning technique used by scientists at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and the Oregon National Primate Research Center was a version of somatic cell nuclear transfer, the method used to create Dolly. The researchers transferred the nucleus of a cell that contained a person's DNA into an egg that no longer had its nucleus. After stimulation, some of the embryos developed to a stage where they produced stem cells. 

Daniel Sulmasy, a professor of medicine and a bioethicist at the University of Chicago, told National Public Radio (NPR), "This is a case in which one is deliberately setting out to create a human being for the sole purpose of destroying that human being. I'm of the school that thinks that that's morally wrong no matter how much good could come of it."

And it happened here in the U.S. in the state of Oregon, the same state that legalized assisted suicide in 2009. I feel the way I did the day Roe v. Wade was announced. Murder of the babies just took an exponential leap. And the culture of death is moving into an entire new ring of hell where the demons howl with glee over the descent into barbarism by "scientists" playing God.

Penance, penance, penance.

The war against life creates ripples of evil that will touch every aspect of our society. Please atone for this atrocity by doing penance specifically in atonement.

Do you keep the Friday abstinence?

A lot of Catholics think that the Church threw out the Friday rule of abstinence. What really happened is that Pope Paul VI in 1966 issued the Apostolic Constitution on Penance. It maintained the requirements of fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and the abstinence rule for the Fridays in Lent. The document also gave bishops' conferences the power to declare other types of penance. The friday abstinence outside Lent was recommended, but no longer required under pain of sin. However, the document did not, as many Catholics think, eliminate penance.

Catholics United for the Faith (CUF) has a great summary on the U.S. bishops' declaration of 1966 and reaffirmed in 1991:

In accord with Pope Paul VI’s directives and Canon, no. 1249, the U.S. faithful must do some sort of penance on every Friday, excluding Solemnities or a dispensation by their diocesan bishop. Abstinence from flesh meat maintained its primary place among recommended works of self-denial and personal penance from which the faithful may choose.

Ash Wednesday Question: How Will You Draw Closer to God During Lent?

Do you have ashes on your forehead today? How will that sign of penance affect you? Will it be just a visible sign that you're a Catholic and Lent has arrived - washed off and forgotten? Or will Lent be asignificant time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that renews your soul during the next six weeks? Answering that question is what Lent is all about for each one of us. But there are plenty of helps. Catholic Culture is one of my favorite sources for spiritual growth. Visit their Lenten Workshop if you need some ideas as you begin your spiritual journey. Repent and believe the Good News of the Gospel!

Called to be a prophet

I am slowly moving through the book of Isaiah on my Advent journey. Christmas will come and the prophet and I will have walked only a short way toward the New Jerusalem. But that's okay; I'd rather enjoy his company on a long-distance walk than a run. In chapter six the voice of the Lord calls out, "Whom shall I send?" (to be a prophet to the nations). Isaiah has just confessed his sinfulness as a "man of unclean lips." He has seen the Lord of hosts, but recognizes his own unworthiness to speak the words of God. That's no problem for the Lord...He sends one of the seraphim "holding an ember which he had taken with tongs from the altar." The angel touches Isaiah's lips saying, "Your wickedness is removed, your sin purged." With that assurance, Isaiah can answer the Lord's question, "Whom shall I send," calling out "Here I am; send me!"

Every Christian is called to be a prophet in his own times. The prophet's role is to call people back to the Lord. He usually brings evil tidings that are unwelcome, not to discourage people, but to warn them and sound the alarm. Some evils are so obvious that it hardly takes a prophet to predict them, which is certainly the case with what I'm going to say now. I predict that in the next few years, likely before the end of Obama's first term, we will see both homosexual marriage and assisted suicide brought to us, not by popular vote, not by state legislatures, but exactly the same way we saw abortion forced upon us through Roe v. Wade...the courts will impose them. Both issues will be treated as civil rights undergirded by the same spurious principles that the Roe court found in the "penumbra" of the Constitution. Assisted suicide will likely be cast as a "privacy" issue like Roe using Griswold v. Connecticut which also legalized contraception. What I do with my body (contracept it, abort it, fornicate it, adulterate it, kill it) is up to me. I think the homosexual issue will be framed as equality. If heterosexual couples have a right to marry, adopt, etc. so do we. The natural law, the inability of two same-sex individuals to have a child will likely be turned upside down by cloning and other evil reproductive technologies. Until that happens, same-sex couples will play let's pretend as they "parent" children together.

Is there anything Christians can do to halt this from coming to pass? I don't know. When the Lord told Isaiah to warn the people about imminent evils, the prophet asked, "How long?" until the people would be healed. God's answer was not encouraging. "Until the cities are desolate, without inhabitants...and the earth is a desolate waste."

But the very next chapter of Isaiah offers the hope of the coming Messiah. The Lord sends Isaiah to the evil king Ahaz telling him to ask for a sign. Ahaz pretends piety (Oh how like a modern politician he is.) saying, "I will not tempt the Lord" by seeking a sign. God gives him one anyway. "The virgin will be with child, and bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel."

Advent is a dark time, but one filled with the glowing twilight of the SON rising in the east, the morning star. It is a time to rededicate ourselves to the Lord's truth and to reform our lives through Confession and penance. The Lord is coming. He will not disappoint. He chastises us only because He loves us. Take heart and do not be afraid.