Ideas For Your Lenten Season

Lent is upon us again.

February 17^th is Ash Wednesday and we all have to decide what penitential practices we’re going to offer Our Lord for six weeks. But Jesus Christ is never outdone in generosity and He often responds to our unconditional gift by rewarding us with spiritual fruit beneficial to our state in life. If you’re on CatholicMatch, a part of your state in life is finding a spouse. Here are some ideas for connecting your Lenten penance and your dating life…

Pick something small.

“I apologize for the length of this letter. If I’d had more time I’d have written a shorter one.” This adage has been attributed to everyone from Mark Twain to George Bernard Shaw to Cicero. Whoever said it was onto something. Because doing something in small quantities can be more taxing than taking it in large doses.

I learned this firsthand in Lent of 2016. I was disturbed by my evening routines after dinner. There was nothing inherently wrong with what I was doing—watch some reruns of Frasier or some similar sitcom, then eat popcorn while I read. But I was doing it so robotically, that I moved on auto-pilot from one to the other. I found myself getting depressed. It was the very definition of a rut.

Not sure of how to fix it—or to what extent it even needed fixing, I tried an experiment. During Lent, I made a commitment that I every time I shifted from one activity to the next, I would take deep breaths and count to three. Sounds easy enough—maybe even a cop-out when you get right down to it.

It was the hardest penance I have ever done.

By halfway through the second count, I’d feel the anxiety rising and wanting to rush on to make the popcorn or get the DVR lined up or whatever was next. Getting through the third count took extra concentration.

The fruit lasted well beyond that Lent five years ago. I realized that, quite often, I was doing things I didn’t even want to do, simply because it was habitual. Maybe I really didn’t want popcorn. Maybe I didn’t want to watch TV. It was about breaking habitual patterns and regaining my own power of choice, as given by Almighty God.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence that 2016 was the first Lent that I was dating the woman I have since married. But there are no coincidences. Everyone who is single—especially those of us who may be “of a certain age” (I was 46 at the time) can be rigid in our routines. There’s nothing wrong with any of it, but relationships are a lot easier when you can breathe and break up pre-existing patterns.

Read a good book.

Another adage to live by is that “man becomes what he reads.” Read something about relationships, but one that is uplifting, pointing you towards Heaven. There are any number of great books on dating and marriage from a Catholic perspective. Three To Get Married, by Archbishop Fulton Sheen is a time-honored classic.

I read a lot and as I look back, I’ve found that the most important books I’ve read aren’t necessarily ones that I can quote easily or even find two or three clear lessons to draw from. The sign that a book has truly hit home is that when I’m finished reading, the world seems to look like a different place.

My spiritual director at the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, a veteran of the Ignatian spiritual exercises, has said that you know you’re on to something when you realize that you need to do the same thing, but in a different way. So pick a good book. And don’t worry if you learn anything specific from it. Offer it as a Lenten practice and see if it rewires your thought patterns.

Spend more time in the physical world.

As opposed to the digital world, that is. When we’re single, there’s a lot of time to be on electronics and it can be often a be an escape from loneliness. Maybe you scroll Facebook on your phone aimlessly. Maybe you’re checking on Twitter or Instagram. Maybe you’re one of the many people who’ve become disaffected by social media censorship over the past couple months and are putting your time into alternative platforms like MeWe or Gab.

Whatever it is, relationships aren’t lived in the digital world. They’re lived face-to-face. And if you’re habitually checking your social accounts, you aren’t connected with the actual physical world around you. Even if you’re alone, there’s still the beauty of what’s right outside your window to appreciate.

So define what you really need to do on your electronic devices, from work to staying connected with friends to keeping your search for a spouse going. Then put a sharp boundary around your social media time. One suggestion might be not to use social media or electronic devices after a certain time of the evening. When we get tired, we lose focus and it’s easy to drift aimlessly online.

That all brings us back to where we started—breathe. Think about what you’re doing. Break electronic habits. That won’t happen magically when you date someone or get married, so start now. Whatever it is that you feel oppressing you or holding you back, start now. Start small, but start. There’s no better time than Lent.