Lenten Practice

Each year millions of people say they're giving something up for Lent. Usually most of the things they're giving up are things of relatively little consequence. I mean that on a relative scale of say global hunger. When you put it like that, giving up cheeseburgers for forty days seems to diminish in significance. Going without chocolate for a season seems to measure on a smaller scale. And yet we keep doing it, over and over again. It seems there is something to this that draws us in each year. If it were truly meaningless we'd have left it behind years ago as a quaint tradition. I wonder what it is about the season of Lent that draws us in and has us give up a token, "something", in order to participate in the larger drama of it all. Even though our sacrifices seem to fairly meager, there is something that keeps pulling us in and giving up milkshakes or potato chips for forty days.

An alternate tradition for Lent has been around for a while now. Rather than give something up, one would take something new on for the season of Lent. Usually this is in the form of a spiritual practice, adding something healthy to a normal routine, etc...

This year I wanted to share with you my Lenten practice. It's really twofold. One I'm giving up bad handwriting and two I'm taking up handwriting practice. Now I really don't have atrocious handwriting but it's not nice to look at or always easily legible. Maybe in your mind that indeed makes it atrocious? I do like to write things out by hand, and feel like I think better with a pen in my hand than with a keyboard. So I found a handwriting guide and have taken on the challenge of improving my handwriting. I feel like I've time warped back to the 2nd grade. I've been tracing letters, using those funny lined sheets of paper drawing meaningless squiggles endlessly all in hopes of improving my written word.



It has, in its own way, become a spiritual practice. It is meditative and contemplative to write the same thing over and over again focusing on form and technique. As I work on my written word I hope to be open to the word that is from God in this form of prayer.
It may be yet another silly and trite Lenten practice but there is something to this story of Lent that keeps drawing us in, over and over again.