NOTE: During Lent, we are asked to devote ourselves to seeking the Lord in prayer and reading Scripture, to service by giving alms, and to practice self-control through fasting and abstinence. This is the second article in a three-part Lenten series of articles encouraging “Godly Grandparenting During Lent.” Today, we discuss Fasting.
How am I going to make the most out of this Lent—especially in my role as a Grandparent? Most know that the three Lenten disciplines are Prayer, Fasting and Almsgiving but I would like to look at these in light of us being Godly Grandparents.
As we speed into the New Year and an Election year, my mind, even in this time of political passion, thinking about the benefits of the upcoming calm, quiet season of Lent is quite welcomed. Lent gives us a penitential season of reflection, repentance, and recalibration. We may have even got off course already with our New Year’s Resolutions, or Lenten prayer commitments but that is OK. The important thing is that we stop, reflect, admit we got off course and then steer back in the right direction.
Business guru Stephen Covey used to say that most airlines flights, even with well-intentioned flight plans are technically off their anticipated bearing most of the time. The difference is that pilots (or their computer assistants) are keenly aware that constant corrections and adjustments are essential to successfully reaching their ultimate destination. That’s how I think of Lent. As a time for some course correction if we are swerving off the road from the direct path to God and our final destination of heaven.
Most of the year I am guilty of veering “off course” (i.e., sinning, making decisions without first taking things to prayer, etc.) at least to some extent, constantly. Even with regularly engaging the blessed gift of the sacrament of reconciliation, I can truly relate to St. Paul’s anguished “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate!” (Romans 7:15). So it’s with a somewhat frustrated, but hopeful, heart that I anticipate Lent.
I know it’s been the new trend in recent times but to do something positive and not “give something up” for Lent, but, for me it remains essential. The most effective spiritual disciplines all include some sort of purgation or bending of the will. I think of an old fashioned blacksmith, who brings the heat of a raging fire to the hardened form he wants to fashion. All too often I am that hardened steel beam in need of heat and the fashioning hammer to be molded into an instrument worthy of the Master’s plan. I must be tempered. It is my heart and mind and will that must be changed; my thoughts, my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. And Lent is that time.
As a grandparent, the Church permits a lessening of the necessity to fast and abstain (Canon 1252). However I would be more properly equipped as a grandparent through being further conformed into His image until the end of my days. Perhaps the same rigors of fasting and abstinence are less obligatory for those of us in our latter years, but the underlying need for repentance and reforming of our lives knows no age limit. The need to become Godly Grandparents remains. And offering my simple fasts and abstinences benefit not only my soul but offered also for our adult married children and grandchildren.
Of course, many grandparents have both medical and related conditions that prohibit fasting or abstaining along the lines recommended by the Church. But ‘fasting’ and ‘abstinence’ need not only be about food. Grandparents can fast from routine activities (even good ones) that encourage us to be intentional about the object of our fasting. Grandparents can join with grandchildren in abstaining from, say, television or for older grandkids-screen time. The simple act of engaging WITH our grandchildren in a shared commitment can impact our grands in understanding that we are not only supporting their efforts but SHARING in the commitment. It becomes an act of modeling to them.
Seeking to be a Godly Grandparent is not for the faint hearted to be sure. But then it has always been easier to simply “go with the flow.” But as G.K. Chesterton said in his wonderful book the Everlasting Man “Only a dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” Well, I’m not dead, yet. I’d rather commit, in this second half of my life, to finish well.
Grandparents are called to both mentor and model virtuous living and being creative with your grandchildren during Lent can provide spiritual benefits for both you and your grandchildren.
May you experience a blessed, fruitful Godly Grandparenting this Lent!
Editor’s Note: This is 2nd of a a three-part article Series. Click HERE to read other articles by Dan Spencer III.
Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash
