By: Iris

These are all great ideas - I love the ideas in the comments, too! I'm reading Gerard Manley Hopkins every day for Lent this year, but I'm definitely stealing the Four Quartets idea for next year. For several years now, my "fasting and almsgiving" Lenten observance has been to track every dollar that I spend on food during Lent, and then donate that total amount to the local food bank on Easter. It's not a formal "giving things up," but in practice, it means that I mostly give up eating at restaurants, and give up expensive groceries like seafood and Honeycrisp apples. It also keeps me mindful, every time I eat or buy food, of my sisters and brothers who struggle with hunger and food insecurity. For my prayer observance, I've been experimenting this year with saying the Lord's Prayer silently in a different place every day (on the sidewalk, in my seat at the theater waiting for the show to start, on the road when traffic has slowed to a crawl), to see how my surroundings can give a new inflection to this familiar prayer, and so far I've been loving it! We'll see if I can keep coming up with new places for 40 days, though...