David Ancell / Tuesday, February 28, 2023 / Comments(0)
Lent is here, and with it, I’d like to help clear up a misunderstanding. Giving up something for Lent has value in itself. I remember reading an article years ago from someone who had a priest get on the pulpit and tell people that giving something up for Lent is useless unless you donate the money saved to the poor.
Now, it’s a great thing if you donate the money saved to the poor. You may feel the need to do this in order to ensure you make a true sacrifice and don’t gain anything from it. However, making an offering to God that has no tangible value is perfectly acceptable. It can even help you avoid falling into the sin of pride for having benefited a charity, if you are inclined to this vice.
Giving up something is simply a way of offering something to God. It’s a way of reminding yourself that this world and its pleasures are passing. It’s also a way to detach yourself from something you enjoy. I remember a priest talking about how they get used to being without what they gave up. He seemed to think it made the penance useless. I’d say it made the penance successful, but if you are no longer feeling the sacrifice you made, then you can choose to make an additional sacrifice.
Also, giving up something is a good, natural means of strengthening the will. Think of it this way. . . someone learning to defuse bombs would not practice on a real bomb. They will use some kind of practice model. Likewise, if we are learning to resist sin, we can practice with something we can legitimately engage in whether than with something that would result in us having offended God if we did.
Also, if, for whatever reason, you aren’t donating money saved from your penance, you can always offer it up for someone who needs it. Maybe you can help someone get out of purgatory. There’s a lot of good to be done with it. So, give something up, but do it with intention.
One final note . . . if you do choose to give something up that isn’t sinful and then break your fast, you didn’t sin. You took on a voluntary penance, and you are free to modify it or even set it aside. However, Lent is a penitential season, so I would suggest ensuring you do some kind of penance.
David Ancell / Thursday, February 02, 2023 / Comments(0)
I’m a little late here considering the events at the end of January, but I really wanted to write this one. If you are from some state like Minnesota or New York or New Jersey, you would likely be laughing at us when we talk about winter weather in the South. While you are probably still going while under a foot of snow, an inch of snow can completely shut us down. I used to joke that you could go throw ice cubes in front of a school building, and they’d call off school. While there can be snow days even far north of us, we sometimes have “it might snow” days. I have seen school called off only to have absolutely no snow fall.
You see, we live in a place where you can still go swimming in September or maybe even October. Most of the time, what people north of us call “snow removal,” we call “just wait for the next day.” It doesn’t snow all that much here, and today, even in February, we are expecting temperatures in the 60s. There are few snow plows down here, so even a small amount of snow will shut down a lot of the city until it melts. It usually does pretty quickly, but we’ve seen it linger on our neighborhood streets, which no one ever cleans, for a week.
It works just fine as a trade off for me. I am not a winter weather person. I’ll take the warmer climate any day. However, I do like to travel to the north when it’s summer and it’s almost 100 degrees with 120% humidity.
Category: Fun Stuff, Uncategorized