Prayer, fasting and almsgiving

For the forty days.

Lent has three traditional disciplines — prayer, fasting and almsgiving — and they are meant to be done together. Fasting without almsgiving is a diet; almsgiving without prayer is charity work. These prayers hold the three together.

A Prayer to Begin Lent

Lord, forty days is not long,
and I have wasted longer.

Show me the one thing I am most afraid to give up,
and give me the courage to offer it.

Make my fasting real and not vain,
my almsgiving costly and not convenient,
my prayer honest and not performed.

Bring me to Easter changed,
and not merely thinner. Amen.

A Daily Lenten Prayer

Merciful Father, create in me a clean heart.
Take from me what keeps me from You:
the habits I defend, the resentments I feed,
the comforts I cannot do without.

Give me instead a hunger for what actually satisfies.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Three Disciplines

• Prayer — add something: daily Mass, the Stations on Fridays, fifteen minutes of silence, the Rosary.
• Fasting — Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are days of fasting and abstinence for Catholics; all Fridays of Lent are days of abstinence from meat. Beyond that, choose something you will actually miss.
• Almsgiving — give until it changes what you can afford, and give quietly.

About Lent

The point of giving something up is not the giving up. It is the space that opens where the thing used to be, and what you do with that space. A Lent spent white-knuckling through forty days without chocolate, and praying no more than usual, has missed the exercise entirely.