Lent 2025
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Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are obligatory days of abstinence from meat (and any meat-based food) and days of fasting. The law of fasting allows a person to eat one full meal, as well as two smaller meals that together are not equal to a full meal. The law of fasting binds all Catholics from their 18th birthday until their 59th birthday. The law of abstinence binds all Catholics 14 years of age and older. All the other Fridays of Lent are days of abstinence from meat.
Lent is a 40 day season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday. We invite you to enhance your Lenten experience to your reflection and spiritual preparation for Easter.
Ash Wednesday is March 5 and it begins the Lenten season where Catholics are called to grow closer to Christ through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Now is the time to start preparing for what you will take on or give up during the 40 days of Lent.
Here is a practical guide with 20 ideas to help get you started.- Think of what you typically spend a lot of money on. Do you buy too many clothes or eat out too often? Consider fasting from one of these and maybe donate the saved money to charity.
- Take on 40 days of doing something particular like saying a particular prayer each day or doing 40 acts of kindness.
- Pray before work. What is the first thing you do when you get to work? Check email? Consider taking 5 minutes to pray.
- Attend week-day Mass once a week, or one extra day if you already go.
- Pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy every Friday
- Start a Lenten journal. Take some time each day in prayer and reflection on your spiritual journey and jot down what comes to you.
- Fast from music on your drive to work and use the time to pray instead.
- Limit time on social media.
- Fast from snacking between meals.
- Volunteer at a food pantry, soup kitchen or homeless shelter.
- Write letters to those in prison, nursing homes or the military.
- Reach out to someone you know who may be in need of companionship or offer to run an errand for someone who cannot get out.
- Give up soda, coffee or alcohol.
- Read the daily Scripture.
- Think of a habit that keeps you from being who God wants you to be. Give it up! (Maybe this is something to journal about as you consider what that habit might be.)
- Save money and donate it to the CSR Rice Bowl project.
- Spend one hour a week in eucharistic adoration.
- Wake up without hitting the snooze button and use that extra time for prayer right away in the morning.
- Every morning, scroll through your phone contacts. Randomly stop on a person and say a prayer for them.
- Go through your closet and find clothes you can donate to someone in need. Don’t just pick the clothes you don’t like or will never wear. If you have kids, they can do the same. Maybe they could also find a few toys they would consider donating.
- Corporal and spiritual works of mercy (list and give examples of what we're doing at HNJ, see below:
- * feed hungry and give drink to thirsty: *donations to food pantry, clothe the naked: clothing donations to shelters;
* visit the sick, comfort the afflicted: nursing home crafts, prayer shawls
* admonish sinner, instruct ignorant: invite someone to come to Mass with you
* pray for the living and the dead: have a Mass said for a loved one.