Oddly enough this is something my fiance and I had already discussed. One of the changes we agreed to make was one less hour of TV and computer usage a night. We can't cheat and say that because we went out that that was our hour either. We realize its a very small step but we are starting and looking for other ways to honor this time by being more in touch with ourselves and our environment. It will be the first step of many to alter our lives to make them less consumeristic and more sustainable. Next step is composting worms or so my fiance keeps saying :)

N. & J.

Very nice message, N&J!

Whatever some Christians think the purpose of Lenten observance is, it is not primarily about punishing ourselves for our sinfulness (though there may be a time and place for that).  In fact, if we place too much emphasis on our own personal decision to jump through one or another moral hoop, secretly feeling good about how virtuous we are, we miss the opportunity to take to heart the lesson, "it is not all about me."

Good for the Church of England, for showing some admirable leadership for a change!  The Archbishop of Canterbury totally screwed up and caved in on the issue of gay rights.

And wake up, all you "pro-life" Roman Catholics and other Christians, who badly need to do more deep thinking about what loving life entails!

The Eastern Orthodox have a notably different approach to Lenten abstinence than the one that has become common in Roman Catholicism.  We Catholics are (or at least used to be) encouraged to abstain from some food or drink which we find pleasurable, e.g. chocolate or beer (an aunt of mine always gives up coffee, which is so horribly unreasonable that no doubt it makes the angels pull their hair and brings tears to the eyes of the Virgin Mary herself).

But the Orthodox try to keep a vegan-ish diet, which is supposed to imitate the diet of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: no meat (but possibly fish is allowed), no dairy products (!), no olive oil (!!), no alcohol (!!!).  According to reports that I have heard, everyone is cranky during the week before Pascha (Easter); and after the Feast of Feasts early on the morning of Pascha, when all Lenten restrictions are at last put behind them, entire congregations of Russians, from the laity to the bishops, are said to get bombed on vodka.

In fact, I am moved by John Bailo's fortuitous reference to that great and well-loved early Franciscan, Saint Anthony of Padua, to adopt him (Anthony, not John) as my Lenten patron.  Even as Saint Francis is an animal-lover, so is Saint Anthony: Francis famously preached to birds, but Anthony, rather less famously, preached to fish.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

The Serbian-American poet laureate Charles Simic, who is not only a worthwhile poet but also a consistently engaging reviewer regularly writing in The New York Review of Books, was interviewed by Deborah Solomon for last week's New York Times Magazine (2/3/08).  And although he was talking about neither Lent nor environmentalism, one answer he gave struck me as appropriate to both:

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Solomon: ... you prefer writing about the bloodstained past.  "The butchery of the innocent never stops," as one poem begins, although your work also offers consoling images of domesticity -- your mom in "her red bathrobe," your grandmother ironing, a lover who "stirs the shrimp on the stove."

Simic: It's a kind of feast-in-time-of-plague poetry.  I always feel like if I am sitting here having a terrific meal with friends, yes, there is someplace else, not too far away, where something awful is happening.
>>

The traditional bit of wisdom that is enjoined upon the believers as the ashes are smeared on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday is,
"Remember, Man, that thou art dust,
And unto dust thou shalt return."

Reflecting upon our own mortality, and temporality and personal impermanence, is always a wise thing to do.  But on top of that, upon further reflexion, it is just as good, or even better, to remember the mortality of all the living creatures around us, in whose lives perhaps "something awful is happening," or is certainly going to sooner or later.

Since the foundation of environmentalism is concern for the entire community of living creatures of the Earth, a bit of quiet Lenten recollection along these lines might be fitting, now and then.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.