Our Lenten sacrifice gives us an opportunity to exercise our freedom and will power, building spiritual resiliency and old-fashion discipline. It is, in fact, the most powerful weapon against the strong pull towards sin.
And because we’re here to help you, we want to briefly address five of the most challenging aspects of the Catholic dating world.
You see, in order to mourn — to truly feel the depth of mourning, sadness, depression, guilt, anger, shame, anxiety, loneliness, dread, remorse, fear — we can’t numb ourselves.
We are made to be filled up every day and then go out to empty ourselves out for others.
Overcome by anger, I turned to Jesus, who also experienced anger. When Jesus turned the tables at the temple (Mark 11:15-17), he did so because the people who were trying to encounter God there were being excluded; they were being taken advantage of and mistreated.
Jesus might be the answer to our problems and worries, but invoking the name of our Lord as a way to defend sinful actions, or even avoid responsibility for them all together, is never the right response.
We take for granted the gap between curiosity about these unique practices and understanding them, let alone incorporating them into our spirituality. For teenagers - especially this year - Lent is an important season.
Fifteen-year-old Greta Thurnberg had just entered High School when in August 2018, she began striking from school on Fridays to protest the Swedish government’s lack of action in climate control. Since then, she’s become a leading teen activist on the matter and even been on a tour of North America to give speeches across multiple countries.
If you were to ask most people what they know about St. Patrick, you would most likely get a wide range of answers. And, inevitably, most would be incorrect. Much like St. Valentine, St. Patrick is more known for his now secularized holiday than for his actual feast day.
