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The Divine Hours of Lent

Friday is, as we all know, the day of summary in our human week, the day for considering what we have accomplished or failed to accomplish, the day for regretting sometimes and, a lot of times, the day for planning for the week to come. Historically, the Church has sanctified our human Fridays by urging…

I was at a meeting in Minneapolis for two days last week, and I have been processing that fact ever since. As meetings go, this one was important…pivotal even, I suspect. It was a gathering of a dozen and a half people, some of whom were emergent Christians and more than half of whom were…

We have six cats, which is more or less four too many, even in the country. In the beginning, we had one cat, a stray who wandered into one of the back sheds and whom Sam adopted out of mercy for her very gravid state of being at the time. Then the physician in him…

Someone asked me the other day what the “The Divine Hours” part of “The Divine Hours of Lent” meant. It struck me as a singularly appropriate question and one that I should have answered without having to be asked. In truth, the title of this blog was not of my making, but it did, and…

It’s Presidents’ Day, as we all know, and as most of us probably remarked earlier this morning with less than huge enthusiasm. In the old days before e-mail, I used to rejoice in any national holiday, however minor, just because it meant one more day of relief from the mail that used to inundate my…

There is no end to all the preconceptions and popular notions about what one should or must do during Lent. Undoubtedly, the most popular of them is that of “giving up something for Lent.” For centuries, the ‘something’ involved food. Nowadays, however, the something increasingly is a habit or an enjoyable activity other than that…

We so-called “Liturgical” Christians–read here: Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, some Lutherans, etc.–love our liturgy, thus our category marker. There is, we say, a way that worship has been offered and the eucharist celebrated for all the centuries of Christian practice, and we are loath even to consider departing from it. The truth,…

Friday, by long-standing tradition, is the day of the week assigned, every week, to particular penance and to fasting for the faithful. Just how many observant Christians still fast in some way on Friday nobody knows, nor does it matter much in general terms. But almost all Christians have some sense that Friday is, next…

I have always had a love/hate relationship with the Bed and Breakfast phenomenon. Like many another writer, I travel a great deal in the course of my work, talking to groups and lecturing. Providing me with housing while I am with any given group is always part of the contractual arrangement between us. Nine and…

It’s Wednesday, the first ‘real’ Wednesday in Lent for me. For better or worse, Ash Wednesday has always felt surreal to me. It is as if Ash Wednesday were not a Wednesday at all…as if it were not even a day, in fact, at least not in the way a Sunday or Monday or any…
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