Catholic Lent
At this time of the year, back home in Ecuador, parents are planning vacations to go enjoy holly week with their families. As a family, we usually spend these days enjoying each other’s company at the beaches nearby our city. Being born and raced in Ecuador, a country with a majority of catholic population, I have observed that for the parishioners the path to holly week is very serious.
To learn about the importance and rituals that happen during this time called lent, I have asked a catholic friend to introduce me to the practices and let me have a peek on it. As explained to me, lent is the moment of conversion, in order to get prepared for Easter. It is an occasion to repent of sins. It seems like a time of reflection where Catholics try to mend their errors to become better persons. For conversion, Catholics want to give the Lord all their heart in fasting, in weeping, and in mourning.
The period of conversion lasts forty days, starting with Ash Wednesday. On this day parishioners go to mass and get the sign of the cross on their forehead marked with ashes. The colors observed for the decoration of the church and the clothing of the priest is purple which means mourning and penitence. The ashes are made out of blessed palms used in Palm Sunday the previous year; they are christened with holy water and scented with incense. At the moment where the faithful get the ashes, the priest who is the person marking the cross tells them a remainder saying: dust you are and dust you will become. The remainder is there to help achieve a spirit o humility and sacrifice.
The distribution of ashes comes from a ceremony of ages past. Christians who had committed grave faults performed public penance. On Ash Wednesday, th...
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... are there to remind you how much love God has for you. She says God sent his loved child as a sacrifice to die for the sins of the world so that we can all be saved. She explains to me that even though this took place, humans tend to forget, and so the images are there to remind us how much better persons we can be, and how we can offer our pain for the recovery of others.
My friend explains to me that the idea of being free of sin is to achieve eternal life, and that this is a personal achievement. Although I observe groups of people walking from one station to the other, she lets me know that usually families spend this time of the year together and do the different events of Lint as a group, or join their praying groups to go through the events.
Works Cited
Joel 2:12-18
Catholic Online
Genesis
Catholic Online,
Etymologies
Catholic News Agency
garb, to recite the Credo and one third of the Rosary, and to make confession
The work begins with Section I, ‘The Background’ which consists of a general overview in medieval women’s social and religious history. The first section delineates the basic societal framework for Western European women in the High Middle Ages and outlines the cultural forces at work in shaping their lives. The second part of this section reviews the changes in religious consciousness concerning sacramental practices and fasting, from the Church Fathers to the late medieval hagiographers. It should be noted here that although more careful attention is given to the practice of ‘fasting,’ especially in the latter portion of the work which I will be examining in more detail, the ‘feasting’ in question more generally denotes the ‘love feast’ of the Eucharist than the fe...
They represent Lily's only connection to her deceased mother, besides her blurred memories. At one point in the novel, when Lily is talking to August, August hands Lily a photograph from the past of Lily and her mother. Lily thinks to herself, "I didn't care about anything on this earth except the way her face was tipped toward mine, our noses just touching, how wide and gorgeous her smile was, like sparklers going off (Kidd 275). When Lily sees the image of her mother, she is assured that she was deeply loved. This gives her a sense of peace and relief that she has been longing for. Nevertheless, Lily still continues to struggle with the sadness and guilt of accidentally killing her mother. However, at the end of the novel when Lily is looking at a different photograph of her mother, Lily finally is relieved of the guilt that has burdened her for so long. She thinks, "In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again" (Kidd 301). Lily is beginning to move on from pain and guilt that has burdened her for so long. Through forgiving herself, Lily is freed from the torment she has held inside of her for as long as she can
The depiction of Madonna and Christ is among the most ancient and common in Christian iconography and has an extensive number of variations because apart from its symbolic religious functions, it allows one to interpret the link between mother and child in many aspects. (8)
When someone dies their bones are burned and crushed into ash and consumed by the relatives. It puts a persons soul at peace to find a resting place within their family, it would be an abomination to bury them in the ground. Once this ceremony is finished the person is gone. Their name or person is never to be mentioned again.
The first symbol was a tall, bronze ladder that was narrow and stretched all the way to Heaven. The ladder represents the path that everyone must climb in order to get to Heaven. On the ladder are iron implements, all of which were various weapons, and that if you were not careful, you would be "torn to pieces" (2). The iron implements were the tools that were used to torture people, especially in the arena where the Christians were killed. One could also see the implements as obstacles that people face while trying to live a good life and get to Heaven. The dragon found at the bottom of the ladder is representative of the temptation of the devil (2). When the dragon put his head down and Perpetua stomped on it, it showed that she had power over the devil and that she was able to resist his temptations. The huge expanse of garden symbolizes Heaven. The white-haired man milking his ewes and dressed like a shepherd is referring to God watching over all his people like a shepherd watches his flock. The thousands of people dressed in white are either representing the angels and saints in Heaven or the thousands of believers that have died before and now live in Heaven. Finally, in her vision, Perpetua is given a small morsel, and she accepts it with both hands, and the people say "Amen". These actions symbolize those of Eucharist and that she was receiving the Body of Christ. After this had happened,
The bread represents Christ's body and the wine represents his blood. When they take this bread and wine, Catholics believe that they are becoming one with Christ and are renewing their faith. According to the Gospels, Christ shared bread and wine with his disciples to symbolise them becoming one body. The final section of the Mass, the Concluding Rite, consists of a final prayer ( postcommunion ), the blessing ( benediction ) and the dismissal. A hymn may be sung as the clergy leave the church.
Feasts and rituals are held in the Virgin’s honor on December 12 of each year, the day she is believed to have appeared to Juan Diego. These feasts and rituals are held throughout Mexico, as well as in cities within the United States cities with large Mexican-American populations. Included in the rituals are imagery and practices native to the Indigenous population Mexico, reinforcing the Virgin’s importance as a deity of to the Indigenous.
It serves as a marker for our faith journey and discipleship lasting all through our lives.
After the death of a person the eyes are closed, so the person can finally rest in peace. Some Jews place the body of the deceased on the floor immediately after death. This is done to cool the body to slow the deterioration of the body and also fulfill the biblical prognostication "for dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return"(Genesis 3:19). A candle is then lit and placed near the corpse head to show respect to the soul that departed. In the past twenty-six candles were light around the body; twenty-six is the Jewish numerical number meaning "God." Today this is done only to show respect to the dead. Jewish people treat a close family members death similar to Americans. Relatives and friends of the deceased feel great distress, sorrow, and pain.
We do tend to expect certain things when we enter a place of worship, or peruse an active ministry, and truthfully, when taking in Christian oriented art. There are a couple reoccurring emblems, symbols, well-worn themes, and subjects which have been deemed safe, coming under overuse, carrying the weight of a saltine in the impact it makes on people, including us. While intentions are almost always well meaning, these conventions appear to the secular as a genre of its own in culture and art, quite often ringing with an unsavory note of incompetence. That’s already an unpleasant attribution to a faith that has changed the world, having built the infrastructure of empathy that has survived ages and permeates the social development of our western culture. It speaks to a deeper issue within the Church itself, which is a woeful lack of inspiration.
...the world upside down, creating happiness, abundance, freedom, and above all equality of everyone within society.” This elaborate and extensive celebration brings all classes together for a period of time when issues and rights are embraced to improve on. Women use this time as a gateway towards equality while homosexuals use the opportunity to gain more acceptance. Even those mourning over loss or poverty can come together and celebrate their misfortunes in a way that makes them feel acknowledged and appreciated. Lent is a period of time when people choose to give something up, the Carnaval starts off this period but making people appreciate what they have and by bringing them together. Brazilians who participate have fond memories of the sense of togetherness the Carnaval brought them. Brazil is known for Carnaval and the spirit associated with the event.
Wueri in his pastoral letter to the faithful in his diocese, he asserts, “We are not left to our own devices.” For the simple reason that the effect of Adam’s sin into the world, such as death, disharmony, confusion, disruption and struggle; Jesu through the sacraments restores harmony and gives us newness of life in grace (3). Just as we consult the doctor in illness, eat food when hungry, go to school to acquire knowledge, the priest in the sacrament of penance gives us instructions and absolution to renews our souls. If you insist on asking mercy from God directly, you are also saying that you will pray to god to nourish you physically when you are hungry. In all aspect of our life, we need others. Our relationship with God is vertical and horizontal not only horizontal. The confessional is like spiritual counseling as compared to psychological counseling for someone who is emotionally over
Retrieved March 22, 2014, from Marbella Guide: http://www.marbella-guide.com/semana-santa-spanish-easter/. Holy Week. n.d. - n.d. - n.d. Retrieved March 20, 2014, from Semana Santa: http://web.schc.sc.edu/Samantha_Ward_Senior_Thesis/SemanaSanta.html. Weaver, M. (2009, March 12). Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Seville, Spain.
I attended Mass at my local parish, the Parish of St. Francis de Sales, on Sunday, October 9th, in order to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist. This also happens to be the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time because the priest of the parish, Father Phan, wore green in order to symbolize life, anticipation for the coming of Christ, and hope. The liturgical season of Ordinary Time is also significant because it focuses on the fruits of Jesus’s three-year public ministry, his educational parables, and his extraordinary miracles. The season of Ordinary Time also serves as a reminder that the Church’s mission, our mission, is to not only share the life and hope of Jesus