Season For Giving Up, And Giving

Holy Family Church
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403 Union St. Rockland, MA 02370 (781) 878-0160

Students at Holy Family School in Rockland are gathering food to help the needy as part of a Lenten project. From left, Lena Tran, 12, of Whitman, and Ciara Ripperger, 12, Libby Sammon, 12, and Christine Wojner, 11, all of Rockland, transport the goods. (GARY HIGGINS/The Patriot Ledger)

SEASON FOR GIVING UP, AND GIVING:
For many, Lent now is ‘what we do, not just what we don’t do’

by LANE LAMBERT
The Patriot Ledger

ROCKLAND - Like her parents and classmates, sixth-grader Christine Wojner has given up something for Lent - Cheez-Its, her favorite snack.

‘‘It’s kind of hard,’’ the Rockland girl admits, as she and several friends shared lunch in the Holy Family School cafeteria.

Along with many other young and adult believers, she’s also leavening her Catholic sacrifice with something she enjoys - she’s writing letters to an elderly great-aunt who’s in a nursing home.

For a growing number of Catholics and mainline Protestants, the pre-Easter observance traditionally associated with self-denial has become more of a season for spiritual extras - ‘‘what we do, not just what we don’t do,’’ as the Rev. Mark Hannon at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Hanson puts it.

At the Rev. Hannon’s church, longtime parishioner Bunny McLaughlin and her husband John are attending additional Masses and reading the Bible more, as part of what she calls ‘‘a quieting of life.’’

Holy Family member and school principal Ann Marie Manning is taking an online study of the Gospels from Boston College. At St. Gerard Majella in Canton, John Hynes is devoting himself to singing in the church choir as well as making the Lenten fast of one full meal a day. (He’s also given up late-night cookies.)

Local Protestants have taken up similar practices. Mary Beth Worrick at Church Hill United Methodist Church in Norwell is visiting people who are in the hospital or sick at home. At St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church in Quincy, Eric Goosens and Elizabeth Deren have joined fellow members for a Sunday night Bible study, ‘‘Bad Boys of the New Testament.’’

While scores of local churches are offering everything from discussion groups and Lenten suppers to additional early morning worship, the generational turn to ‘‘what you do’’ is on dramatic display at Holy Family School.

For the first time, Manning and her staff have transformed the 40-day Lenten season into a comprehensive hunger-awareness project, complete with a charity food-donation drive and a planned ‘‘hunger banquet,’’ where some students will get a full meal and others will get little or nothing.

Along with classroom assignments, the school’s 454 students are getting visual reminders, too. In place of traditional hallway images of the Stations of the Cross, which symbolize Jesus’ crucifixion, they can see current photos of global poverty - among them, a Bangladeshi woman holding her dying son, in a pose that evokes the ‘‘Pieta’’ image of Mary holding Jesus.

‘‘It makes you feel really fortunate,’’ sixth-grader Ciara Ripperger of Rockland said of the project. ‘‘A lot of people are starving out there, and we get to have lunch every day.’’

Holy Family is sending its food donations to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.

For Boston College theology professor Thomas Groome, programs like Holy Family’s reflect both the Vatican II reforms of the 1960s and some of the faith’s oldest practices.

In the early centuries of the Roman church, Lent was the period when new believers (catechumens) prepared to be formally brought into fellowship. Meanwhile, the rest of the community fasted and increased their almsgiving, for penance and to identify with the poor.

With Vatican II, Groome said, the church began devoting more attention to ‘‘doing things ... making Lent positive rather than punitive,’’ though the Vatican continued to preach fasting and charity as a way of ‘‘giving something up to give it away.’’

Boston University theology professor Nancy Ammerman said the more open, ecumenical climate from Vatican II prompted mainline Protestants to embrace the Lenten tradition, along with the pre-Christmas season of Advent. (High-church Episcopalians had long observed both. Few evangelical Protestants have adopted Lent.)

For Protestants, Lent is primarily a time for deeper reflection, ‘‘a way to refocus things,’’ Eric Goosens said. Elizabeth Deren, who’s 26, has resumed Lenten devotions for the first time since she went to college.

‘‘It feels like home,’’ she said. ‘‘I never thought of it as not being Protestant.’’

While the Rev. Hannon and other Catholic pastors praise their own parishioners’ contemplative efforts, they say Lent’s sterner disciplines still have a role amid what they say is a secular culture of indulgence and materialism.

‘‘Jesus died for our sins,’’ said the Rev. James Hickey at Holy Family Church. ‘‘He didn’t die for us to give up candy bars.’’

That conviction hasn’t kept the Rev. Hickey from urging his parishioners to give up one workaday temptation - the habit of complaining. Two weeks past Ash Wednesday, ‘‘we’re trying,’’ Bunny McLaughlin said.

This article originally appeared in the March 16, 2006 issue of The Patriot Ledger.