Ecumenical meetings, Masses, meditation hours, and each Sunday the Via Crucis. These are the typical ingredients of every Lent in the various dioceses of England and Wales. The magazines produced for the occasion, with the title “Lenten”, are full of suggestions for making these forty days special. During Lent we read in “Lenten Extra” the faithful are invited to add or remove things from their life, “not so much to become martyrs, but because this helps us to live in the right perspective”. During this period, the habit of renouncing sweets, confectionery, the cinema or the theatre, is widespread among English Catholics. Someone also suggests that we look with greater attention at nature, which is of the greatest importance in this country and has always been a privileged way of cultivating the life of the spirit. This is a suggestion made, for example, in some of the newsletters containing verses for meditation and church announcements that are distributed in every English parish during Lent: they advise the faithful to go for a walk in the woods and let themselves be inspired by the beauty of nature. Among the spiritual exercises practised during this period of penance there is also the tradition of concentrating each week on one of the five senses to reflect how they may be used either for good or for ill. There are also those who place a lit candle in a pottery vessel in remembrance of the spiritual treasure given to us by Baptism and in acknowledgement of the fragility of the container in which we bear it. In some churches, children are encouraged to make cut-out paper flowers and leaves and hang them on the “Resurrection tree”. It’s a tree without branches placed in the church: the children are given the task of covering it with paper flowers and leaves on which they have written the names of sick, elderly and handicapped parishioners, as well as the names of the persons who are helping to look after them. Parishioners are then invited to take a leaf from the tree and to pray during Lent for the person whose name is written on it. A major ecumenical initiative in the UK is the march promoted in London each year. Catholics, Anglicans and Methodists walk in procession through the streets of the capital, passing the city’s three most important cathedrals: the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, the Anglican Westminster Abbey and the Methodist Central Hall. The event, punctuated with moments of meditation and prayer, annually attracts hundreds of people.
