Engaging Lenten Practices as a Family

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about how my family might engage the traditional Lenten practices. What’s the best way to convey concepts like fasting, prayer, study, and giving to younger children like my own, who are 6 and 9? In my experience as a child, fasting meant giving up chocolate or candy, and I was never entirely sure why I was doing it beyond a vague impression that Jesus wanted us to suffer. Or maybe it was a secret diet? As I got older, we talked more about taking on a new spiritual discipline rather than giving up dessert, and that carried me through for many years. Giving alms wasn’t part of my Lenten practice until I was an adult, and I could make my own connections between the words of the Invitation to a Holy Lent spoken in the Ash Wednesday service and how I wanted to mark the 40 days until Easter.

In my time as a parish priest, my family had the experience of “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” Professionally, Lent was one of the busiest seasons of my year, and their education about spiritual practices was mostly confined to Sunday School. This year, with the time to reflect and plan, I have explored multiple resources available for keeping Lent as a family. I knew I wanted to focus on fasting, giving, and study/prayer at home, and found the information presented in Traci Smith’s book Faithful Families for Lent, Easter, and Resurrection so helpful that I am using it as the basis for a family workshop in the parish I attend as well.  

Smith’s chapters contain a combination of reflections on the purposes of holy days and seasons, accompanying practices for all ages, and seasonal prayers. She talks about simplifying our lives as a way to reframe fasting to avoid some of the negative connotations of the practice, such as severe restriction of food or other extreme forms of abstention that can too easily cross the line into harm or self-punishment. She instead recommends fasting activities such as making something you would ordinarily buy rather than giving up shopping altogether or eating more fruits and vegetables rather than giving up meat. 

Similarly, Smith approaches almsgiving with a focus on small, individual actions we can undertake at any age, including collecting favorite foods for a local food pantry, making small gifts for our neighbors, and advocacy actions like writing letters to our representatives using prompts from Bread for the World. Just as we fast as an act of solidarity with those whose fasts are involuntary, we give of what we have in thanks for all that we have been given. A family I know creates a gratitude jar during Lent, writing down something each of them is thankful for each day on a small slip of paper and putting it into a large jar on their dinner table, later pulling out slips throughout the Easter season to read as a family and to prompt dinner time conversation.

Smith provides nine different prayer practices for families to try, including a simplified version of the Ignatian practice called the Daily Examen. The Examen helps us identify moments of consolation, defined as closeness to God, and desolation, or distance from God, in our daily lives through a series of questions and reflections repeated at the end of every day. This practice has been part of my prayer life for decades, and when done regularly, it helps me to be more conscious of God’s movement in my life and provides a structure with which to train myself to recognize those moments as a need for or a fruit of spiritual growth. There are plentiful resources for incorporating it into your daily routine. My favorite is the Reimagining the Examen app from Loyola Press, which gives you options of prompts and then leads you through each question. 

Studying scripture is not a focus of Smith’s book, but in my own family, we have tried many ways of engaging with the Bible more frequently. Illustrated Ministry’s Bible coloring pages are affordable for family use and can be printed at home. They have been a good entry point for my children even before they were literate, and we talk about what they are coloring as they go. The website also offers seasonal family study curricula for those wishing to go deeper. 

Illustrated Ministry inspired me to take a simple approach with my children during worship on Sunday mornings. Each week I ask them to listen extra closely to the Gospel as it is read, and then draw what they hear, whether in comic book style or an artistic response to the way the words they heard made them feel. I’m always surprised by what they come up with, and it is a good entry point for discussing the text.

Sometimes, my family’s artistic Bible studies happen on a grander scale. In our Episcopal tradition, we refrain from using the word ‘alleluia’ during the season of Lent in recognition of the season’s penitential. During Lent in 2020, in an attempt at Covid-era home Sunday school, my girls and I chose an image from one of the readings each Sunday and used it to decorate a letter or two from the word ALLELUIA, intentionally out of order. We got creative, coloring the numbers of the Ten Commandments on two Ls, making a U in the shape of Noah’s rainbow, and on Palm Sunday, turning an i into a palm frond. Some of our creations were a bit of a stretch, but we managed to cover every letter and grapple with the texts at the same time. At the end of the season, we unscrambled our letters and threaded them together with ribbon, resulting in beautiful ALLELUIA banners to display on Easter morning. What started from pandemic lockdown boredom became one of my favorite family memories. I plan to try it again this year and hope they enjoy it as much the second time around.

I hope these resources give you the confidence to try one or two new practices for fasting, giving, prayer, and bible study as a family this Lent. No matter what you choose, and no matter if you manage to keep it up for the full 40 days, by giving it a try you are showing your children why your faith is important to you, and equipping them with memories to inform the rest of their lives.