Your Packing List for a 40-Day Trip

Provost Jan Cope asks you to imagine that you're headed on a journey for the next six weeks. What are you bringing with you? What will you leave at home?

In her homily for Ash Wednesday, Jan offers some guidance as we begin the 40-day journey through Lent, toward Easter:

Like any trip, it’s important at the beginning to reflect on those things that are essential to take with us and some of the things that are probably better left at home. We receive an invitation to keep a holy Lent, one that is marked by self-examination and repentance by prayer, fasting and self-denial, and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word. The scriptures, as you can tell from those essentials, were not heading out on a luxury cruise. And yet this journey promises to be life giving and transformative in a way that no cruise, no matter how luxurious could ever hope to achieve.

As you’re packing for this journey, Jan offered some practical tips on what you should consider taking with you:

• Subscribe to the Cathedral’s daily Lent meditations, offered seven days a week by a rotating cast of our Cathedral clergy.
• Join Vicar Dana Corsello for the weekly Take on Lent programming, offered in-person and online every Tuesday evening.
• Our Pastor for Digital Ministries, Jo Owens, will lead an online book study on “A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers in Lent.”

And, Jan notes, consider leaving your cell phone at home. Studies show most working-age adults spent an astonishing two and a half hours on social media each day. Just think about what else you could do with that time:

Just imagine if you abstained from some of that and made that part of your fast. Maybe, just maybe, you would follow up on your impulse to pick up the phone and talk to a family member or a friend or a neighbor in need. Maybe, just maybe, you would have more time to be in service to others.