Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

Lent

Pancakes and preparations

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The antipodean Lent starts tomorrow with Ash Wednesday, where the nights, and not the days, continue to lengthen, and we move into autumn and towards winter. Not that you can tell at the moment, with all the heat and humidity.

In the past I’ve tended to give things up for Lent (coffee, I think) to serve as a reminder to myself to be more reflective as I approach Easter. In the past couple of years I’ve tried a different tack, to add something into Lent rather than taking something away. Recently, this has been to commit to a daily series of reflections specific to Lent. One year it was a book by Tom Wright, last year it was Faith Odyssey (see Greenflame: Star Lent). Sometimes not filling the gap left by giving something up, leads to it being unconsciously being filled by something else – like the year I found I had upped my cola intake without noticing, while giving up coffee for Lent.

So, yesterday I walked down to my local Christian bookshop to see what things they had that might be good to use this season. However, they had nothing (it was all arriving sometime soon, they said), and so today I tripped across town to another bookshop who had a selection of Lenten and Easter books on display and picked up a couple. I have no idea what they’ll be like, so it’ll be an interesting journey, I hope. the first is Voices from the Desert – A spirituality for our times by Leslie Griffiths (SCM Canterbury Press), while the second is Mirror of the Soul , a series of 40 reflections from the Psalms.

And speaking of filling things up, with today being Shrove Tuesday, we had pancakes tonight, cooked in the new frying pan I bought today. A bit of an experiment while I got the hand of the pan’s thermodynamics, and definitely no tossing of pancakes until I’m used to the pan’s weight. Pancakes turned out okay, and were eaten simply with lemon and sugar.

By next year, maybe I’ll have had some more thoughts on writing a Lenten series oriented around comic books – Lent by Lantern Light?

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