Lent, First Sunday in...

In the church calendar, Sundays are usually known as the "Sundays of" as in the 4th Sunday of Pentecost or the 2nd Sunday of Advent.

But during Lent, they're known as the "Sundays in" as in today is the first Sunday in Lent. If I put my outsider's hat on again (that I grew up outside the church) and do the math geek thing that's hardwired in my genes, there are more than 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday. In fact, it's off by 6 because Sundays don't count. Sundays are mini-Easters and therefore they are "in" rather than part "of" the Lenten season. (And my mother should be proud of me now because as fantastic as my math scores were, I could never choose the proper preposition back in high school -- and she was a high school English teacher.)


All this is a convoluted way of saying that today's entry is not really part of my formal Lenten goals. However, this Lenten practice will hopefully become part of a larger lifelong goal -- writing. I'm not sure in what form or to what end, but I know I want to write something and that the best preparation for that is to simply write something every day.

So... I won't hold myself to write something about Lent for each Sunday "in" Lent this year, but if I do, it will reflect a bit on the process of writing a Lenten journal.

For example, I chose to write these entries on one of my blogs on blogger.com, because I though it might be fun to share whatever pops into my head during the 2010 Lenten season, and honestly no one has ever really followed any of the other blogs. Most of other blogs are false starts because I'm such a perfectionist. This time around I decided to just go for it. Don't create yet another new blog, just keep adding to the most recent one.

Great idea until I realized that I had tethered this blog to my Facebook page, which of course gets much more attention. What I thought would be a semi-private thing that I could unveil around Easter became something that immediately received comments and is not nearly as private.

I wasn't sure how to handle the comments. I kind of wanted to just be in my own bubble while writing the Lenten entries, and in some ways, still want that. But it's also weird to not acknowledge them at all. So... the Sundays in Lent entries seem to be the best way to do that: acknowledge them and perhaps even use this space to comment back.

But for now, the biggest acknowledgment is that even though I wanted to be in my own bubble, the very fact that people commented on the first few entries will probably keep me in a daily writing routine than had I kept it semi-private. So thanks to all who have commented so far -- it's inspiring me to keep writing.