To help keep us on track, the Church offers us three pillars to focus our efforts during the 40 days of Lent: Prayer, fasting and almsgiving. While the practice of fasting during this season is widely known and observed, many are not aware of how to properly incorporate prayer during Lent.

God calls us to begin or strengthen our daily prayer regime so that we may come to know Him on a personal level. If we are truly going to grow in a relationship with Jesus Christ, increasing our time in prayer is exactly where we need to start from. Through the three pillars of Lent we journey to develop a closer relationship with God. The 40 days of Lent should be filled with reflection, service and prayer.

Often times the most overlooked pillar of Lent is prayer.  There are so many wonderful ways to pray during Lent.  More time given to prayer during Lent should draw us closer to the Lord. Prayer is our communication with the Trinity God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is a two-way relationship of both listening and speaking. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “This mystery, then, requires that the faithful believe in it, that they celebrate it, and that they live from it in a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God”.

During Lent, we are called to pray as a way to connect with God and reflect on Jesus’ sacrifice. Prayer helps us become attuned to God's voice, seek forgiveness and grow closer to him. It's a time for self-reflection and renewal, inviting us to align our lives with God’s will. Through prayer, we find comfort, hope and strength in knowing that God is with us during our 40-day journey through Lent and beyond. Prayer is an essential component of growth in our relationship with the living God. If we have not already been incorporating prayer into our daily lives, Lent is an excellent time to start.

We begin by reconciling ourselves to God. God wants us to be reconciled to him and to one another. He wants us to shed anger, bitterness and resentments that could decay our souls. If we truly desire God’s love and mercy, we must learn to humble ourselves and seek not only divine forgiveness but to establish life-giving relationships around us.

As we set our relationship right with God, we can simultaneously add a manageable habit of prayer into our daily routine. Examples could include: A daily decade of the Rosary; A daily examination of conscience; Reading and reflecting on the daily Mass readings and Spending five minutes in silence every day, asking the Lord to speak to us.

Fasting

There are only two days of the year that Catholics are required to fast. One is Ash Wednesday and the other is Good Friday. In fact, both days are days of fasting and abstinence. What’s the difference between the two, you may ask. On days of fasting we are to eat only one meal, which can be breakfast, lunch or dinner. On days of abstinence, which are somewhat optional throughout the year, we are to abstain from eating meat. Almost everyone knows that Good Friday is a day of abstinence, but a surprising amount of people forget that Ash Wednesday is, too.

Also, even though Fridays throughout the year have had their law of abstinence loosened, in that you may replace abstaining from meat with some other form of penance or corporal work of mercy, during Lent all Fridays are days of abstinence. Fasting goes very well with prayer. It’s like salt and pepper, they just work well together. One reason is that by fasting we deny our human appetites, both literally and figuratively, and can focus more intensely on our prayer.

Another reason, for both fasting and abstinence, is to show solidarity with the poor. For many centuries the poor didn’t have access to meats on a regular basis like the rich did, so to skip a meal and or abstain from eating meat lets us walk a mile in their shoes and learn to empathize with their plight. Jesus spoke of fasting during the Sermon on the Mount in a way that assumes we are going to fast. He said, “when you fast.” He didn’t say “if.” (Matthew 6:16).

Jesus also speaks about fasting many more times in the Gospel. He even told the Apostles that some demons can only be driven out with fasting and prayer. Use your hunger to focus more clearly on Christ, every time your stomach rumbles think about how hungry Jesus must have been during His forty days in the desert. How hungry was He while hanging on the cross. Allow it to become a prayerful exercise.

Almsgiving

Almsgiving is really just another name for charitable giving. Alms comes from a word that means pity, while charity comes from the Latin word “caritas”, that means love. Giving to charity is showing caritas, love, for our neighbour just as Jesus told us to. St Francis of Assisi said, “in giving we receive.” This is very true. When you have love for someone, and you give to them, its better than any gift you could receive. Anyone that’s ever watched his/her children open a gift knows this to be true. But just as with anything else we must take care not to give for the wrong reasons, or not out of authentic charity.

Three passages from the New Testament come to mind regarding giving. The first is from the gospel of Matthew and concerns giving to receive praise from others. This is not true charity and must be guarded against. The second passage is from the Gospel of Mark and it’s about proportionality. Jesus compares the giving of a widow and that of a rich man, even though her donation was a fraction of the rich man’s it was actually of greater value because it was all she had. It could be compared to a billionaire donating N1,000,000 and a homeless man giving his last Naira. Even though one is numerically greater than the other, in proportion to how much it cost them, the homeless man gave the greater gift.

The point is this: He who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and he who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work. During Lent we are to pray, fast, and give. How long, how intensely, and how much is up to us.

We can say one Glory be, probably the shortest prayer I know. We can fast and abstain to the barest of minimums, eating every few hours but making sure that it stays just within the rules. All these would satisfy the letter of the law, but would they satisfy the spirit of the law? Only you and your conscience can answer that. The biggest thing that all three of these pillars have in common is that we should be doing them already, they aren’t something special that we do only for Lent. We only increase these virtues during Lent, and hopefully it carries over for the rest of the year.

Hopefully any virtuous habits that we commit to this Lent will also have a staying effect on all of us. Let’s makes sure we do it all with the proper motives and remember the admonishment that Jesus gave concerning praying, almsgiving, and fasting in Matthew chapter 6: Don’t do it for the praises of men, do it for God.

God Bless the Catholic Church!!! God Bless Nigeria!!!