Tree hugging and queer reflecting (Lent 2022)

The 40 days of Lent can be awfully long if you're trying to do something (or not do something) every day. Here are a couple of things I found this year which I thought I might actually be able to keep up with. One has a very small action each day, and the other is something to read and think about - but only on Sundays, until you get to Holy Week.

Get Outside in Lent

Christian environmental charity A Rocha has provided six weeks of ideas to get you and your family outside in Lent. The PDF is here: https://bit.ly/ECGetOutsideforLent. There are six activities each week (and yes, the first one really is "Hug a tree") and a suggestion for a celebration and prayer on Sundays.

The logical way to do six weeks seems to be to start next Monday, but then the final Sunday is Easter Sunday. So I guess you could also start today (or tomorrow) and finish on the Thursday before Easter. There are no dates, making it pretty flexible.

Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional

Unbound, a Christian social justice journal, offers two series of devotions for Lent. I'm reading the 2020 one, Ashes to Rainbows, written by LGBTQIA+ people of faith and allies. The other is Disabling Lent: An Anti-Ableist Lenten Devotional.

Both include reflections for Ash Wednesday, each Sunday of Lent, and every day of Holy Week - so not a whole lot of reading until you get to the end. I think these are likely to challenge some of my assumptions about faith, as I hear from different perspectives.

Are you doing, reading, or listening to anything new this Lent? Let me know!

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A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks! I learnt a new word today! I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian . Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist. Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials. All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal. That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter. So why the need for a fancy new word? Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal. But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course. The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Hosting Thanksgiving

OK, I have to confess. This will be a very boring Thanksgiving story. Everything went right and it was a lovely day. For an interesting story you need a few things going wrong. I heard a couple of interesting stories this year - like the one about mis-measuring bourbon to go in the stuffing. Apparently if you put far too much in, all the alcohol doesn't boil off. Or the one about going to cook dinner at an Asian friend's house, and discovering at the last minute that she doesn't have any baking trays, and it's quite difficult to roast a turkey in a wok. But as I said, we didn't have so much as a lumpy gravy panic. Where's my food??? We're working on it, baby! So what do you want to know? Well, it was my first Thanksgiving dinner cooked on American soil. Back when I was free and single and shared a house with lots of people who liked to eat, I got into the habit of celebrating the American feast for a few years, until the number of peopl

Martha's Marvellous Munchies

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