Describing Catholic Lent

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Catholic Lent
At this time of the year, back home in Ecuador, parents are planning vacations to go enjoy holly week with their families. As a family, we usually spend these days enjoying each other’s company at the beaches nearby our city. Being born and raced in Ecuador, a country with a majority of catholic population, I have observed that for the parishioners the path to holly week is very serious.
To learn about the importance and rituals that happen during this time called lent, I have asked a catholic friend to introduce me to the practices and let me have a peek on it. As explained to me, lent is the moment of conversion, in order to get prepared for Easter. It is an occasion to repent of sins. It seems like a time of reflection where Catholics try to mend their errors to become better persons. For conversion, Catholics want to give the Lord all their heart in fasting, in weeping, and in mourning.
The period of conversion lasts forty days, starting with Ash Wednesday. On this day parishioners go to mass and get the sign of the cross on their forehead marked with ashes. The colors observed for the decoration of the church and the clothing of the priest is purple which means mourning and penitence. The ashes are made out of blessed palms used in Palm Sunday the previous year; they are christened with holy water and scented with incense. At the moment where the faithful get the ashes, the priest who is the person marking the cross tells them a remainder saying: dust you are and dust you will become. The remainder is there to help achieve a spirit o humility and sacrifice.
The distribution of ashes comes from a ceremony of ages past. Christians who had committed grave faults performed public penance. On Ash Wednesday, th...

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... are there to remind you how much love God has for you. She says God sent his loved child as a sacrifice to die for the sins of the world so that we can all be saved. She explains to me that even though this took place, humans tend to forget, and so the images are there to remind us how much better persons we can be, and how we can offer our pain for the recovery of others.
My friend explains to me that the idea of being free of sin is to achieve eternal life, and that this is a personal achievement. Although I observe groups of people walking from one station to the other, she lets me know that usually families spend this time of the year together and do the different events of Lint as a group, or join their praying groups to go through the events.

Works Cited

Joel 2:12-18
Catholic Online
Genesis
Catholic Online,
Etymologies
Catholic News Agency

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