Pondered In My Heart

Lent Calendars 2020

Lydia has once again illustrated beautiful calendars for the upcoming season of Great Lent, one for the Eastern Rites and one for the Latin Rite. Young and old alike have enjoyed using these for many years. You can print them out and color a space a day as a visual reminder of our progress through the season.

*Please note: The numbers on the calendars are the numbered days of Lent, not calendar dates.

Download Lent 2020 Latin      Download Lent 2020 Byzantine

Please feel free to share with your parishes, homeschool groups, catechism and ECF classes, etc.

A blessed, holy Lent to all of you!

Menu Planner - Lenten Style

This is a printout that we use during Lent for planing our meals. I designed this one to include three unique features important for us: space for teatime snack, space for evening prep tasks (like soaking beans or starting sourdough), and listing Sunday as the first day of the week(!). A simple form, but I post it here in the event it may be useful to others. Also, we find it very helpful to keep our completed sheets from year to year to assist in planning Lenten meals.

Download Menu planner Lent

Lent Calendars 2019

Lydia has once again illustrated a beautiful calendar for the upcoming season of Lent, and this year she has made two: one for the Eastern Rites as well as one for the Latin!

Young and old alike have enjoyed using these for years. You can print them out and color a space a day as a visual reminder of our progress through the season.

Please feel free to share with your parishes, homeschool groups, catechism and ECF classes, or whomever you wish.

Download Lent 2019 Byzantine

Download Lent 2019 Latin

A few notes about the Great Fast for those of you in the Latin Rite who are curious about the East: As you can see, Lent starts on the Monday before Ash Wednesday. The First Sunday, called the Sunday of Orthodoxy, refers to the triumph over Iconoclasm and the restoration of the use of icons and holy images. There are five All Souls Saturdays (three occur in Lent) in which to commemorate and pray for the dead, as opposed to All Souls Day celebrated in November.

Lent Calendar 2018

Lydia has once again illustrated a calendar for the upcoming season of Lent! Young and old have enjoyed using this for years as a visual of the journey through the forty days. You can color or mark off a space each day as we make our way towards Holy Week and Easter. Seeing the daily progress is an encouragement to all.

Note that since the Annunciation falls on Palm Sunday this year, in the Latin Rite the feast is transferred to after Easter.

Please feel free to share with your homeschool groups, catechism classes, parishes, or whomever you wish.

Download Lent 2018 (C) PonderedInMyHeart

Art for Our Lady: Marian ATC Swap 2017

Icon of the Theotokos, watercolor by Lydia Grace

The Visitation, ink and watercolor by Mary Rose

We will once again be hosting an Artist Trading Card swap of Marian artwork to honor Our Lady during the month of May!

Artist trading cards are miniature pieces of artwork created for the purpose of trading with others. At 2.5 x 3.5 inches in size, ATCs are quite small, making them fun to create and collect and trade.

Artist Trading Cards can be made using any art medium you like such as colored pencils, graphite, watercolor, acrylic, marker, pen and ink - whatever you like! Artists of all ages are welcome to join. We also like to encourage busy mothers to participate as well, whether you create art alongside your children or take some quiet personal time to work on your own.

Some possibilities for artwork themes: icons, titles of Our Lady, (see for example the Litany of Loreto or an Akathist Hymn), mysteries of the rosary, devotions and (approved) apparitions, hymns, prayers, antiphons, symbols, traditional images or classic paintings. Religious catalogs, books, holy cards or calendars of artwork can be helpful to have around for inspiration. You can see posts on previous ATC Swaps here.

The swap will work the same as the previous ones. Here are the details:

• Each participant will create five ATC's to mail out and will receive five different cards in return, usually from five different artists.
• Everyone will send their cards to me. We sort them out roughly by age group/ability of the creator and then mail the cards back out to their new recipients. When you mail your cards to me, please include a self-addressed stamped envelope that I can use to send your new cards to you.
• International swappers are most welcome! It's always extra fun to receive cards from a faraway place. 
• The swap is open to all ages.
• Each card should be labeled on the back with the creator's name and however much info you'd like to share.
• If you are interested in participating please leave a comment or send me an email kimberlee (at) beadsofmercy (dot) com with ATC swap in the subject, and I will send you further information. Anyone can join in and definitely the more the merrier.
• Please mail your cards to me postmarked by Wednesday, May 31st.
• If you have a blog (or use other social media) please post about the swap to spread the word. Please use the hashtag #marianatcswap if you post photos on Instagram.

Enjoy creating lovely artwork to honor Our Lady! We look forward to hearing from you.

Celebrating Pascha

 

This year our traditions were a mix of old and new as we celebrated for the first time at our Byzantine Catholic Church. We made a lot of pysanky during Holy Week, something we hadn't done since my oldest children were little. Lydia decorated one of our homemade beeswax tapers for our Paschal candle. She used crayon melted in a kistka to apply the design and it worked like a charm (boiling water made quick work of cleaning up the kistka). I made my first hrudka, the traditional Eastern European egg cheese served on Easter bread. We enjoyed Slovak pascha baked by the church ladies (including my daughters), along with our traditional Hungarian kalacs. We jumped on the babka bandwagon and make some of those deliciously decadent loaves for the first time. Our customary piskota, nut and poppy rolls, rugelach, and bird nests rounded out our sweets with which to break the Great Fast and celebrate Easter.

Holy Saturday was spent cooking and baking as is our longstanding tradition, though we had to scurry a bit to get everything prepared before evening Liturgy and the blessing of the Pascha food baskets. This was a great thrill as we finally got to participate in this tradition that my mother and sister often speak of from their childhoods in ethnic churches. Anna Ruth embroidered a beautiful Pascha basket cover for us, and the older girls wore their traditional garb for the occasion. Mary Rose wore the Hungarian vest that Josiah made and Anna embroidered for her for Christmas - she had been waiting for the feast day to wear it for the first time. Father blesses the food baskets after Holy Saturday evening Liturgy and again on Easter morning; all the lovingly prepared special foods from the various ethnic traditions make a beautiful sight.

The Easter morning services begin with Resurrection Matins and a procession around the church in the brilliant sunshine, a stark contrast to Good Friday's nighttime procession with the Shroud in the dark. With the church bells ringing out, Father marks the door with the Cross and the troparion of Pascha is sung for the first time:

Christ is risen from the dead!
By death he trampled death
and to those in the tombs he granted life!

Christós voskrése iz mértvych,
smértiju smert' popráv,
i súščym vo hrobích živót darováv.

And we have been singing it seemingly incessantly ever since. With it the Resurrection is proclaimed in song many times throughout every Divine Liturgy, in numerous melodies, in various languages. Folks in my house hum it, whistle it, think it, sing it, back each other up in spontaneous harmonies, live it as it constantly courses through our minds and hearts and souls bringing Resurrection joy and peace and hope. Eliza goes out on the deck every day to sing it at the top of her lungs to the world at large. The reality of the empty tomb permeates and preoccupies our thoughts throughout these glorious triumphant days of Pascha. Holy Mother Church gives us fifty days to celebrate! May the joy of the risen Christ belong to you and yours as well. 

Christ is risen! Indeed He is risen!