You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, sprouts. Today is Friday, February 19th, 2021. This week on the Catholic Spouts podcast, we have been journeying from ordinary time into Lent. So we are currently in the season

of Lent. And as a reminder, Catholics avoid eating

meat on Fridays during Lent. And today is a Friday. So if your parents decide that you

are old enough to join the church in this day of fasting, they encourage you to take that seriously. It is also wise,

if you were old enough once again, to avoid eating between meals or eating too much food on Fridays.

And we do this to remind ourselves once again that only God can satisfy us and that when we feel that hunger, it is a reminder to turn

to God for our needs and not necessarily to run to the pantry for a granola bar. So today we are going

to talk about the things that we can expect to hear and feel during this season of Lent.

So the first thing that you might have noticed is that during Lent, we proclaim,

we begin the gospel part of the liturgy of the word at Mass in a different way.

Since we're in Lent, I won't even say the word that we're not supposed to

say, but we don't say the A word, that big Easter A word. We instead bury that word, and we enter

into a bit of the time, we kind of put ourselves back before the resurrection. We imagine that we are

living this world before Christ has risen from the dead. So we don't say that word anymore.

Now, another thing that you are going to see at Mass during Lent, of course, is that everything

is purple. And there is this part in Lent

at most churches where they actually take purple drapery and they cover up the crucifix, the big icons,

the big pictures. We drape those with purple. Now, why do we do this? Well, we do this just as a way of making

things quieter and more still. In fact, that is the one thing that you can expect to hear in Lent.

More silence, more stillness. The whole point here is to strip away all of the things

that might have distracted us and to focus in, to focus in so completely on Jesus Christ himself.

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