My game plan:
Reflection:
- listen to a homily every day - could be Bishop Barron, Bishop Burbidge, from my own parish, or some other reflection from another priest
- Reading - I am slowly rereading Augustine's Confessions and also reading Compassion & Conviction; The (&) Campaign's Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement. I'm also reading a collection of short meditations from Bishop Barron, entitled Centering.
Prayer:
- Lauds every morning
- Divine Mercy every afternoon (need to set alarm for 3 p.m.)
- Night prayers with my family
Reparation/Penance:
- Confession - I need to quarantine as much as possible until after vacation (to keep my father in law safe) so I will go in early August.
- Each day I will perform a work of spiritual or corporal mercy. I am already on prayer requests team from my parish which is a good thing. Two other things I can do are: pick up trash around my neighbor when I take walks and remember to buy extra groceries and take them to the drop off at my parish for the food bank. Next month I'm scheduled to make chicken for the homeless the first Thursday. I also consider taking my glass recycling to the drop off site a corporal work of mercy since it helps Creation (and I absolutely hate the sound of breaking glass. Gives me nightmares. I have to grit my teeth the whole time!). Conscientious recycling is a work of mercy! Deliberately choosing to buy ethically and locally even if it is less convenient and more expensive is a corporal work of mercy, I think! Wearing a mask, even though I hate it, should count too! I don't hate it for political reasons, I just find it intensely uncomfortable! I will brainstorm more to come up with ideas I can implement. It is hard to do something every day in normal times, during CV19 it's even harder but I'll still work towards that goal.
- Consumption of media will be restricted to the following: facebook for a quick check in with possible posts/messages from family, also I am in a discussion group about Christian civic engagement. But I'm just going to dash in and out, no hanging out! I will watch homilies, but that's different, I will still keep up my booktube channel. That has been nothing but a good thing to me. But, I will watch only one other booktube channel a day and one gardening/homesteading channel a day. I often binge watch. I might keep up Instagram because I mostly just post photos of nature or books. Only takes a minute. No twitter which I recently returned to. No political youtube, no politics anywhere! I need a breather. Although, I also am going to attend a maybe three zoom meetings. Does that count? Otherwise it would be in person and wouldn't be social media, so I don't think I'll include them. And they also could double as spiritual or corporal works of mercy because they deal with racism, police brutality and the environment. I want to restrict the totality of media consumption to one hour a day, whenever possible. Some days will go over but most days could easily be restricted to 30 to 45 minutes. Oh dear though. This is all so complicated!
- Fast from sugar - this is something I regularly try to do but lately have been very bad at. So I'm going to get stricter about this.
- Abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays. I try to do this also but often fail utterly!
- Exercise 1 hour a day - this includes walks, gardening, playing outside with D. However, I also need to stretch regularly and I need to include in this doing at least 15 minutes of housework each day. I am so lazy. Outside of cleaning the kitchen and doing laundry, I hardly touch anything. I wait until someone is coming over or there is some sort of pressure from something to get me going. It's awful. If I take a 15 minutes walk with D in the a.m. Weed for ten minutes, kick a ball around with D or horseplay with him, plus some sweeping, vacuuming, scrubbing, I could get in an hour easily and will probably go over it. But in truth I probably need at minimum two hours of this low key movement to be healthy.
