LENT 2008

Again this year the Dominican students at Blackfriars, Oxford would like to offer readers of godzdogz a Lenten Retreat. A meditation will be posted each day from Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday. We invite you to check in each day and share the journey of Lent with us. We appreciate receiving your thoughts and comments also.

This year most of the meditations will be on the Rosary and its individual mysteries. The Master of the Order has invited us to make 2008 a ‘year of the rosary’. It is the first in a novena of years during which the Dominican friars will prepare to celebrate their eighth centenary in 2016. The Dominican nuns have already celebrated their eighth centenary (1206-2006) and the friars have decided to use the years between 2006 and 2016 as ‘a time to enter into a serious renewal of our life and mission as preachers’. As a first step, the Master invites us to re-discover the Rosary ‘as a means of contemplation and an instrument of prophetic preaching’. Our Lenten meditations are offered in response to his invitation.

On the Sundays of Lent there will be reflections on the Mass readings and we will also interrupt the Rosary reflections for other important feasts along the way. We will follow the new arrangement of twenty mysteries, adding to the traditional Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious mysteries, the ‘Mysteries of Light’ identified by John Paul II, in which we meditate on key moments in the preaching ministry of Jesus, his baptism, the sign given at Cana, his preaching work as a whole, his Transfiguration, and his institution of the Eucharist.

Have a serious – but happy – Lent!