Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent – a season of repentance and reflection leading up to Easter.
Although the season is primarily observed by Catholics and liturgical Protestants – Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists and the like – some other branches of Christianity are also starting to connect with the season.
One common practice is to give something up. It’s seen as a way to deeper reflect on sacrifice, and to distance oneself from something that can be a distraction from God.
Christianity Today lists chocolate, alcohol, Twitter, social networking, and swearing as the top five most popular things to give up. And in the “social networking” category, Facebook is a big one. Many see giving up the social platform as a chance to connect more meaningfully with people in person, or to spend the time that would be spent on Facebook doing other activities – prayer, reading, etc.
The website CNET has 5 tips on giving up Facebook and avoiding the “social minefields” that could come with it. The article suggests people set a status to let people know, write down birthdays and even change to a reminder profile picture. (Many of my close friends are rarely or never on Facebook, so I struggle to understand the “minefield” concept … but I digress.)
As meaningful as giving up Facebook can be, naturally, the Internet is full of memes about it. Here are a few I spotted this morning:
1. Paranoid. And the source of this one – Anglican Memes – is on a roll this morning.
2. Substituting one network for the other? Here’s one from someecards.
3. Hipster Lent – found this one on memegenerator.net:
4. This one makes a good point – the point of giving something up isn’t to brag about it. This one’s from High School Memes:
5. And for those of us who are sticking around, here’s another from Anglican Memes:
Kellie, thanks for this article! I am giving up Facebook for Lent because frankly I waste too much time, and mental energy/angst, while I am on there. But I had completely forgotten to change my profile picture to a reminder to my family and friends that I am not monitoring my fb page. Thanks for the reminder and the memes!
I do think that bragging about how pious it us to give up something for Lent is contrary to the idea, and that one’s reasons for abstaining from anything can be many and varied, and possibly not religiously motivated at all. As in the time my family gave up tv for three years, not out of piety but out of poverty. So many if our conservative Christian friends congratulated us on our removing that “negative” influence from our lives when what we REALLY needed was for those same friends to positively add to our bank account!!
So it goes with my Facebook-leaving: it’s partially motivated by an attempt to remove distractions from my focus on the rest of my life, both spiritual and physical, and and as a vain attempt to cause myself some small pain daily to remind myself in some tangible way of the daily pain Jesus bore internally as He approached the Cross. Are the two pains remotely similar in scope or depth? Not even close. But, truly, what human suffering here could equal the suffering of our Lord for all humanity? Nothing. My pathetic attempt is just that – pathetic. Nevertheless I will try to imagine, for the next forty-six days, what He might have been thinking and feeling, and in this way walk beside Him to the Cross. For me, this is Lent.
Hilarious! Loved this article, and am stealing one of these pics for my profile.