So much for that mega-post below.  I’ll try again soon.
As we look to Ash Wednesday, a few Lent links. Practiced blogosphere surfers will have already seen them, but nonetheless:
Marcel LeJeune’s well-done summary at Aggie Catholics
NCR(egister’s) suggestions
40 Ways to Improve Your Lent
The Pope’s Lenten Message which focuses on almsgiving, very powerfully.
The Internet Monk’s “Resources for a Post-Evangelical Lent”
Resources from the USCCB
A good article from Ignatius Insight
On a lighter note, those Kansas City church signs are talking again….
The Pope will, as has been the practice for a number of years, begin Lent at the Dominican Santa Sabina Church on the Aventine Hill in Rome. There, he presides at Mass after a short procession from the nearby Benedictine church Sant’Anselmo.
Santa Sabina is the first of the “Stational Churches,” explained here:

 Stational or station churches are churches in Rome designated to be the special location for worship on a particular day. This practice dates back to the early centuries of the Church. The Pope (or his legate) would celebrate solemn Mass in one after another of the four greater and the three minor basilicas during the 4th and 5th centuries (the seven churches or Sette Chiese — St. John Lateran, St. Peter, St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. Mary Major, the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, St. Lawrence, and the Twelve Apostles). Other churches were added to list as needed for various liturgical occasions, bringing the total number of churches to 45, with the last two (Santa Agatha and Santa Maria Nuova, called Santa Franciscan Romana) added by Pope Pius XI on March 5, 1934. When the popes started residing in Avignon, France in 1305, the popularity of this devotion declined until recently.
On the day of the station, the faithful would gather in one church (church of the collecta or gathering) and in procession singing the Litany of the Saints or psalms, they would go to the church where the Mass was to be celebrated: there they met the Pope and his clergy, coming in state from his Patriarchal Palace of the Lateran. This was called “making the station.” Such a Mass was a “conventual mass” (or community Mass) of the City and the world, Urbis et Orbis (the visible congregation in Rome and the invisible audience of the entire world). This old custom reminds us that Rome is the center of Christian worship, from which we received our faith and our liturgy.

The North American College has a great interactive website on the Stational Churches – the seminarians make a pilgrimage to the stational church of the day each day during Lent.
We tend to think of Lent as a primarily an opportunity for individual spiritual growth. But listen to the reading from Joel which we’ll hear tomorrow at Mass:

Blow the trumpet in Zion!
proclaim a fast,
call an assembly;
Gather the people,
notify the congregation;
Assemble the elders,
gather the children
and the infants at the breast;
Let the bridegroom quit his room
and the bride her chamber.
Between the porch and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep,
And say, “Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”
Then the LORD was stirred to concern for his land
and took pity on his people.

Our individual acts of penitence – our fasting, praying and almsgiving – done in secret, as Jesus commands, with no fanfare, self-pity or self-congratulations – are joined with those of others so that what happens during Lent is that God’s people come together in more intense prayer and sacrifice, witnessing to Christ and letting Him work through that sacrificial love ever more powerfully as we turn from what is unnecessary and even evil and let it be replaced by Love.
That connection – between the individual quietly praying, fasting and giving and the community called together for a fast – can be easily lost.  But tomorrow gives us an opportunity to make that connection, not only in our awareness of the crowds that gather in churches on Ash Wednesday, but, in Catholic churches, the collection that is taken that day: For the Church in Central and Eastern Europe.

The 2008 Collection for the Church in Central and Eastern Europe offers an opportunity to participate in a spiritual revival unlike any other. Through the Collection, Catholics in the United States help to build parishes in many distant places, such as Magadan, Russia, a part of the world where prisoners of the Stalinist labor camps once had to fashion rosaries from bits of their bread ration. Generous donations from Catholics in the United States support seminaries, social service programs, youth ministry, pastoral centers, church construction and renovation, and the spreading of the Gospel message through the mass media. New Catholic schools in war-torn areas such as Kosovo are beginning to ensure a lasting peace.

From the Pope’s message:

5. Almsgiving teaches us the generosity of love. Saint Joseph Benedict Cottolengo forthrightly recommends: “Never keep an account of the coins you give, since this is what I always say: if, in giving alms, the left hand is not to know what the right hand is doing, then the right hand, too, should not know what it does itself” (Detti e pensieri, Edilibri, n. 201). In this regard, all the more significant is the Gospel story of the widow who, out of her poverty, cast into the Temple treasury “all she had to live on” (Mk 12,44). Her tiny and insignificant coin becomes an eloquent symbol: this widow gives to God not out of her abundance, not so much what she has, but what she is. Her entire self.

We find this moving passage inserted in the description of the days that immediately precede Jesus’ passion and death, who, as Saint Paul writes, made Himself poor to enrich us out of His poverty (cf. 2 Cor 8,9); He gave His entire self for us. Lent, also through the practice of almsgiving, inspires us to follow His example. In His school, we can learn to make of our lives a total gift; imitating Him, we are able to make ourselves available, not so much in giving a part of what we possess, but our very selves. Cannot the entire Gospel be summarized perhaps in the one commandment of love? The Lenten practice of almsgiving thus becomes a means to deepen our Christian vocation. In gratuitously offering himself, the Christian bears witness that it is love and not material richness that determines the laws of his existence. Love, then, gives almsgiving its value; it inspires various forms of giving, according to the possibilities and conditions of each person.

 

6. Dear brothers and sisters, Lent invites us to “train ourselves” spiritually, also through the practice of almsgiving, in order to grow in charity and recognize in the poor Christ Himself. In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that the Apostle Peter said to the cripple who was begging alms at the Temple gate: “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, walk” (Acts 3,6). In giving alms, we offer something material, a sign of the greater gift that we can impart to others through the announcement and witness of Christ, in whose name is found true life. Let this time, then, be marked by a personal and community effort of attachment to Christ in order that we may be witnesses of His love.

Finally, there is this most concrete expression of the relationship between  our individual spiritual growth and the impact of that on the Body of Christ and the world during this season: the presence of catechumens and candidates for Full Communion among us, entering into those intensely prayerful six weeks. Check out the Catholic Converts blog, pray for all coming to Christ this Lent, and let them know of your prayers.