Thank you for participating in Catholic Relief Services’ Operation Rice Bowl this Lent. Consider including the following reflections and prayer resources in your Lenten devotions.

Use the following weekly reflections to guide your Lenten journey:

Prepare the Way

Return to a Right Relationship With God

Experiencing a New Life With Hope and Stability

Cleanse the Temple and Make More Room for God

From Darkness Into Light

God’s Law, Written Upon Our Hearts

Entering Holy Week

Happy Easter!

Use the Prayer Service with your family or faith community.

Use the Lenten Prayer Eggs to learn how Catholic Relief Services’ work embodies the principles of Catholic social teaching.

Use CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl Stations of the Cross and presentation and bring an international dimension to this traditional Lenten observance.

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Additional bulletin resources include:
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Need an advertisement for CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl for your newspaper? To customize your advertisement, please email CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl Advertising and provide the due date, size, format, color preferences, and text for the ad.

Remember to turn in your contributions to your parish or faith community. If your faith community does not participate in CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl, you may submit your gift online or mail it to the address below.

Catholic Relief Services
Operation Rice Bowl
PO Box 17090
Baltimore MD 21203-7090

Your gifts help make Catholic Relief Services’ lifesaving work in nearly 100 countries possible, including the projects you have learned about through CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl this Lent.  Thank you for your support!

Pray

Our Lenten journey is filled with apparent contradictions. On Ash Wednesday, we proclaimed a Gospel that cautioned against religious practices that all could see.  On Palm Sunday we begin our liturgy by proclaiming the triumphal entry of the King of Glory with processions and palm branches, only to recall in the Gospel how he was arrested, rejected and crucified. We are an Easter people because we balance these seeming contradictions as we embrace the eternal life that came – not despite Jesus’ suffering and sacrifice – but because of it. And we are called to make choices that reflect our own circumstances and acts of solidarity.

Holy Week is a prayer. Clear your calendar as best you can and enter into the rhythm of its liturgies. And bring the poor with you – especially those you have met through your Lenten walk with CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl in the past several weeks. Hold them in prayer as they seek to continue to forge hopeful lives. Offer yourself in prayer as one who seeks to build the Kingdom of God with the hope-filled zeal of our Easter faith.

Fast

If Holy Week is a prayer it also is a fast – a fast from our usual routines and from the kinds of stories that pacify and distract us. The Lenten fast is officially over, but it is replaced by a deeper, more demanding practice.  The ancient practice of fasting has been described as an act of giving up behaviors that were killing the soul. Reflect this week on the attitudes and behaviors you will leave behind in the dust of Lent, and what will replace them in the new life of Easter.

Learn

One of the keys to understanding how we are to live as the Body of Christ in the world is recognizing that our prosperity as people is both developed and realized in relationship with others. This is at the root of the Church’s teaching on community and our call to participate in relationships that build a mutual prosperity and foster social structures that protect and uphold it.

A good example of an effort to foster prosperity is Feed My Sheep, a community outreach program supported by the Diocese of Arlington, VA. Volunteers from several area churches form relationships with people living in poverty, offering support and resources that help them to shape more positive futures. Patricia fell on hard times after moving to Virginia to be with family, and she struggled to put food on the table. Feed My Sheep has helped Patricia to support her family, write a résumé, apply for jobs and find reliable transportation to get to work.  Now she is in a loving community that will help her achieve her goals.

While 75 percent of CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl contributions support Catholic Relief Services’ programs around the world, 25 percent remains in the United States to fund local diocesan hunger and poverty alleviation efforts, such as Feed My Sheep.

Give

By now your Rice Bowl should be quite heavy with the sacrificial contributions you have collected over the last six weeks.  Now is the time for one last push. Place an offering in your Rice Bowl in honor of food banks and outreach programs in your community, knowing that 25 percent of the funds raised through CRS’ Operation Rice Bowl will remain in your local diocese to help support such efforts.

Pray

This week spend a little time revisiting the first reading from Sunday’s scriptures. It provides a stunning image of the transforming love of God, a promise that travels with the Jewish people throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and finds a lasting home in Jesus and the Church.

“But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days—oracle of the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will no longer teach their friends and relatives, ‘Know the LORD!’ Everyone, from least to greatest, shall know me – oracle of the LORD – for I will forgive their iniquity and no longer remember their sin.” (Jeremiah 31:33-34)

This is a God who, despite our sinfulness, our frailty and our doubt, always opts for us. And this same God longs for us to opt for one another – especially for the most vulnerable in our society. What does a law that is written upon the heart look like? It takes the form of action rather than words; it does rather than says. Why?  Because a heart with this kind of law written upon it does not need to be taught what love is; it simply loves, and that gets the job done.

In your prayer this week, reflect on what God has written on your heart, and examine where love is calling you to respond. Who beckons you from beyond your comfort zone?  Who is calling you to love like you have never loved before?

Fast

We are in the final days of Lent, less than a week away from Palm Sunday and Holy Week. It’s time to fast in earnest. Fasting is a practice that often accompanies deep prayer and profound intercession.  This week set aside one day to cut out at least one meal. Or consider a three meal fast, if you are able. To keep a balance of food each day, consider giving up dinner one evening, followed by breakfast and lunch the next. This is a fast you will feel.  Allow the hunger pains to remind you of the pain of poverty; the pain of parents who know their children go to bed hungry; the pain of workers who cannot support their families despite constant labor; the pain of refugees who flee war or who are crushed beneath it. Spend the time you would normally be eating in prayer, for a future that reflects Jeremiah’s vision.

Learn

Malnutrition can begin in the womb. Through CRS’ mother and child health programs, local health workers are trained to teach expectant mothers that eating extra food and taking vitamin supplements can strengthen their unborn children. And they work with families of young children who are not thriving to understand how proper nutrition can give them a more solid future.

Thirteen-year-old Gulsana – who lives in the village of Bahadurnagar, India – understand how a CRS nutritional program could save her baby sister’s life.  Gulsana’s family knew that two-year-old Shabnam had always been small for her age. But when a CRS health worker visited the village and weighed the little girl, the family learned that the child wasn’t taking in enough food. The health worker’s information about proper nutrition and healthy growth for babies, as well as a supply of food supplements, was the key. But the child’s parents didn’t trust the strange food. That’s when Shabnam’s older sister, Gulsana, intervened. After explaining the family’s doubts to the health worker, Gulsana learned a way of preparing the food that would make it acceptable to her skeptical parents and to her little sister. Now Shabnam is healthier and has more energy to move and play.

Give

By their nature children must depend on the adults around them for their basic needs. As a result, children in poverty suffer most from the lack of food, clean water, sanitation, health care and stable homes, and they have the least ability to change their situations. How many children move through your life each day – in your immediate or extended family, in your neighborhood, and in your workplace?  Count these children and drop an offering in your Rice Bowl for each child in your circle of care.