Prepare!

Time to prepare.

My Catholic religion provides time for us to prepare ourselves for Lent, which begins next Wednesday, February 17th. In the traditional Latin Rite, the Sundays before this are known as Septuagesima, Sexagesima, Quinquegesima. These are Latin words that represent respectively 70, 60, and 50 days before Easter. When Ash Wednesday arrives, the Latin for is Quadragesima, indicating 40 days before Easter. Lent lasts for 40 days.

These words are not specifically accurate as translated into English. For example, today, Sexagesima Sunday, isn't exactly 60 days before Lent. But the use of the word is consistent with the Latin sense that communicates a period of time before Lent begins, a period before Easter arrives. 

All of this is intended to help us prepare. We prepare our minds, hearts, even our bodies, first for Lent; then, when Lent begins, we prepare for Easter.

We employ three means of preparation: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. While we always pray, we special, ideally extra, ways during Lent. While we should always mortify our flesh, we engage in some additional mortification during Lent by means of fasting. Our fasting does not need to be extreme in any ways. One gives up some favorite food or drink. One may also reduce the quantity of that food or drink. 

As for almsgiving, it takes the form both of giving something of our substance to those in need, as well as performing special acts of charity towards God and our neighbor. Love of God and neighbor should be our daily practice. During Lent, by focusing in special ways on this, we attempt to strengthen and perhaps expand that practice.

To prepare requires us to take a step back in some way from our regular daily activity, to make time and put in the effort required. Ideally, we write down some form of a plan for what will become our special Lenten discipline. That discipline will engage our minds, our hearts, our bodies to the benefit of our souls.

Our spiritual life can never be separate and apart from the rest of our life. With that in mind, we switch gears to another kind of preparation.

It's time to prepare for what will surely come in the stock market - if you have money in it or professionally guide others in their investments. That preparation entails stepping back from the daily strum und drang of daily market activity and planning ahead. 

We might anticipate a continued rise in stock prices for some length of time. Setting aside all the chatter about whether or not stocks are overvalued, or whether we're sitting in a massive, even historic bubble as legendary investor Jeremy Grantham has so eloquently documented recently, just take in the facts. A bull market began in 2009. It has lasted longer than any other (at least any other I'm aware of). It's life has been extended by the utterly fantastic creation by our central bank, the Federal Reserve, of excess "liquidity" (money printed out of thin air that has spilled into the markets). Such activity might be compared to extraordinary means modern science can utilize to keep someone alive who is heading, one way or another, for their final day on this earth. The end will come, no matter the means employed.

The means the Federal Reserve has been using might further be compared to a kind of "leap" in technology. The means of "life support" they used during and after the 2007-2009 financial crisis have been amped up to a level never before imagined. 

With all that, we can either remain enchanted by the constant rise in stock prices, or attempt to take whatever measures we believe will protect us when the end comes. And come it will, even if the Federal Reserve succeeds in prolonging the patient beyond what any or us had imagined might be possible.

Are we willing to pay the price of preparation?

In our spiritual lives, are we willing to take the time to prayerfully plan for Lent? We could instead just go on with our lives in all those superficial activities that suck up most of our time. When Lent arrives, will we willingly embrace those special prayers, fasting, and almsgiving to which we have committed? Or will we allow the busy-ness of our personal and work lives suck up all our time to the exclusion o those practices that are so easy to ignore or at least put off?

When it comes to the financial markets. are we willing to take the time to consider what we need to do now - or in the near future - to avoid what can easily devolve into "The Big Loss"? - something none of us ought to accept or allow to happen if it is at all within our power.

I chose to prepare. What about you?