Lenten Practices

For our non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters, during the Lenten season we Catholics normally have a practice to help unite us to Christ's passion in some small way such as giving up some thing we enjoy, or some other such practice. I was wondering if your church has any similar kind of Lenten practices.

Dear Bill,
I grew up as an Assembly of God preacher's daughter, and I can tell you from my background, the church didn't teach us anything about Lent. As I got older and heard the word, I asked my mom what it meant and she said it's the 40 days before Easter and then dropped it.
In my opinion, it's one of those traditions that the Protestants have chosen to disregard, as a way to delineate themselves from Catholics. I think that is a big loss for them, but what do I know?

Yeah, someone else told me similarily that before becoming Catholic they didn't hear anything about Lent...but, my wife is lutheran and they celebrate Lent including all of Holy Week, although not as deeply, so I didn't realize that other protestant groups didn't. I guess it would depend on which group you belong to as to how much or how little of Catholocism your group teaches. The ones who split directly from the Church seem to have more of our practices and beliefs than those who split from a split of a split...

Non-denomination Christians pride themselves on not belonging to any "traditional" church. They have no practices, such as Lent, Advent, or otherwise. All that "stuff" is considered unnecessary. I believe they simply don't understand the spiritual benefit and significance of these practices... I think if more people knew the purpose, there wouldn't be such an issue about it.

Orthodox Lenten traditions, BillC, during Lent (which starts from Forgiveness' Sunday, which was on March 9th this year) abstain from "greasy foods" including milk, eggs and meat. As they do not usually attend to many Liturgies after the first week of Lent (on Saturday) they go to Church and receive communion. Then they decide whether they want to continue their fast till Easter and continue their abstaining from all greasy foods, or they will only abstain from meat. No particular prayers nor behaviour is followed, so even if they fast you can hear a lot of swearing.
The more religious people (usually older people) also abstain from food every Wednesday and Friday during the whole year.

Ok...yeah, I would expect the Orthodox to have some Lenten practices as they seem to be pretty close to us in beliefs and somewhat in their practices...
Do you know if the Eastern Catholics have similar practices to the Orthodox, or closer to the Latin Catholic practices? I think I've heard some/all of the Eastern Catholics do the Wed., Fri. abstinance, or maybe just from meat? Not sure though...

It's logical that the Eastern (Byzantine Rite) Catholics retained the Lenten fasting practices as they retained all other practices (liturgical and traditional) from the Orthodox Church with the exception of accepting the Pope. I recently went to such a liturgy and it's completely the same with the Orthodox one.