I don't think I've ever in my life been ready for Lent, and I suppose in some sense that is not surprising. Who can keep up with God? But this year it did at least occur to me a day in advance. I woke up this morning knowing it was Fat Tuesday. I had actually already thought about feasting on fat things; however, I spent most of yesterday in narcotics withdrawal, and I didn't think eating crazy amounts of chocolate or even a meal with meat was a good idea on an uncertain stomach. I had a cookie or two that a friend had brought me. To splurge and celebrate my new-found ability to sit in the car for ten minutes, we ate out. I had a vegetable stir fry: broccoli, carrots, peppers and rice. Living large, I am. We thought about going out for dessert afterwards, but it was cold out and the only dessert places around served ice cream, so I came home and made brownies. Then I ate one. Yes, that is how I live it up around here, one week post-surgery.
More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.
What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.
One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.
It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.
Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.
In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.
And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.
More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.
What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.
One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.
It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.
Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.
In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.
And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.
Cara, you have such a way with words. I'm so sorry you've had such a rough several months, and I wish I would have been a better support for you. Prayers for quick healing headed your way!
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