Lent = Superbowl
Ah, Lent. How I love thee. Next to Advent, my favorite season of the liturgical year.
Lent has always presented a unique challenge to me. I thrive on competitive personality improvement - how long can I go without wearing a watch? Drinking soda? Can I be better, stronger, faster, smarter? So Lent is like the Superbowl of Lulu-dom. I get to trot out my inclinations toward asceticism (slightly masochistic in nature, though you won't see me flagellating myself any time soon) and try to embody a more pure refined self. Whatever the hell that means.
There's something rather pathetic about giving up something "important" for a symbolic period, because important is usually couched in the day-to-day sense. In the face of mass social injustice, the spread of dangerous agricultural and scientific "improvements", and a US political system that seems to derive its notions of governance from a Roman model of tyranny and domination, it's pretty sad that my massive annual protest comes in the form of a lack of lattes.
Still, at its heart the role of Lent is to narrow the focus from the multitudinous complexities of life to what's really important: ostensibly, the work of the spirit. My urge is always to give something up, to fight the good fight against the evils of bodily desire (Chocolate! How splendid and nefarious are your forms!). But I think in so doing I've sort of missed the whole point. It's become ever more apparent to me recently that the soft spots of life are even more important to preserve than some rigidly Spartan discipline of self-denial and judgment.
The move I've made here to California has given me a place to start to settle down, to relax out of the crisis mentality and the frenzy I've been in for so many years. This is the first time I've lost the restlessness that drove me to edges, and in its place I've started to soften, to open up to a life of sunshine and fulfillment and peace. It's been harder than I would have guessed; after so long on the heady drug of panic and excessive emotions, I often don't know what to do with myself. I've defined love as a depth of pain, and I've defined myself as frenetically emotional. The fiction is surprisingly resilient.
So this year, in addition to my choices of abstinence (caffeine and alcohol), my commitment is to find out what it's like to let go of the relentless drive that has brought me here. I want to see more about what life looks like when you don't have to run 30 miles a week to feel balanced, when you sleep well and are cared for and protected by the people in your life. I have a feeling it'll be incredibly challenging, but in a completely different way.
As a sidenote, I'm continually entertained by how surprised people are when I tell them I go to church. To be fair, given my predilection for dancing on the stage at clubs, professing an abiding love of yoga, and dying my hair in primary colors, I suppose it's understandable. A friend laughed himself silly when I told him on Saturday I went to Trinity; I can't blame him, since at the time I was holding a rather large Jack and coke and talking about beer pong. Welcome to the Episcopal faith.
Lent has always presented a unique challenge to me. I thrive on competitive personality improvement - how long can I go without wearing a watch? Drinking soda? Can I be better, stronger, faster, smarter? So Lent is like the Superbowl of Lulu-dom. I get to trot out my inclinations toward asceticism (slightly masochistic in nature, though you won't see me flagellating myself any time soon) and try to embody a more pure refined self. Whatever the hell that means.
There's something rather pathetic about giving up something "important" for a symbolic period, because important is usually couched in the day-to-day sense. In the face of mass social injustice, the spread of dangerous agricultural and scientific "improvements", and a US political system that seems to derive its notions of governance from a Roman model of tyranny and domination, it's pretty sad that my massive annual protest comes in the form of a lack of lattes.
Still, at its heart the role of Lent is to narrow the focus from the multitudinous complexities of life to what's really important: ostensibly, the work of the spirit. My urge is always to give something up, to fight the good fight against the evils of bodily desire (Chocolate! How splendid and nefarious are your forms!). But I think in so doing I've sort of missed the whole point. It's become ever more apparent to me recently that the soft spots of life are even more important to preserve than some rigidly Spartan discipline of self-denial and judgment.
The move I've made here to California has given me a place to start to settle down, to relax out of the crisis mentality and the frenzy I've been in for so many years. This is the first time I've lost the restlessness that drove me to edges, and in its place I've started to soften, to open up to a life of sunshine and fulfillment and peace. It's been harder than I would have guessed; after so long on the heady drug of panic and excessive emotions, I often don't know what to do with myself. I've defined love as a depth of pain, and I've defined myself as frenetically emotional. The fiction is surprisingly resilient.
So this year, in addition to my choices of abstinence (caffeine and alcohol), my commitment is to find out what it's like to let go of the relentless drive that has brought me here. I want to see more about what life looks like when you don't have to run 30 miles a week to feel balanced, when you sleep well and are cared for and protected by the people in your life. I have a feeling it'll be incredibly challenging, but in a completely different way.
As a sidenote, I'm continually entertained by how surprised people are when I tell them I go to church. To be fair, given my predilection for dancing on the stage at clubs, professing an abiding love of yoga, and dying my hair in primary colors, I suppose it's understandable. A friend laughed himself silly when I told him on Saturday I went to Trinity; I can't blame him, since at the time I was holding a rather large Jack and coke and talking about beer pong. Welcome to the Episcopal faith.