In Three Parts
It shouldn’t surprise me that this Lent has been hard. It shouldn’t surprise me that I falter…grow discouraged…and grapple, sometimes resentfully, with the weight of the cross God sends me.
None of this should surprise me and yet…
It does.
It always does.
We are asked to join Our Lord in the desert. “Okay!” I say eagerly, feeling fat and happy on the Tuesday before the journey. “I can do that! I love God!” The desert, though, is a difficult place—dry, uncomfortable, and very lonely. Two days in and I am ready to turn back. I am a gregarious person, I tell myself—an extrovert!
In short, I’m a girl who just wants to have fun.
I am the sort of person who associates the love of God with creature comforts. In other words, I am sensual. Consider this paragraph from The Catechism of the Catholic Church:
We must also face the fact that certain attitudes deriving from the mentality of “this present world” can penetrate our lives if we are not vigilant. For example, some would have it that only that is true which can be verified by reason and science; yet prayer is a mystery that overflows both our conscious and unconscious lives. Others overly prize production and profit; thus prayer, being unproductive, is useless. Still others exalt sensuality and comfort as the criteria of the true, the good, and the beautiful; whereas prayer, the “love of beauty”(philokalia), is caught up in the glory of the living and true God. Finally, some see prayer as a flight from the world in reaction against activism; but in fact, Christian prayer is neither an escape from reality nor a divorce from life” (CCC 2727)
That line about exalting sensuality and comfort as the criteria of the true, the good, and the beautiful? That’s my temperament all over the place.
(Woo hoo! They understand me!)
One of the reasons that Lent is so difficult for me is that I have “issues” with overeating. I turn to food when I am happy, sad, angry, anxious, fearful, tired, and/or stressed.
Most of all, I turn to coffee.
Oh, how I turn to coffee.
Every Lent it’s the same thing. I lament that I can’t give God my greatest good—my fondest love—which is coffee. Every Lent I talk to all the significant others in my life—my priest, my husband, my closest friends—about my inability to make this sacrifice, and they tell me—again and again and yet again— that it’s okay. “Move on, Margaret,” they reassure me gently. “You are doing enough as is.”
Fact is, I never feel as if I am doing enough.
I never quite feel that I’ve earned Easter.
To be cont.
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