[AE.Personal] Friends, Roman Catholics, Countryfolk... Lent Me Your Fears
Just a note in advance that this newsletter will mention food and voluntary dietary restrictions, Christian culture, and Catholic upbringing.
While I was never confirmed into the Catholic Church, Cathlicisim played an important role in my early childhood and my extended family background. It continues to affect (while not being the sole shaper of) my spiritual outlook and practices as an adult, and I consider myself to be culturally Catholic.
One of the formal observances I follow is the keeping of the dietary traditions of Lent, at least the considerably relaxed modern version of them my family practiced, which amounts to abstention from meat (for a liturgical definition of meat and with diocesal exemptions based on need) on Ash Wednesday or the Fridays of Lent.
I renewed my commitment to after moving in with my partner of a similar though not identical background. It's something I can do to feel closer to him, to my own history, and to my scattered family, through our shared roots and... in stark contrast to the original purpose of the practice, it is not at all a hard thing to do.
It sometimes requires some adjustments to our planning when the calendar sneaks up to us, but an excuse to eat more fish, more peanut butter sandwiches, more cheese... I mean, I like all of those things, so it's more of a treat than a penitential fast.
Of course, I am more than capable of adjusting our early spring menus to move my observances more in the spirit of the season than the mere letter of a single restriction, but I don't connect spiritually to that kind of denial and it's not meaningful to the cultural connection I seek.
Nevertheless, under the theory that there is to all things a season, I have sometimes wondered if I could not use the season of Lent to work on myself and my life in a way that is meaningful.
I did not come into this week, the start of the Christian holy season, with any great plans in that area, but by happenstance this morning I found myself thinking of some of my tasks for the day -- end-of-month budget stuff -- as "doing the scary thing". Like checking over one's body after a bad fall to see if it's seriously injured or just a little scuffed. Before you look, it's possible that all your limbs basically fine... or painfully and horrifically ruined.
And of course, after you look, you know, and that's almost always better, even if what you know is painful and horrifying, because now it can be dealt with. Now the damage, if it's ongoing, can be halted in its course.
As things transpired, everything is fine. The work I've been putting into acquiring the skill of budgeting has resulted in one of the more pleasant outcomes to this kind of task I could have hoped for. I even have a bit of a cushion that I wasn't even thinking of (because I'm more used to not having it than having it), but things would have been fine either way.
As I spent a few minutes quietly decompressing from having done the necessary thing, it hit me... and not for the first time... that almost always the things I'm afraid to confront turn out to be easier and better than I fear they will be, and that the more of them I deal with to the point that they're not hanging over me, the more of my own inner resources I'll have to deal with whichever of them turn out to be disasters.
So in the spirit of the season, I have decided that each Friday, I will be doing one thing that needs doing and which scares me.
I don't generally have to say this kind of thing in my newsletter compared to Twitter, but I would like to be clear that I'm not soliciting suggestions for things I could do that fit this bill, nor for other ideas to improve my Lenten experience. I have a rough calendar of scary things made up for March, out of the necessity that it starts tomorrow, and some ideas for April. Many of the items on these lists are time-sensitive, either in the sense of being long overdue or relating to something that is coming up soon.
If I find this fruitful, I may well continue this practice past Easter, as a way of slotting the things that scare me into my life's immediate calendar in a way that lets me both set a deadline and give me time to psych myself up throughout the week or give myself a great big running start at it.
I'll probably have some reflections on how this goes, if not during then after.