I flunked Lent again. I do it every year. I start out with at least ten things I’m going to give up and at least five new spiritual practices I’m going to take up. I was even going to give up my nightly cocktail hour. That lasted for two days. (My son informed me that if I was going to stop drinking, everyone else was going to have to take it up.) By about day four I’d whittled it down to two things I’m going to give up and one new spiritual practice. I usually do fairly well in the almsgiving category, but this year Duke Energy and I disagreed about how much I owed them for the “budget” pricing to the tune of $1,200 and our car had to have a new transmission to the tune of $5,800 and my son had to get braces, and about twelve other things. So almsgiving fell a little short.
I had high hopes at the beginning. In February I was healthy and I had my ADHD under control and I thought I could make a big splash in the Lenten pool. What I didn’t realize at the time was that – as I should know by now – if things are going really well, God notices and starts throwing snowballs at you. (My mother used to say, “If you get too high up God will send something to strike you down.” Which didn’t do wonders for my relationship with God, but that’s another story for another time.)
This year, in addition to the financial problems, my health suddenly became weird. I developed a really severe cough from out of nowhere (turns out it was a side effect of my blood pressure medicine) and for reasons known only to God I also came down with pinworms. If that is something you’ve ever thought about doing I highly advise against it. So for all of Lent I was either keeled over from a coughing fit or in misery because I couldn’t scratch where it itched.
I have a theory, and I’m only half joking, that those ailments were handed to me because I kept so few of my Lenten ambitions. (I don’t say promises because I know better than to promise.) In all honesty, I am an absolute pig about creature comforts and that has not gotten better with age. And since I am horrible at self-denial, God gave me the opportunity to sacrifice creature comforts another way. Even though I was miserable, I kept thanking Him for it because I have no willpower and so He did that part for me. I offered it all up as reparations for the sorry state of the world.
The one ambition that I actually made good on was that I took up a lot of Catholic-related reading for Lent. I read two of the best books by a highly intelligent lady author who maintains that Shakespeare was Catholic (She convinced me), two books about the English martyrs, and then I read Brideshead Revisited (my favorite book) two more times and both times came away with things I’d never noticed before. Evelyn Waugh is simply brilliant.
In case you’re interested in checking them out, these are the books I read:
• Shadowplay by Countess Claire Asquith (Amazing book! I loved it!)
• Shakespeare and the Resistance: The Earl of Southampton, the Essex Rebellion, and the Poems that Challenged Tudor Tyranny by Countess Claire Asquith (Equally amazing book. She’s a scholar and as far as I can tell has only written these two books. I wish she’d written more.)
• God’s Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England by Jessie Childs (Highly recommended if the subject interests you)
• Autobiography of a Hunted Priest by Fr. John Gerard, SJ (back when Jesuits were Jesuits!)
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (You should read it. Twelve times.)
So I flunked Lent again and then I went to confession to confess having flunked Lent again, and now we have moved on to Easter and I have an entire year to enjoy before I flunk Lent again.