huh...

I'm losing Lent this year. I can't think of anything I can really fast--I need my meagre strength and focus for work, so I can't do anything that jeopardizes food and sleep. I guess I could give up beer--but I think it plays a really important part of my social life right now, and my social life is more than a luxury--it's part of my duty, my calling. I want to give up my bike--the discipline of walking everywhere would be phenomenally awesome. It would slow me down, I'd discipline myself to plan more, and I'd experience so much more of the world around me instead of just flying by. I'd also walk through a lot of shady neighborhoods after dark, and I wouldn't be able to get to the classes I kind of need to take in order to keep my EMT certification. So, scratch that.

I can't think of anything else that could be profitably fasted--anything that is unbalanced or unhealthy or in need of perspective and discipline. Except, maybe, my solitude--I spend too much time alone, too much time on the nocturnal schedule (it's been four months now) by myself. I need to fast being alone--I must be the only person in America who doesn't have a deficit of quiet solitude and reflection.

What I really am sad about, though, is missing Ash Wednesday. I just finished six twelve-hour overnights in a row, went to an employee meeting on my night off, and today I'll start another five straight. The whole entrance to the season just got lost. I wanted to go to St. Joes, I wanted the priest to take the ashes of last Palm Sunday's branches and mark with the sign of execution. I wanted to know, wanted to remember and kneel and ponder in stillness, that "dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

I can say it and write it a thousand times and still not know it. The death is in me; I am decaying, and today or tomorrow or another tomorrow I will finish decaying and return to the earth and be forgotten. It is certain, and when I knell in that quiet place and hear those words, I know that certainty and it is a part of my life, and I will keep somber celebration of my mortality until ignoring my impending death is no longer a part of the pattern of my day to day life.

This is why I love prayer and ritual. Ignoring my place in the world--my smallness and my impending death--is a frantic and sickeningly empty way. On Ash Wednesday I bear that truth on my forehead and for a moment, in the quiet of that cathedral, in my life. And with luck and repetition, I will begin to laugh at myself and my self-importance later when I catch myself living out some myth of my own importance and significance of business for impressing others, or ignoring some person's humanity because it feels inconvenient. And maybe some day the grace of a thousand Ash Wednesdays will transform my life until I carry that certain truth about myself around with me every day as a part of me.

Yeah. I missed Ash Wednesday. I guess I'll have to celebrate it on a Friday instead...