This has been an amazing Lenten journey this year — which I'm not feeling eloquent enough to explain without descending into cliches, so I'll skip that for now. There are two weeks and some days left in the season. So while we're waiting for Easter, I'm going to repost the piece I wrote at the outset of Lent — subsequently wiped from the site in a "tragic" (all right, goofy) database accident.
Here we are again, another Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Shrove (shrive means to hear confessions) Tuesday, call it what you will, it marks for me another struggle to figure out what to give up, what to add in and how to somehow make the next 40 days not just about symbolic change and preparation for Easter, but about genuine transformation. Some years I have better luck at it than others.
Mardi Gras is French for Fat Tuesday. It refers to a last hurrah, a need to use up fat, eggs and dairy before an extended period of fasting and abstinence (the fasting and abstinence regulations for modern Catholics are by no means as challenging as they were in centuries past) – mortification not to deny the goodness of these good (ontologically speaking) created things we give up, but to reaffirm our proper relationship to them (it is in relationships that a thing is corrupted – a glass of red wine is good, six bottles a day and a lost job and broken family is bad, but not because wine is bad, only because the drinker has got himself into a wrong relationship to it). The fasting and abstinence should bring us back to a right relationship with God, with God in primacy of place, just in time for the miracle of Easter.
In any case, I won't bore you with my obsessive attempts to come up with an appropriate Lenten sacrifice (it's complicated in many ways - one example: giving up something that's a sin or vice anyway is not in my opinion a sacrifice - just a corrective measure that should be undertaken regardless of the season; if this were sufficient I'd have plenty of options to choose from). I will simply note that the season is upon us, and note also my gratitude for the cycles of liturgical seasons. The more immersed I become in technology, the more complex the demands on my time get, the more directions I feel pulled in and the more life threatens to become weighted toward frantic reaction as opposed to decisive and focused action, the more I realize how important it is to maintain that sense of priority, of right relationship (this is the essence of time and project management in business) - and to me it seems these liturgical seasons represent a perfect time management for the soul.
