A season of discipline for grown-ups

Lent approaches.  (listen to me heave a big sigh.)

Lent, for those of you who may not really be familiar with the term, is the 40 weekdays before Easter, beginning with Ash Wednesday (March 9) and ending the few days just before Easter - Holy (Maundy) Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday.  Lent is a season observed mostly by Catholics, and also by denominations within the Protestant community (although with different traditions/customs than Catholic churches).

I grew up Catholic.  Indeed, since I have not gone through classes and been formally recieved into the Episcopal church, I suppose I can still call myself a Catholic - although I haven't attended Mass in, oh, about 7.5 years.  My husband grew up in a Protestant denomination; as a compromise (and so as not to confuse the children!) we attend an Episcopal church.  Our older daughter was baptized in a Catholic church; our younger daughter was baptized in our current church.  Oh, my head is starting to hurt - so complicated!

Anyway.  When I was growing up, right up until I moved out of my parents' house and perhaps for a few years after that, I observed Lent as a Catholic.  No meat on Ash Wednesday, went to church on that day, no meat on the Fridays during Lent.  Always went to church on Palm Sunday.  Usually helped my mom take baskets with special ethnic "Easter foods" up to church on Holy Saturday morning, to be blessed.  Sat through an endless Holy Saturday vigil which sometimes lasted until almost midnight.  I went to a Catholic gradeschool so in my memory of those years, it seems like we were forever doing the Stations of the Cross during Lent.  It was the whole nine yards, for a good many years, including...

"Giving up something" during Lent. Well, what does that mean? I think I gave up eating chocolate during Lent, several times.  Two years ago, I gave up reading anything during Lent except the Bible (I think there may be a post on this blog about that!)...I don't remember how successful I was with that.  On the website http://www.crivoice.org/, Lent is defined as a season "traditionally...marked by penitential prayer, fasting, and almsgiving...Most Christian churches that observe Lent at all focus on it as a time of prayer, especially penance, repenting for failures and sin as a way to focus on the need for God's grace.  It is really a preparation to celebrate God's marvelous redemption at Easter, and the resurrected life that we live, and hope for, as Christians....Lent is a way to place ourselves before God humbled, bringing in our hands no price whereby we can ourselves purchase our salvation."

Those are some powerful words.  How do they translate to me, in my day-to-day "stuff"?  In what way would I combine the above description with my Catholic background and my current Episcopal affiliation?  I no longer do the "don't eat meat on Fridays" thing (although I will admit, not doing that took me a while to get used to).  Where I am these days, religiously speaking, is a complex thing - and it's made more important because now, I have children for whom I have to be an example.  So, I'm not sure, this year, what to do with "Lent".  Somehow, compared with the intensity of the description of Lent above, "giving up playing Farmville during Lent" just doesn't seem to fit, somehow, you know?

Well, I have three more days to figure it out.

Thanks for reading,
Jen

Ready

Well, it is Christmas morning, and the way our holiday visiting worked out this year, we went to church this morning and now are home for a few hours until going to my mom's house.  Otherwise I would never have had a moment to write! 

Church was, mercifully, a very small crowd today.  Apparently people do not generally go to church on Christmas morning, anymore.  I was surprised, B was not.  It was nice, though, because we did not have to park a long way away, the service was much simpler (and thus a bit shorter), and the majority of those there were people I don't really know well.  That sounds odd, I know...but honestly some days I find it a very nice change to be able to go to church and have it be more about worship than about socializing.  I wrote in the post just previous about how I sense an element of "fakeness" at times, when it comes to church congregations - you are there frequently enough that the faces are familiar...and sometimes you are praying for other church members regarding some pretty serious life issues....but overall you don't truly know the people around you.  But you all act as though you know each other quite well, because of the environment.  And yet you might see the same people at the local grocery store a few hours later, and it's like they've never seen you before!  So anyway, it was fine with me today that the service was a bit drier and cleaner than yesterday's services probably were.

Along the same lines, I am about done with Christmas-type music, and if I could I would probably start putting away some decorations today.  After a while it all becomes too much - too much celebrating, too much spending of money, too much food, too many desserts, too much of what comes to feel like self-indulgence.  I can't help but wonder if even the majority of the gift-giving done within these few days is really done because of that religious detail - God sending Jesus to earth, to be human for 30-some years, and die for our sins so that in turn we can look ahead to eternal life.  The act of giving gifts is a pleasant one, and I certainly wish I could do more of it for more people - neighbors, friends, family!  But I think humans take it to such incredible lengths at times, buying presents only out of obligation and spending far too much money, that the real reason we celebrate today is lost in the manic shuffle.  We personally have very little money to buy gifts, and so this has caused me to reflect on what gift-giving at Christmas is really about.  For me this year it was more meaningful to give/mail Christmas cards, because in the act of doing that I was able to actually sit down in the quiet of my house and really think about the people receiving the cards.  These days, with the very surface and transitory nature of texting and Facebook-ing taking the place of real, true communication, the mailing (actual mail, with a stamp, putting cards in the mailbox) of cards makes so much more of a connection with others. 

Wishing the world a meaningful Christmas,

J.

WHY...

does going to church, often make me extremely crabby????

more on this later,
Jen
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So, it's now 'later'.  To be honest, I really like the church we attend.  The people have been really pretty good about attempting to understand S's diagnosis, which helps. 

I think I am just constitutionally predisposed to 'not want to play nice', sometimes.  Sometimes we'll be sitting in church - this place that is meant to be one's true faith community - and I'll look around and think that 99% of the people sitting there really know nothing about me, or us as a family.  They might remember our names, maybe.  But I seem to have a talent for finding myself if situations where I know, deep down, I don't quite fit in.  This church experience has been no different.

B and I started attending this church just before S was born.  B grew up in a UCC church (Protestant), and I am still Catholic, I guess.  After we moved to our current residence, we needed to find a place to attend church where we both felt comfortable.  As a Protestant, B is "not allowed" to take communion in a Catholic mass; and the services at the UCC church where he grew up and where we got married felt too much like simple prayer services and not enough like Mass.  We felt we needed to decide on one church; to try and continue attending a Catholic church where B didn't feel welcome would just become confusing for the kids.  Luckily we found St. P's, which was traditional enough to suit us both.  It has been a good choice; I'm not sure it is ever possible to find a place to worship and grow your faith which always fits like a glove.  And perhaps, if I don't exactly always feel welcome at St. P's, it may be my own fault.  Possibly I put up walls which are easily sensed by others, I don't know.

Part of what gets to me at our church is the simple fact of income differences.  We have happenened onto a church community which, while located in an urban setting, has a congregation whose personal financial status often falls within the upper middle-class bracket.  That is definitely not us, at the moment, and I don't know that it ever will be.  Even if we won buckets of money tomorrow, I'm not sure I would turn into one of "them" - for one thing, we don't own a boat or belong to the yacht club.  I know I don't exactly "fit in" with most of the other moms in the church.  My clothes aren't quite as nice, my hair isn't cut as frequently, and my personality isn't as smoothed over as that of the women in the church who haved lived in financial comfort all their lives. 

So, maybe I analyze the differences too much.  Maybe I'm assuming what others' perceptions of me/us might be.  And really, the important thing about attending church and being active within one's church community isn't making friends or fitting in or, even, feeling "comfortable" on a regular basis.  I'm not going to church on Sundays to be reassured that I'm making socially acceptable or politically correct choices, right? It's about checking in with God.  So I guess I can do that.  I'm not in favor of church-shopping just because another family (or a whole bunch of families!) in our church have more money than we do at the moment.  I'm not in favor of bouncing around from church to church at all, actually.  God sent us to this church for a reason, I guess.

I do hope, though, that the parking situation improves SOON.  That was the source of my grumpiness today; it was ridiculous, I could barely get the car out of the parking lot.

Jen