Lenten listlessness

One week down, almost six to go. Bet a lot of you didn't know that.

I'll be honest: I'm not taking the season as seriously as I once did. Oh, I did all kinds of fast-like things at times. My high-point, I think, was while I was in California, hustling my way through the Silicon-Valley buzz. There are all kinds of fasts these days. A brief internet search will reveal way more than you ever wanted to know. Being a fan of tradition (while not being a slave to it), I've always leaned toward the more well-known ways of participating in the season: giving up meat, beer, alcohol in general, sweets, you know, that kind of thing, but one year I decided to get real about it all.

In the olden times, Jews, for example, fasted on Mondays and Thursdays; the early Christians, in order to differentiate themselves from their primarily Jewish brethren, chose Tuesdays and Fridays as fast days. That's why when I was growing up, my Catholic friends couldn't eat meat on Friday, but that got loosened in the past few years and meatless Tuesdays have popped up again. All my Catholic friends that I asked couldn't tell me why that all was, but I really don't expect most people know why they do half the things they do. Nevertheless, I decided, on a whim -- how else? -- to do the "real deal", or at least what I could determine that might have been.

It turns out this regular fasting meant drinking only water during the day, and when the sun went down, eating only bread and salt. (The bread part is obvious, and if you ever spent any time in a desert, you get the salt part too.) I wasn't going to get this past the family, of course, being that at most times they're more concerned about dad's health than their own, I compromised. I only had water during the day, and after sundown, only something light for dinner: a tomato-and-lettuce sandwich, a bowl of cereal, you know, something like that. Oh, I still had to put up with a lot of squawking, but each intercession gave me an opportunity to at least thematicize Lent-relevant topics, like fasting, belief, physical needs, habits ... a whole array of topics. You should know that dinnertime in our household was more a food-augmented discussion rather than a meal in the traditional sense of the word, even when it wasn't Lent. Evening dinner in our house could go on for hours; to me (and I think to the others) it was special time together.

No, I had no enlightening experience during those 40 days, but you couldn't help but notice that the world was different. I finally realized how little is actually required in order to get along physically well, and that the time spent with the family, even without eating, is time that cannot be better spent. I came to see that what we truly need is not necessarily food, though there is a lower limit we should not -- and cannot -- dip below, but rather the presence and interaction of others that makes all the difference in the world. I also finally understood that Life is something to which we are connected by the slightest of gossamer threads. And, I grokked what it means to be thankful, for the least of anything. The last lesson was the surprise lesson of the exercise. The food I ate in the evening were some of the best meals I have ever had.

We all have to gather our own experiences in this phase and time of our existence. No one will argue that. But, I can assure you that too many of us miss far too many opportunities to get the most out of the experiences we have. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort. Sometimes a very slight shift in viewpoint -- like a fast, for example, during Lent -- can give us just the nudge we need. If you never look, you'll never see.