The Adventures of an Awkward Catholic on Ash Wednesday.

Two posts in two days is excessive, I agree. But my Ash Wednesday...

Remember yesterday when I said I was going to try to be less awkward with God this Lent? Let me tell you, I am off to an AWFUL start. 

My shame can only be told in bullet points:

• Last night, Trish was telling a story about how the kindergarten class her mother teaches had a "funeral" for the Alleluia in school that day. My first thought?  "Crap. They're changing the mass again and I missed it. How do they expect me to keep up with this?" Yes, that's right. It has been so long since I was any sort of regular church goer that I completely forgot Catholics don't say Alleluia during Lent. And I've said it twice already in this bullet point alone. That must add up to at least a couple of extra centuries in purgatory or something...
• Did you know Catholics fast on Ash Wednesday? I knew we weren't supposed to eat meat, but I figured I had that down because already don't eat meat any day ever. Nope. Fasting. I suppose you can guess how I already screwed this one up...
• I was not able to make any of the Catholic Ash Wednesday services in the area because my lunch (which I ate) hour is at a weird time. So I went to the Presbyterian service conveniently happening in the Presbyterian church I work in. Because nothing says "I'm going to improve my Catholicism during Lent," like kicking off the season at a Presbyterian mass. 
• And yes, I say "mass"and not "service" because there was communion. I know better than to call it "Eucharist" because it's protestant style, but that's about the only thing I knew was different...
• Presbyterian communion is DIFFERENT than Catholic communion. I thought I knew what I was doing, too. I walked up to the bread basket and picked up my own chunk of bread, just like everyone else was doing. Feeling very proud of myself for making it this far, seeing as I never had to pick out my own communion wafer before today, I triumphantly popped my bread cube in my mouth and walked up to the guy holding the wine. I was met with shock and probably a little panic etched on the poor man's face. He pointed back to the bread basket and said, "Did...did you want to get another piece of bread to dip in the cup?" Confused, I chewed my piece of bread and watched as the woman next to me dipped her own bread chunk into the wine cup. Oh. 
• Feeling certain I just royally pissed off Protestant Jesus, I declined the new piece of bread and took the wine. More surprises: It's not wine. It's grape juice. I pretty much failed every aspect of Presbyterian communion. 
• For the first time IN MY LIFE I nailed the part where you tell the priest  pastor that you want the Lord to be "with his spirit." Turns out the Presbyterians are old school, because you know where they want their Lord to be in relation to their pastor? "And ALSO WITH YOU."
• Apparently the "Our Father" has a second verse. 
• We have a Franciscan brother who interns with the Social Service Center on Wednesdays. When I arrived in the office today, he was fully frocked in his brown robe and rope and had already gotten his ashes, presumably at a Catholic service (show off...). Being the hilarious person I am, I pointed to his forehead and said "Oh hey. You got a little something on your face." He just looked at me. And then reminded me it was Ash Wednesday and that the black smudge was, in fact, ashes. 
• You can't even see my ashes. Catholics usually smear that stuff on there. The Presbyterians are apparently more concerned with ash conservation.  
• It's been Lent for less than 24 hours and I already casually tried to eat a Thin Mint. Had to spit that deliciousness out because-- even more surprises-- Thin Mints are covered in chocolate.

I hope someone up there is getting a kick out of my Lent so far because we are off to a rough start. It's going to be a long 40 days...

Your standard issue JVC blog post about Lent.

Happy real Mardi Gras!

See, in my world, there are two Mardi Gras’s—there’s “real” Mardi Gras, which is the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, and there’s “fun” Mardi Gras, which is a giant drunken parade in St. Louis.

But more on that nonsense later.

I’m coming into Lent in kind of a weird way this year, and by “weird,” I mean “closer to the way I’ve actually should have been approaching Lent for most of my life.” This is the first year in the many (22. I’m so old.) I’ve lived that I’ve given real thought to my relationship with the Almighty (I cringe. Still not super on board with the God language. We’ll see if we can develop an appropriate euphemism later), likely because I’m finally in a space where I feel like I have the license to do so. You can call bullshit on that, because the higher power in the universe meets you where you’re at so there is no “right” time to start a relationship and so on and so forth… but that doesn’t change the fact that I hadn’t felt like I could contemplate my relationship with the non-gendered being who resides upstairs until I thrust myself into a year of faith-based service and living.

Go big or go home, amirte?

But in all seriousness, I’ve been thoroughly uncomfortable with the notion of Lent, and I can’t help but think it’s because of my catholic schooling. We started doing Lent before most of us had learned that boogers aren’t an acceptable snack food. I personally was too young to question why my teachers were encouraging me to give up chocolate, and hell, “Because Jesus wants you too,” was a good enough reason anyway.

Side note: further questioning was often met with some variation of the answer: “Because your lord and savior bled to a horrible, painful death for you. Gruesomely.” Sometimes, giving up chocolate is the less scaring route, you know?

Like most things from my youth, Lent became something sort of lame as I got older. Suddenly, the reasoning of “Because…Jesus?” wasn’t flying anymore. “Because Jesus” wasn’t much of an answer to anything in my life, so I didn’t see the need to cling to it for an arbitrary 40 days when I could have been clinging to chocolate. And if I did make myself try Lent, all I was usually met with was crippling guilt and failure as I learned that I couldn’t make it a measly 40 days without breaking the promise I made to be nice to people or stop smoking or putting down the damn chocolate. I’d end Lent in the same place I started: under the assumption that I wasn’t cut out for this whole catholic thing anyway, so it was pretty pointless to try.

I like Easter though. They give you chocolate on Easter.

This year feels different though. I can’t put my finger on how best to describe why, but you’ll have to take my word when I say it may be because I’m finally feeling a tiny whisper of faith.

My approach to the value of spirituality as of late stems from the very first line of the Kairos speech I gave my senior year of high school (Yeah, Ms. Baber, I still remember parts of it. I had to practice it so many times, I’m surprised I didn’t have the whole thing memorized by the end…):

“Getting to know God is like getting to know any person. You must have a desire to know God, and you must really work at it.”

I’m still not a church-goer and the bible still isn’t my idea of a good read. But my experiences of these last 6 (or 7? Ish?) months have lead me to believe there is something to this whole “relationship with God” junk that I’ve been on the periphery of for most of my life. In a way, I feel as though JVC threw me into the deep end of spirituality and said “Okay, now you have to do the work so you can catch your breath.” Because my job and this city are ripe with unanswered, hard and often heart-rending questions, and if you don’t fight to stay afloat, this year can and will drown you.

So you’ll flail a bit and wonder what sort of disaster you just hurled yourself into, and it takes an uncomfortable amount of slipping under the surface of the water and bobbing back up again before you realize you can float if you try hard enough.

Okay, so maybe comparing my relationship with the alleged creator of the universe to drowning isn’t the best way to go. But y’all can’t tell me you didn’t swallow gallons of pool water while you were learning to swim, too.

Or maybe there actually are some people who are naturally buoyant. It seems that way sometimes.

My point (and I swear there is a point) is that after working to obtain a relationship with something or someone I wasn’t sure I wanted to relate to for a few months, I finally feel as though I can point at things in my life and say “Yes, there. That’s what I’ve been missing.”

A big part of this is that I’m finally learning to tie faith to tangible things in my life. Another big part involves me totally cheating and looking in the places I know people have already found God.

And you know what? Sometimes it’s shooting a call to the he/she/zi/hir/it/thing we’ve come to call “God” and asking how they think I’m doing. Because what I’m finally (finally) learning is that a relationship takes communication, even if that communication feels sort of one sided. Sometimes it doesn't hurt to ask for a bit of guidance or ask questions. Talking to God has been the best way to tackle my own confusion about the role spirituality has in my life and the entire concept is finally (FINALLY) getting less weird.

So I come into Lent this year with a new sense of why Lent is a thing to begin with. This is a time to think about where you are with God before God shows up again sometime around Easter. And whether you do that through sacrifice or good deeds or chocolate deprivation, the point is that you’re setting yourself up to be able to say “hey” to God and have it not be awkward.

Or at least it will be for me. There's already a number of different blog posts out there from other volunteers and different reflections from various individuals with stronger faith than I who see these 40 days differently. But my life is always a quest to tone down the awkwardness I'm just so dang good at. Might as well use this time to try to be less awkward around God. 

Also, I’m giving up chocolate. And peanut butter. Pray for me.

Woof, talk about a lot of Lenten word vomit. Let's do a highlight reel of the last month so we can all move on with our lives:

Camille took us to a free Airborne Toxic Event show for community night. I knew of the band, but as with most new music, I don’t usually get obsessed until I hear it live. I've been listening to them nearly non-stop since the show. No, really, it's getting weird guys. Someone find me something else to listen to:

If you look closely, you can see the band.

Our support people, the ever fabulous Colleen and Steve, took us on the Half Acre Brewery Tour. Half Acre is a Chicago beer, brewed a ten minute bus ride away from my house. It was awesome for many reasons, but perhaps the greatest part was that they give you a PINT GLASS for your tasting glass, and then give you three free pints. It was a nice reminder that sometimes, you plan to do good, life affirming things with your Saturday, and then you accidentally get drunk at 11 a.m. Ah, life:

This kettle is CookiePuss!

Much Arrested Development love. 

"Bye Buddy! I hope you find your dad."

Yum? Beer?

This would be the "tasting glass."

Support person Steve sang a little bit...

Tom, the hipster tour guide.

The wonderful and attractive Matt S. and I visited the just as wonderful and attractive Priya S. at her new home in Lafayette, Indiana. Despite Indiana continuing to be the god-forsaken state we all know and love (ha), much fun and good times were had by all:

Guess which bowling score was mine? Haha. Ha. 

Also, 

Hi Matt :-).

And then this weekend was “fun” Mardi Gras. Shout out to the St. Louis community for hosting a grand time. It was nice to be back in STL, despite almost getting stranded there for an extra day because Megabus is a bunch of weather-fearing wimps:

STL shuttle bus. I don't actually have good pictures from the weekend...

And MAJOR props to Caitlin B. for giving me a ride back to Chicago. You rock, girl. 

STITCH. 

Alrighty. You're sufficiently caught up. Now go eat some pancakes and get ready for 40 long days without chocolate. And don't forget to get your ashes tomorrow. Seriously, tomorrow is the only day all year you can walk around with a black smudge on your face and no one judges you or asks why. I know--I've tried other days. You don't want to miss out on this.