I have always - as someone raised super liberal, non-cermenonial protestant - had a voyeuristic love for Catholicism. If, by some completely unlikely tossing of the dice, I someday become a Christian, I’d want to be full bore catholic. I mean all the way. I want Latin. I want incense. I want my Jesus bloody and I want to confess. I want matins and lauds and maundyies. How do you spell maundy, plural?
Ash Wednesday is my favorite. As a person who was told flim and flam are silly, rites veer on the cultish, and mysticism goes against common sense. Ash Wednesday tickles my nose.
I do not and have never had a practice of lent…of purification and abstinence, flaggelent repentance, a late winter gasp before the sweet spring water green of Easter. Nah.
Except in the way that I absolutely, personally, know hangover. I know self loathing, sickness and excess. I’m really good at self-flagellation. It’s in my bones. It’s in my bones genetically it’s in my bones meaning I think I actually left marks on my skeletal structure and fermented a wee bit of bone marrow. Even after all these years. Oh I know hangover.
I know what it means to eat the ashes and rub your face in it and roll around in the mess.
As a child, I was confused and mystified when the Catholic kids would come to school with a smudged forehead. Confusion and mystification are a blend of concern - should I worry about these kids? Were they being manipulated into weird things? - and jealous - why didn’t I get in on the secret ceremony? I wanted to mark my head with soot. I wondered what the ash tasted like, because kids mostly try things with their mouths. And I was kiddishly aware that no one in my world blessed, with a thumb, my brow.
The FOMO for absurd shit runs deep in me.
Generally, around this time of year, after not having thought about it at all, I become aware of New Orleans. How a thing like place is the bothing. A city is absolutely indifferent to me, a reality out there, a history and a populace of strangers; New Orleans is a thing with trombones and ghosts; no city is Mine or Personal. And at the same time New Orleans is cuttingly personal: I’ve got intimate ghosts, an actual scar, a tattoo but I haven’t got any body’s phone number. Not any more. New Orleans is just one of a handful of my debauched suicides. A woman in a kimono who tasted like champagne. A man who is probably dead by now.
Funny. How ambivalent it all is. How bothing. How feeling left out of absurd shit hits a true nerve right next to my left eyeball.
Think of it this way: in Vedic traditions, you eat Prasad: the left overs of ceremony. You eat what god left over. You have a community meal together after doing sacred stuff, and what you eat is the actual left overs of the ceremony. Your daily bread isn’t so mundane.
The trick of this, I think, is not just gawping down something that has been infused with prayer and suffering and grace and love, but the prior work of what if you made an offering before you ate, worked, or considered yourself blessed or damned? What if the need to eat was elongated by a process of dedication and priory? First: the divine. With my ordinary because that’s what I have. Afterwards: eat your god.
Last weekend was Mahaśīvaratri. A big holy day. A big holey day personally, because it marked a year of ceremony. There were Events. I was Invited. I was asked to wear vermillion on my forehead and dress respectfully, with a scarf and my hair tied back. The Teacher’s Teacher showed up. There were flowers.
I didn’t talk about this, really. It was too personal
I did notice and talk about the dirty, difficult, inconvenient and we’re sick of it now aspect of late winter. I’d come home from a vacation: I noticed and commented upon the fact that coming home is always harder than going away. I mean the culture shock of it. It’s easy to adapt to the culture shock and time change of away: it’s expected. Hell that’s why you went. You’ll take it all and not care so much if you’re tired and confused and your digestion is a little off. You’ll be compassionate with your brain fog and awkwardness because to think you could be smooth and eloquent in such a situation is unreasonable. But then you come home. The grocery store with it’s Americanness is so overwhelming you get flustered. The weather is still shit, and even though you went away like a snow bird thinking a break in the tedium might help, I wonder: now I just have to have the shock of it again, the tedium of it’s still here and has been here, waiting for me. Now you have to do the sad, insulting work of putting on wool socks and unflattering parkas that make you waddle and you have to shovel. And you have to slip on the sidewalk. And there aren’t any sidewalks that are not treacherous. You have to go to work. And no body cares.
Treacherous is the word I’ve been using for it. Mid to late winter. After the prettiness and beauty of first snows and holidays and enjoying the winter stuff, at a certain point we hit treacherous and teadious. It is hard to walk. It’s dangerous to drive. And you’re pretty much over it, so your tank is low and you’re cranky and you’re tired, so you don’t pay as much attention to thinks like walking and driving and conversation and food as you probably should.
“It’s treacherous out there”, I say in every conversation, meaning sympathy, meaning neediness and exhaustion. “Gawd this is all so freaking tedious,” I say, I feel, struggling to just do what I’ve got to do.
But I actually, secretly, freakishly love Ash Wednesday. I love the moment I wake up the morning after, finally knowing the party is over. What if the actual magic is the moment you take the masks off? I have my own versions of the morning after in NOLA, a mess of really gross details and a crack of light. A solitude. A truth.
A New Orleansian friend said something about this being the season of letting go. Letting go, she said, has a weirdly negative connotation for something that really just means surrender. Ordinary life intrudes: I need bread, she said. The past is passed and now you have to let one season go into the next. That’s hard, she said, if you really loved yesterday.
Or even if you didn’t. Even being over it can have that weird twinge by your left eyeball. A longing for the absurd.
Maybe I’m just thinking about purification, a thing I’m set to be talking to students about for oh the next three months. Or three years. How it isn’t like that, really. That’s just absurd. But there is a honest to god truth of it that is more like eating ordinary bread and feeling it’s like tongue kissing god.
But don’t let it get weird, is the basic teaching.
That’s just downright treacherous.
I always love your writing. This is particularly wonderful, as I have always been Catholic adjacent. You are rocking this writing thing. Thanks.