As I’ve noted before, I’m a cultural Catholic. I stopped practicing at 16, but after a period where I went through my militant atheist phase (while still studying and reading about religion), I’ve come around to acknowledging the place religion has had in my life, my upbringing, and my parents’ living room. There’s a crucifix with the previous year’s palm tucked into it. It will be replaced with a new one on Palm Sunday. I had a rosary. I owned a Bible and read it. I went to a historically Catholic university1, and now work at a different historically Catholic university. I have a passing knowledge of saints, and I don’t take Communion even at other churches, because I don’t practice and that is the correct thing to do, as a Catholic.
I’ve come around to Lent again in recent years, for a variety of reasons. A period of reflection and fasting has some merit in these confusing times. 40 days (plus Sundays) isn’t that long, but it is long enough to develop new habits and practices! I like pancakes, so Shrove Tuesday is a great one for me. And after many, many years of only associating the Easter season with grief2, I’m ready to transform it for myself. Using Lent as a period of reflection and preparation for Easter, even if I don’t celebrate Easter in a traditional way, helps me make some markers for the year.
…doing
Slowly, slowly trying to make myself feel at home here. People keep asking me how things are going and I feel like I’m giving an inadequate answer when I say I’m still adjusting. Transitions are work, and I am doing it. The surface stuff is done, and I expect to spend the rest of the year working on deeper shifts.
I do my yoga, I go to work, I read on the bus, I text my old friends to say I miss them, I text my friends and family in the city about getting together - ever so slowly running through my list. I see my nephews, I go for a pint downstairs, I play Pathfinder on Thursdays, I take the interns at work for coffee because they want whatever wisdom I possess about librarianship and I want to pay forward all the little treats my mentors gave me when I was them.
…making
This is hard with a kitten who thinks everything includes her and has dubbed herself my collaborator in all creative endeavours. But what I want to do is finish the miniature porch kit so I can bring it to my office, and then get to work on the cross-stitch kit I got to try. I want to expand my making! I have been painting with Mallow, which she loves. Me, less so, but it is very cute how excited she is and how much she wants to help, in her little cat way.
…baking
It’s nice to feel at least settled enough to bake again I feel like I haven’t baked much in months, which is true and also not. But I’ve been baking bread. I tried a couple new cookie recipes. I have all the ingredients for a carrot cake later this week. I made some wildly inauthentic Irish soda bread for St. Patrick’s Day and served it with Irish cheddar. My partner will make hamantaschen for Purim later this week (he is not Jewish, he makes them in honour of a friend who is and shared their recipe). I’ll whip up some biscuits for soup sometime soon - relying, as always, on my dad’s recipe.
…thinking
Mostly I think about the latest thing on my to-do list which probably involves calling yet another administrative body for something or scanning my birth certificate for reasons I don’t understand or finally filling out the forms to defer my pension, which feels like something I shouldn’t have to think about at 32, but I have a pension from my previous job and it needs me to make a decision about what to do with it. All that to say, I am exhausted from the nine million little things I’ve done and have to keep doing, this pile of life administration you get when you change jobs and move provinces all in one go.
But when I’m not thinking about that, I’m mostly thinking about writing. Ways to deepen my writing practice, ways to get on track. I always act like there’s one more thing I have to do before I can focus on writing, but this transition has reminded me more than ever that you can’t wait for everything else to fall into place.
…fasting
I actually really don’t like the concept of fasting, because it feels just a little too close to disordered eating, and like an overwhelming majority of people who grew up in the early 2000s, I have a fraught history with disordered eating. I’ve never fasted for religious reasons - I was a child when I practiced, so not required to even pretend to observe fasting days - and I’m not going to start. But in thinking about Lent: and the idea of fasting from things and not food, well that piqued my interest. There are things I could be better about not doing. I won’t self-flagellate if I don’t get them done. We’re about two-thirds of the way through Lent now, and I haven’t been wholly successful at them, but the spirit is there and they’re building me to continue these habits in the future.
I just checked on this, and a friend of mine from undergrad is going to be ordained as a priest on May 31, 2024.
In 2006, my maternal grandfather died very suddenly, a week before Easter, and down in South Carolina. I was fourteen, which means I was both old enough to be privy to the logistics of death, especially when your loved one dies in a foreign country, but also to be crushed with grief for the first time I could really remember. That was the end of Easter for me - we had to wait out the holiday to fit in his funeral, and my parents had last-minute set some chocolate bunnies on the table in my grandmother’s kitchen for Easter, to mark the occasion. It still makes me sad to think about, and I was unable to enjoy Easter for more than a decade to come after, because it was so bound up in my grief. And as a bonus issue for my faith in general, which was pretty shaky to begin with: I was being confirmed that spring, and my grandfather was my sponsor. He died just over a month before I was going to be confirmed as a Catholic. The letter he wrote me, as my sponsor, arrived the day after he died. My grandfather was a devout Catholic, and the letter is beautiful, but all I could feel while reading it was anger and grief at the world that left me to do this rite which was important to him and not to me, without him. Time does soften the edges, but it took a very long while.
Once again you have shared your life and feelings with me as your faithful reader.
Thanks again and sending hugs!
What really resonated with me - aside from the hate for Easter (my aunt/uncle and my parent announced their divorces on Easter Saturday and Easter Monday ‘97, respectively) - was that there’s no perfect time to do the thing. So do the thing. I’m happy for you that you’re doing the thing, even if it is hectic right now. 🩷