Originally published 2/9/16
I feel most normal in Lent. As good Episcopalians, we try to give up earthly things and take on spiritual practices during Lent. Last year we gave up dessert, coffee and meat. Maybe we took it a bit far. Coffee was by far the most difficult. It almost flattened Michael. He's a two-pot-a-day guy, and drinks little else unless I remind him and hand him a glass of water. No coffee (even though we substituted with black tea, which contains caffeine) gave him a five-day withdrawal headache.
At left, Michael savoring the coffee at Relavator in Chattanooga.
We only ate meat twice, and that's when it was offered to us by a gracious host. We didn't want to be those people who come to your house and announced their food preferences. You can get around "dessert" if you eat cake at 4 p.m. and call it a snack, by the way. Isabel recently announced that she wanted to give up meat again this Lent. This, from the now-three-season athlete who often eats nothing but protein for snacks and dinner. I advised her against that. This year, our family is different, and you're different, I told her. You need protein so that I can remain sane around you. I don't need a moody, hormone-enraged, protein-starved, calculus-taking, exercising 16-year-old girl wandering around my house. Can you imagine the chaos?
The team, right. Isabel's #23. Just like Mike. Jordan, that is.
What we usually took on for the past three years was family fellowship night for our Sunday School class, delightfully called "Muffins and Ministry." Please tell me you're not surprised that my Sunday School class has food in its name.
The idea came to me the first year we were in the class, and we were going around the circle to give everyone a chance to tell us what they were giving up for lent. Some gave up Sunday commerce (interesting), Coke, chocolate, peanut butter and, most interesting, yelling at their children. (Mind you, this is a class of very sane, level-headed parents.) Many also mentioned the common vice of alcohol, which I gave up 13 Lents ago, living, as a seminarian coined it recently, in perpetual Lent. Not drinking is weird. I mean, you have no idea how much of society and average socialization revolves around drinking until you don't do it anymore. It's pervasive, and invasive, and constant. Most people assume that you drink, and that wine is the appropriate hostess gift. Awkward. I've been an alcoholic since my first beer, well, my first 13 beers, during the drinking of which I threw up 9 times. You'd think a person who does that wouldn't drink anymore. That kind of activity doesn't bother an alcoholic, though. There is some guilt and remorse, but two Tylenol and a nap will cure that. Until it can't. So I can't. And I don't. Ever. We love to entertain, but sometimes there is an awkward moment when the guest brings a bottle of wine, because it's so common. Not drinking is so uncommon. "For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, 'He has a demon!' Luke 7:33 Except in Lent. That's why we offered our house for a big family party. Parents and kids, sans alcohol and dessert. It made me feel normal.
After the flood, kids got to write on the walls during our Lenten fellowship.
I'll miss it this year, as I miss our friends and all their children in our Sunday School class. I'm taking on a couple of spiritual disciplines, but we have yet to determine what - if anything - we're giving up this year. Maybe I should give up feeling weird about not drinking.
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