Why I don’t treat lent like a diet

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day that Lent begins. Some Christians have ashes placed on their foreheads, and they fast and pray on this day to commemorate the beginning of the 40 days of Lent. Lenten ashes, in case you didn’t know, are made with the palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday, which are burned. On Ash Wednesday when I was a child, we would cross the street from our Catholic school to the church, where a stern priest would smudge ashes on our foreheads, saying “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It felt vaguely like a threat, but it was sort of spooky and Halloween-y, and I liked it. The ashy smudge stayed there for the rest of the day, and I remember noticing who had ashes, as I walked home after school in my maroon uniform jumper, itchy synthetic blouse, and falling-down knee socks, legs freezing. My friends and my brother and my cousins and I would talk about what we were giving up for Lent, usually some kind of edible treat like chocolate. I don’t remember ever making it all the way through Lent without caving.  

During my four years at Colgate University, I regularly attended mass. I must have gotten ashed there, too, but I don’t have any specific memory of Ash Wednesday. I do remember very vividly an outdoor Holy Thursday service during which the priest washed the feet of some students. This seemed super-radical, even more radical than the real loaves of bread that we used for communion instead of the papery host I had grown up receiving.

Post college, living in Manhattan, my church attendance was infrequent. Still, I would sporadically seek out a Catholic church where they could hook me up with some ashes. It always felt like stepping into another dimension.

It was during those years that I started to experience Ash Wednesday as a reminder of my own mortality. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” There are few sentences that are truer than that one. We will all one day be dust. It is humbling and somehow calming.

I’m no longer a Catholic. I am a member of Union Congregational Church in Montclair, NJ, where I live with my husband and two teenagers. It’s part of a very liberal Protestant denomination, the United Church of Christ, which was the first denomination to ordain a black person, a woman, and a gay person. There, today, I will have a choice: forehead or hand. That will be a game time decision, but hand or forehead, it will imprint on me the beginning of Lent.

I won’t be giving up chocolate, though. First of all, it’s Valentine’s Day, which coincides with Ash Wednesday for the first time since 1945. Second, I don’t tend to give up food or drink during Lent; Lent, to me, is not a diet, not a second chance to make your New Year’s resolution stick. I know that for many people fasting and abstaining from different foods during Lent is a spiritual practice, but it’s not my practice. Instead, Lent is a chance to ponder my mortality and figure out how to become a better person in the time I have left on this earth.

Photo: Petra Kobayashi