Lent is supposed to be a time of reflection and contemplation, but only if you do it right. And I can already say with confidence, barely a few days into this Lenten Season, that I am doing it wrong.
In the first place, I ate a sandwich tonight at around 8 p.m., which was one of the things during Lent I was going to try to adjust, no eating after 7 p.m., because I’ve always heard that eating earlier is better for your sleep, and sleep is another one of those things I was hoping Lent would fix. “Get at least eight hours of sleep a night,” I told myself, which was bookended by another Lent improvement: “Wake up at 6 each morning.”
Those three Lenten goals, as I’m sure you can see, are a house of cards. Break one and the others come tumbling down. This happens every year, and for some reason, I have yet to learn my lesson. The trick to a meaningful Lent, wise folks will tell you, is to choose something small and nurturing to bring into your life. “For Lent this year, I’m taking five minutes each day to sit quietly in silence,” someone told me this week. And here’s an even better one I heard from a fellow parishioner: “I am going to stop saving the good wine and begin to enjoy my collection.” It misses the entire point of the season, but it still seems pretty sound to me.
I should have known it was going to be a difficult and cranky march to Easter when I approached the altar during Ash Wednesday for what we Episcopalians call, with our typical grand pomposity, the imposition of ashes. That’s when the person at the front of the church makes that cross-shaped smudge on your forehead, which allows you to walk around town for the rest of the day telegraphing how much better you are and how much more God loves you than all of those other people with smooth and unblemished foreheads.
I mean, there are other reasons to do it, apparently. But that’s a key driver, if we’re all being honest.
“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” is what they say when they’re making the sign of the cross on your forehead. The “ashes” of Ash Wednesday are traditionally made from the burned-up palms from the previous year’s Palm Sunday, mixed with oil. It’s a nice tradition, the continuity of the church year, the way Holy Week figures into the following year’s Lent, but it’s also a little dicey. You need to mix the ashes with oil, not water. Ashes and water form something called “lye water,” which can leave a nasty caustic burn on human skin, and that’s not what they’re going for. The goal is to impose a smudgy black cross that can be washed off, not a blistered and red burn mark. Not to mention the public embarrassment that would ensue if a person went up to the front of the church, received the cross, and then howled in pain, “It burns! It burns!”
That would send a complicated message, to say the least.
For the past few years, the tradition at my church has been for the members of the youth group and for those young people in the process of Confirmation to be the ones who impose the ashes on the rest of us. That means that all of the old people trudge to the front of the church to a line of young, clear-eyed people with their whole lives ahead of them who impose the ashes and then deliver the words that, coming from a healthy young person seem deliberately cruel and taunting: “Remember that you are dust,” the smug little bastards say, “and to dust you shall return.”
When I went up there, I could swear the kid said it with a barely perceptible smirk on his face. “Remember you’re old and in the way,” he seemed to be saying, “and your next stop is assisted living.”
It’s no wonder I went home and tucked into a late-night sandwich, and then allowed myself to sleep in the next morning. Lent is a hard season anyway, even without the reminders of my imminent decrepitude. I may just eat and sleep my way to Easter.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
