God is Not a Pharisee, or How I Ate Meat on Ash Wednesday

Father, forgive me, I have sinned.

I ate meat on Ash Wednesday.

I didn't mean to, mind you -- even one possessed with the most ironclad of homeschooled holy-roller rad-trad Christendomite upbringings can subdue or even obliterate one's knee-jerk primal-instinct inhibitions with enough practice in the art of disuse. Reverting to the faith of your childhood after four years spent as what may only be termed a secular-hedonist wannabe necessitates an arduous [and rather humiliating] process of remembering all the things you aren't supposed to be doing that you'd long ago forgotten you weren't supposed to be doing. In a sense, it's far easier to excise the more prominent mortal sins from your life [even your favorites] than to do battle with the more mundane and socially accepted vices of mistaking "damn" for God's last name and sleeping in on lazy Sunday mornings.

In any case, I was about four bites into the chicken before I stopped dead in my tracks and blanched to my roots in horror. Had I ever wondered if Catholic guilt was still strong within me, my fears were cessated. That scene in The Silver Chair when Jill and Eustace realize they've just eaten a talking Narnian stag and the little blue-blooded Brits go green to the gills? They got it from me and they toned it down a little.

I felt like I just ate baby. I couldn't have felt worse if I had just chopped up my mother with a meat cleaver. Some things never depart you, no matter how far you've fallen or how long you've strayed. "An Ulster Scot," as Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy, "may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath." Perhaps Hallmark should sell fourteenth-birthday greeting cards: "Congratulations, Mary Elizabeth!" they'd crow. "Now your lunchmeat options can send you to hell!"

That being said, the reasonable part of me recognized that I obviously hadn't done it on purpose, that I put away the chicken as soon as I realized it was an abstinence day, that any priest worth his collar would probably absolve me of food-related penances along with the kiddies and pregnant ladies anyway [God knows it's more penitential for me to eat the chicken than to not eat it], and that, as we all learned in moral theology back in the day, there can be no sin if there is no intent. Yet I was astounded by how quickly the devil was at my elbow with a velvety whisper, crooning, Forget it. You're hopeless. What an inauspicious Lenten beginning. You're pretty much the worst Catholic ever. Give up your resolutions, throw in the towel, eat everything in the refrigerator, then purge till you puke blood. Oh, and hey, while you're at it, there's a bottle of Jack Daniels under the sink, and I'm sure you can find some new and creative way to compromise your chastity!

It was a herculean effort, but I told him to bugger off and went and got my ashes. I accidentally ate four bites of chicken; it is what it is. No need to turn an accidental lapse into a deliberate debacle, for-the-love-of-all-that's-holy. The Venus de Milo is missing some limbs, but that's no reason to burn down the Louvre.

That's when it hit me for perhaps the first time in my life: God is not a Pharisee. He sees my pathetic little efforts at something great for what they are (inadequate but cute) and even if I botch the job a bit here and there, the God of the universe isn't about casting aspersions on all my perceived deficiencies and endlessly berating me for them. That isn't His schtick. The kerygmatic image of God as Father is not an arbitrary one. What father scoffs at his three-year-old proffering yoinked dandelions from the neighbor's yard in an act of love? What cold-hearted bastard would have the heart to say, "Honey, that's a weed -- now put those back and go pick me some real flowers?"

I'm reminded of a truly heinous clay creation of mine dating back to perhaps the first or second grade -- the artistic representation of a creature I had imagined with the head of a dog, the body of a brontosaurus, and the tail of a squirrel, an affront to aesthetes of every culture and clime, an enormous fat bulbous monstrosity of grotesque proportions, conceived in love and painted a bright bilious brownish-green. [Fortunately for posterity, my career as an artist was a short-lived one, and I soon thereafter shelved my Sculpey forever and took up the pen.] In any event, I gave it to my mother for a Mother's Day present, and hideous as this thing is, she still proudly displayed it in a place of honor in our home for years to come [to my eternal chagrin]. In similar manner, I think, God chuckles to Himself as He takes our humble lurid-green squirrel-dog-brontosauri offerings, and fashions them into something beautiful for the kingdom.

I am now propounding a spirituality that sounds suspiciously Little Way-like, and as St. Therese of Lisieux and I have been on the outs for years, I'd better stop now.

In a different vein, I've been in horrible, horrible physical pain for the past day and a half. Digesting food is a bitch when you haven't done it in eight years, and it hurts unimaginably badly. I find myself prostrate and crying on the floor more often than not. Prayers would be much appreciated. I also find that time crawls by painfully slowly when it is no longer filled by hours of epic bingeing, and reclaiming my life and remembering the other things I used to like to do instead of dying is slow going. I'm continuing to slog away at it, I guess. It'd be easier if I weren't in gastrointestinal distress, though.

On the resolutions front, I've already broken the weighing-myself-after-eating one and gotten supremely grrowked off as a result. But, for what it's worth, still didn't purge. But gaining weight - for the eating disordered - is a traumatic effing experience. It's like waking up in the morning and finding yourself without an identity. Rotten feeling. Just rotten. Hinc illae lacrimae.

Onward and upward, I suppose. Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. (Francis de Sales)