μετάνοια, or a Half-Assed Saturday-Morning Metanoia

I missed daily Mass yesterday, thus violating (yet another) of my Lenten precepts. In my defense, it's because food was taunting me all flipping day long and I was virtually exploding out of my skin with concupiscence, so I wound up napping all afternoon in a last-ditch (and, for what it's worth, successful) attempt to stave off purging, and thus didn't make it to 5:15 p.m. Mass at the Shrine. That said, to atone for this execrable failure to get my holy on yesterday, I hit 8 a.m. Mass this morning in the most drastic exercise in piaculative self-flagellation of which I could conceive. (I have long thought there is a special circle in hell reserved for people who wake me up before eleven o'clock on weekend mornings. I can't remember the last time this decade that I was up at seven on a friggity-fricking Saturday.)

So there I was, nodding off in the pew, bloodshot and bleary-eyed, jostled from the arms of Morpheus at the butt-crack of dawn after a sleepless night of starting awake every hour on the hour drenched in a cold sweat because I've taken to having obsessive hallucinatory dream sequences about food (I'm an addict in detox. It's not as weird as it sounds, I swear.) Had I, like Matthew in the Gospel this morning, been called upon to drop everything, pick up my cross, and follow Christ, I can totally envision myself balking, buying time in a desperate attempt to negotiate for my Disney princess comforter. Funny -- but at the same time, not. (The rich man walked away sad for much the same reasons. And he probably wasn't as sleep-deprived as me.)

My eyes began to wander around the church, which is historically not without precedent -- I have the attention span of an ADHD gnat, the spiritual depth of a Slip 'n' Slide, and a sense of the sacred that outs me as Howard Stern and Ozzy Osbourne's lovechild -- and I noticed, to my horror, the presence of a boy at Mass with whom I am supremely pissed.

I am Jack's raging bile duct. Seriously? Seriously? Of all the parishes in all the towns in all the world, he walks into mine. As Calvin (as in "& Hobbes", not John) would say, of course I believe in God -- SOMEBODY'S out to get me!

So while I carried on an interior dialogue with aforementioned deity consisting largely of permutations of friggity-frickin-frick-frick-friggity-FRICKING-I-HATE-THAT-BACKSTABBING-FORMER-FRIEND(!!!) and other sentiments equally unsuitable in church, I realized the whole thing was quite simple, really, at least in principle: I had to forgive him. That 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us' bit? The God of the universe nudged me; I scowled. I meant it, kid.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I have a massive effing abandonment complex. (Just ask my ex-boyfriends.) I don't just have issues on that front -- I have a whole damn subscription. This trait, immediately and acutely perceptible to anyone who has known me longer than about three minutes, sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb and causes me a hell of a lot of angst and interior tumult. As a consequence, the qualities I admire most in others are consistency, fidelity, patience, loyalty, and stick-to-it-ive-ness in interpersonal relationships -- and conversely, I will forgive anyone anything -- except leaving me. I hate Tolkien with a burning passion, but a brief passage in The Fellowship of the Ring:

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens," said Gimli.
"Maybe," said Elrond, "but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall."

serves as my life's mantra. Or as Walker Percy puts it, "We love those who know the worst of us, and do not turn their faces away." And this particular friend had violated my trust in cataclysmic fashion, reneged on a timeworn friendship, and abandoned me when I needed him most. And I was supposed to forgive him! It was absurd. Unthinkable.

I did it anyway. Okay, tried hard. Working on it, at least.

I had an epiphany of sorts last night (somewhere in the midst of all those subconscious erotic fantasies about kung pao chicken and rocky road ice cream that rivaled the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for sheer phantasmagoric trippiness) that if we would just get our heads and hearts out of the past, quit bracketing, categorizing, prejudging, and resenting others for what they've done or haven't done for us, and just freaking love them, no strings attached, we'd spare ourselves a lot of sorrow and stupidity in this protean tragicomedy we call life.

We're forever being exhorted to think of others more, but I think, paradoxically, true charity is only attainable if we think about them less, at least in a qualified sense. We've got to dispense with the bullcrap of psychoanalyzing their actions, questioning their motivations, and judging them on the monstrously sophistical grounds of whether or not they've suffered as much as we have (maybe they haven't, but so what?) and simply give of ourselves -- no questions asked. One of the greatest tragedies of modern civilization is that we've outgrown forgiveness -- we're too damn Freudian and enlightened for it. There's no room in our smug cultural zeitgeist for what is is, in some sense, the province of the intellectually unencumbered. (Look at little unlettered Maria Goretti. She was good at it.) Dismas didn't volunteer his whole life story on the cross; more importantly, Christ didn't ask.

On a related note, the only purging I've done in the last 36 hours is finally purging myself of the ex-boyfriend box in which I've obsessively stockpiled photos of -- and love letters from -- every boy I've ever loved for the last decade, refusing to relax my grubby, tenacious little grip on the past and only paining myself for my own recalcitrance. So after Mass this morning, I settled into a mountainous, imposing heap of scrap paper and Polaroids (have there really been that many boys?), and slowly, methodically, painstakingly, went through each one last time, reread, retrod, relived, chuckled, wept, and then, without further ceremony, bagged up the whole lot of broken promises and shattered dreams and chucked them into the trashbin once and for all. The fact that it anguished me so much to do it convinced me all the more that it needed to be done. "What we call the beginning is often the end," writes T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, "and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." Baggage, in life as in traveling, can be prohibitively heavy, and looking back is the surest way to miss where you are going.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. (Helen Keller)

For a practical, pragmatic update, I'm doing passingly well. I've been pretty bad about weighing myself -- still doing it too often -- but haven't touched hooch, have been reasonably good so far about hitting daily Mass, and purged only the one time in three days (which, when contrasted with 10 times a day in the months preceding it, is some serious progress, and as they say in AA, progress, not perfection, is key!) I've been going through about 10 packs of gum a day in an effort to not binge on everything in sight, and have been chewing it till my jaws have about fallen off in exhaustion.

My next goal: figuring out what the hell I used to do with my time back before it was all eaten up (pun intended) with this bulimia crap. I'm thinking of taking up playing the piano again. It's good catharsis, and stuff.

I've already gone on too long, but I'll leave you with this parting thought:

"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step." (C. S. Lewis)

Lest we forget.