And Lent Begins

Until moving up here to North Dakota, I had no idea what Lent was, or Ash Wednesday was (that's today, the beginning of Lent the season preceding Easter in “mainstream” Christianity) because I grew up in a church tradition that didn't emphasize feast days or a lot of the rituals that – as we get older, let's admit – we find providing structure. The Southern Baptist church I grew up in emphasized preaching the word of God and making sure everybody in the world had (has) the opportunity to hear that Jesus the Son of God died for your and my sins, our acts of separation from God, in order to be admitted into heaven where God is and sin can't be.

McFarlane, Todd. Spider-Man: Torment. Introduction by Jim Salicrup. New York: Marvel Worldwide, Inc., 2011. ISBN 978085162186

But I digress. I've chosen to give up – and I'm using two definitions here of the word “up” – two things this Lenten season, from February 13 to March 31. I've been eating and getting for the family lately a lot of chocolate in the form of candy bars. Not every day, but there's some really great specials going on around Minot right now and quite honestly I'm tired of staring at my blood sugar levels yo-yo-ing and the doctors' only solution is another medication. I've got that, and I've got forty minutes of prayer a day every day to do on my knees. That I will do on my knees, and GET focused no matter how unfocused I sound even to myself.

Pastan, Linda. A Perfect Circle of Sun. Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1971. ISBN 08014005332

Yesterday Martha and I and her parents Robert and Sharon were at parent-teacher conferences for Sarah and Jeffrey, and we are so grateful Mrs. Burckhard and Mrs. Perrin (Jeffrey and Sarah's teachers at Longfellow Elementary) agreed to meet us before we got to work instead of us trying to work the conferences in when only one of us could be there! For I really want to know how they're doing, and according to their teachers they're both doing very well with their reading, about a grade and a half above average, and Jeffrey is getting better with his writing while … well, he doesn't want to do extra work when he was free time, while Sarah is so quiet and helpful that Mrs. Perrin claims she'd like a dozen Sarahs in her class. I'm fine with that, but we only get one coming home!

Brown, Guy. The Living End. London, Macmillan, 2008. ISBN 9780230517578

Ash Wednesday's direct Biblical foundation is Genesis 3:19, part of what God says to Adam after he and Eve are both found guilty of enjoying the forbidden fruit in Eden. Instead of the eternal physical life we were supposed to enjoy, we are limited by an earthly lifetime – perhaps long, perhaps short – “for dust [we] art, and unto dust shalt [we] return.” Kinda blah. And the last book I've posted here that I finished reading this last seven days, besides the comic-book reprint and book of poetry I've excerpted above, subtitled the future of death, aging, and immortality deals with until the last century or so you were more likely to get wiped out in an epidemic than of extreme old age. But the change of our attitudes toward death, to something that's part of life from a sudden eye-blink, enables us to make life matter and leave behind something that does matter.

Ready for that cross on my forehead, David