Of Faith and Fasting

Thou hast neither youth nor age

But as it were an after dinner sleep

Dreaming of both

from Eliot's Gerontion

I've never been one to fast during Lent. I remember once or twice I gave up chocolate, or potato chips, but that was no big deal, just a fairly simple means to chalk up a brownie point or two with God. It seemed sufficient that I knew people or had friends who fasted. This Lent, however, I've decided to fast...very little meat, light meals, very little carbs or fat...water instead of soda....sparkling water instead of wine. We were out walking the other afternoon and stopped into a coffee shop. I found myself staring at the Philly Cheese hot dog advertisement, mesmerized: sauteed peppers and onions, melted fontina cheese, pork sausage, toasted bun, grainy mustard....but I digress.

I've stayed hungry for the past week, living expectantly for each meager meal, still waiting for the payoff on the scales.... but I have discovered something else: my mind is more active, dreams more poignant; my soul is stirred. I've been reading a lot more lately....Just the other night I couldn't really get to sleep (hunger will do that) and I found myself immersed in memories that flooded into my consciousness in a luxurious and gentle reverie...I arranged them in terms of my school grades...Mrs. Camp my first grade teacher, Kathy Bennett gave me a Christmas present....Kennedy shot, dead and buried in the second....Mrs. Baxter grieving for her husband in the third, long division, Ulysses lost at sea, I loved Penelope too...Allen Jones' wit, seventh, spin the bottle, Jane returned the locket, tears... basketball in the ninth, Shamrock milkshakes, Abbey Road....growing pains in the tenth, Latin, the smell of lantana at the beach, a salty sea breeze...college, Yeats discussed at the truck stop.....marriage and children...beloved pets departed....of wheeling seasons...bitter sweet our lives.....love and loss...hope and grief....joy and disappointment....boredom and poignancy.....my life a never ending succession of unlikely occasions...never happening the way I had thought...joy and regret of the same fabric, of the same song.....the memories so real and so close now it seems.

Now is the time in the "juvescence" of the year, as Eliot puts it....now is the time to take stock, to take account....to gather up the fragments of our lives and hold them gently and with reverence, because these shards of our existence, these memories, no less real than the present moment, are sacred...not just some of them, but all of them....our lives universes unto themselves and intimate rudiments of the universe entire...redeemed by water and Spirit. Nothing is lost...nothing of no use... nothing without meaning...A holy hope manifest among the broken pieces that all manner of thing will be well.....A hope that already sets its roots in the present surely...if we but pay attention.

However you choose to do it...take account....pay attention...glean the soul...live expectantly...the time is nigh and the kingdom of God is at hand, God's kingdom that seeks every time and place, God's bitter sweet kingdom that even inhabits our memories...Prepare the way of the Lord....a way upon which we all, memories and all, are profoundly implied.