This is not a new story. I've written about this before. Definitely in my old online diary, possibly in the blog before this one. But I'll write about it again, because it's something that stands out, a beacon in the landscape of my whole life's memories. It shines at me now, both as a reflex when world events make me want to think about what is most comforting, and as something topical as many people celebrate Holy Week. You know I don't do religion, but I was raised Catholic, went to parochial school, the whole nine. I considered myself devout, and maybe I was a true believer in those days, or maybe I was just drawn to the ritual of mass, the calm and order, the bombast followed by great gasps of reverent silence. And incense. Easter-time is when the priests get freshman dorm levels of liberal with the incense, and to this day I have positive associations with that distinctive blend. This is not about Catholicism, or religion at all, though, but the Catholic mass is how I arrived at a particularly cherished stretch of time in my youth, and helped shape me as an adult.
The thing to know about me as a child, or fine, maybe even to this day, is that while I'm not a classic Type A personality, I've always had a compulsion to achieve at a certain level, both academically and in other areas. "Good enough" can sometimes be good enough, but it usually isn't, and I have to take things to the next level on my own terms. Enter: Lenten sacrifice. I had to be the Valedictorian of Lent, and this time in fourth grade I'm guessing I had heard a teacher insinuate that it was better or nobler or more difficult to do something over the Lenten period vs. giving up candy or something, so I decided to go BIG and commit to attending mass every day from Ash Wednesday through Easter. This meant rising while it was still dark to go sit in the freezing, cavernous and mostly empty church before putting in a full day of school. The idea seemed a glamorous challenge. Do-able, but requiring a certain oomph not shown by my peers (who were probably secretly eating candy anyway, those slacker heathens). I'm not proud of my pre-teen smugness, but it was definitely a motivating factor in my intention. My grandparents, who lived in the apartment downstairs, were going anyway, so at least I had a ride. And so it happened that for 40 days in a row I started my day, bundled up and yawning, in a pew with my Gram, Pup and Great-Aunt Laura.
This is what I remember about the actual church experience: dim lighting, few parishioners, the priest's economy with the service length and being the only one there under retirement age. Everything else I remember: that sweet, quiet alone time spent with my grandparents and great-aunt (who realistically was my third grandmother). Everyone else was still in bed, and the four of us sat around the breakfast table after church, sharing sections of the Sun Journal and eating thick slices of homemade bread (Gram's plain white bread for me, not Easter bread, that anise-kissed devil's loaf which the rest of them enjoyed through the season), buttered and sizzled crispy on one side under the broiler. Black coffee for them, hot chocolate for me. And really, honestly, you haven't lived until you've dunked buttered toast in hot chocolate. It is powerful nourishment. As is the private, unshared access to three of the most special people one's life. How could I have known then what a rare jewel, what a limited edition I had inadvertently set myself up to collect?
Pup is gone, now. Aunt Laura is gone. Gram is still here and still baking her bread, and may she for as long as she's feeling well. What remains is that my machinations to prove myself the Lord (or, let's be honest, to lock in my teacher's pet contender status, all the same to me in those days) set in motion the delivery of a more valuable and lasting gift. There is no way that I was cognizant of it at the time. I was ten at most, and that's not how still-forming elementary school brains work. But there was something happening there, a subconscious recognition of how cherished a time this would be decades later, even if it presented itself as small selfish joy in the moment. Some would say that that's evidence of how God works, and I don't mind if you say it, even if I don't necessarily believe it. What it feels like, to me, is that the experience in itself IS God. My kind of God. Not a deity, not the grantor of a blessing I've asked for or was shown, unbidden, for whatever mysterious reason. It's a feeling. An awareness and a pure jolt of gratitude.
Unbeknownst to me, that Lent in the 1980s planted the seeds of my eventual peace, and the ability to look back and recognize what I've come to know as God along the way, occasionally even as it happens. But Easter bread, man: still nope forever.
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