First and most important, T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday. Yes, I know you’re tired of me talking about it. But it’s my favorite. Sometimes I read it out loud to myself.

Second, a song by a friend of mine inspired by the same poem. I’ve always liked Dann’s work, but this song really knocked my socks off.

Third and fourth, two old posts from me on Ash Wednesday: Our peace in God’s will (yes, inspired by Eliot. I’m sorry, I’m into the guy!) and Create in me. Both of them at their core are about trust and submission. Hmmmm.

And finally, a wish inspired by a loved one who was disappointed to get a bad ash-er at mass this morning. May your cross be distinct and your ashes be dark and lasting. Seriously, I should write greeting cards.

No, I’m not talking about 2012, we’re not far enough into it yet. I’ve never had a reason to get off the academic schedule so I’m talking about AY 11-12, since Labor Day when I capped off two weeks of nausea with a panic attack on a boat on Long Island Sound, holding an ice pack to the back of my neck while I hung over the side and wondering what in the world was going on.

I’m tough, though, so I didn’t really accept that what was going on was that I was getting beaten up. Life was getting harder. People only a few years older than me but infinitely wiser spoke to me of “seasons” and I didn’t want to listen, because most of my seasons have been pretty good and I didn’t want to admit that I was in for it, for a while.

My day job was stressful. I wasn’t getting as many gigs as I wanted to. I was gloriously in love, except the person I was (and am) in love with lived three hours away which meant part of my heart was always somewhere else. And then my insides exploded and I started vomiting copiously. I had to write a 35 page thesis. I had to read 500 pages on the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Excuse me, I have to go read. Excuse me, I have to drive 150 miles. Excuse me, I have to practice. Excuse me, I have to vomit. Again.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
     to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
     to something unknown,
         something new.
Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
     by passing through some stages of instability
         and that may take a very long time.

Teilhard de Chardin’s words do not comfort me here. I do not want it to take a “very long time”. I want to be there NOW. I want to kiss the anxiety goodbye and get on with my life, with the easy, comfortable life I knew not so long ago. I want to shout at God “I HAVE WORKED MY TAIL OFF TO BE WISE AND TO BE OVER ALL THIS SO LET’S GET ON WITH IT!!”

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
     as though you could be today what time
         — that is to say, grace –
     and circumstances
        acting on your own good will
     will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
     gradually forming in you will be.

“Grace and circumstances acting on your own good will”. I love this description of progress. It’s the only equation that makes sense, bringing God, me and chance all into the same sentence in the right balance. Maybe there’s a new spirit forming. Am I brave enough to embrace it?

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
     that his hand is leading you,
     and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
         in suspense and incomplete.

Accept the anxiety…I often wonder if that line was written by someone who was deeply enlightened, or by someone who didn’t quite know the depth of anxiety that some of us can face. If Teilhard de Chardin was a neurotic Italian would he have been singing a different tune.

Anyway, that’s where I am. Anxious, in suspense, incomplete. I am starting to believe my friends who said that this is a season, that on the other side of this there is a relatively normal life not lived on the edges of panic. I don’t think it is a sign of faithlessness to say that I wish I were there right now, on the other side.

This is what my Lent will be: an act of submission. I submit to the here and now. I vow to find the beauty in the stress, the purpose in the chaos. To paraphrase Jeremiah 29:11, there is a plan here for a future and for hope. I can’t find it on my own. But it is there, off in some distant future, waiting for me in a loveliness even more striking than the glint of the sun off the water, the rays that enthrall me even when I’m puking off the side of the boat.

I really do love the water, even when it's chilly.

I know people who get all worked up over Ash Wednesday, because it is a popular liturgical holiday which is not a Solemnity, and conjures more excitement from the faithful than, say, the Feast of the Assumption. People make a big deal out of “getting ashes” even though it’s not obligatory. So some people see Ash Wednesday as another sign of those “greedy” cultural Catholics who will only come to church when they are going to get something. I do not share that sentiment.

People want signs, and ashes are a fine one. Mimicking our baptismal anointing, the ashes form a cross on our forehead proclaiming to whom we belong. So all the people, even those who haven’t given much thought to practice or theology during Ordinary Time, line up to “get” them.

I say this all to make the case that I am pretty laissez-faire about the practices of Ash Wednesday – most of our Lenten practices are customary, that is, there are few rules about how they must be done. No rule says ashes can only be distributed during mass. No rule says you have to go to mass on Ash Wednesday. And as the practice is common in many Christian churches in addition to my Catholic Church, there are as many ways to celebrate the rite as their are Christian communities.

But still, this was just too much: Celebrating Ash Wednesday outside of Starbucks. Isn’t it natural, on a day of fasting and repentance, to catch people after they’ve grabbed their morning indulgence and ambush them with ashes?

Forgive that one cheap shot. I really do respect the energy behind their ministry. But I think the practice is misguided. No matter how pervasive the movement of American individualism is, I refuse to believe that faith is something you do on your own. That’s why we come together in faith communities to practice. Sometimes our faith requires us to show up. If we want to participate in this custom that marks us as Christians (and that is not obligatory!) then the only way to express that desire is by showing up.  But my belief in the value of community isn’t my only hang-up.

What is often forgotten is that ashes are a sign of repentance. It’s not just that we are sporting our Lenten forehead fashion out of Christian pride: this smudge should also be a sign that we know we are sinners and we have committed ourselves to turning our lives around. For the sake of those in Starbucks, I hope that encountering an ash-er on the sidewalk will inspire them to “repent and believe in the Gospel”, but I fear it will only increase complacency.

Yes, as the article mentions, Jesus went out among the people and ministered to them. But when he did that he made great demands of them. His demands were not judgmental or pushy but manifested his high expectations. I think he truly believed that people could “go and sin no more”, give away all that they have and follow him”.  Yes, grace is free, but it’s not easy. It calls us to discipleship and repentance, not to skip off sipping our latte. I’m not convinced we do people any favors by making it easy to do something that is supposed to be difficult.

This weekend I went running on an unseasonably warm morning and enjoyed the sun on my face for an hour or so. By the time I was done I felt like I could conquer the world. Everything was sun-filled happiness. Even the things that had me sobbing and depressed earlier in the week were nothing to me! I realized this as I wrapped up my run, and because my mood was optimistic I didn’t really mind that it was all caused by something out of my control.

The scene of this weekend's incredible perking-up

During the long fall and winter I am a little less sanguine about my connection to nature. Winter’s lethargy feels like weakness, and my morose pensiveness becomes obnoxious even to me. I should be able to put mind over matter, I tell myself.

I reflected on that voice this weekend, when my mind was all jazzed up on matter and I was ready to wrap my arms around the whole happy world. The truth is, I don’t think I want to put mind over matter.

We weren’t enfleshed by accident. This isn’t some mean joke or some waiting period until we get to the good stuff. This is the good stuff, and there’s more good waiting for us beyond. This should be harder and harder for me to proclaim, as it has felt in recent months like my body is falling apart. But learning the ins and outs of my body has made me love it even more, realizing how precious it is and how grace-filled.

So too the created world. In the very beginning of “in the beginning”, God came up with the first recorded catch-phrase: “And it was good”. I’m with God on this one. It is so, so good and so good that we can taste and touch and see and smell and feel it, that we can be in it with others, embodied and loved into being and proclaimed just as good as the moon and the stars.

God was not enfleshed by accident. In case we couldn’t figure it out from Genesis, the Incarnation of Christ tells us that our created world is sanctified. When at the end of his life Jesus took simple bread and wine and announced they would become him, he made holy the simplest fruits of the earth. That same earth and the rest of Creation are what make me happy and sad, what make my body work, what feeds and sustains the people I love in their messy, enfleshed grandeur.

I should want to be in control of all of this, to put my mind over matter, but I don’t anymore. Instead, I see in it one more example of the Paradox that runs the universe, the one that says weakness is strength, and that in giving we receive. Because only a God who became like us in silly, broken body could come up with this: our fragile flesh is sign of Love, is earthly glory.

Maybe always is a strong term. Until I got to college I didn’t think much about it, and happily porked out during high school with no one giving me much grief about it, God bless them. When I got to college I turned to a lot of unhealthy ways of trying to punish myself for not being skinnier (which, in what seemed supreme unfairness, didn’t work. If I was going to abuse my body couldn’t I at least lose weight?!?!). My first year working full time I dropped 10-15 through race-training and more-sensible eating, and that’s been about where I’ve stayed. Not-quite-skinny. Not-quite-fat. Not-quite-happy.

Because I know what to do to lose the weight. If I really wanted to, I would, I suppose. I would stop eating, more importantly stop drinking, and work out even more than I already to.

Except I want to have a life.

And that’s the bargain we all have to make. If women want to live a life in which they can eat a piece of birthday cake, have a glass or four of wine, eat the chocolates we get for Valentine’s Day, and go to happy hour at four on a Friday instead of to Pilates, then we don’t get to look like the people in the magazines (we probably don’t get to anyway, but that’s another post).

This is more than just whining that I don’t want to give things up. It’s that I don’t want to do what I don’t want to do. I have a lot of healthy habits. I chug water all day long. I limit to a half-cup of coffee. My diet is primarily veggies and whole grains. I run half-marathons. But I do those things because they enrich me, not because they limit me. In the real world people have to make real sacrifices. I’m not going to come up with other ones just for fun (except during Lent. Again, a different post).

Why am I writing all this? Because I need to tell myself again that it’s OK to have an extra helping of pasta primavera on a cold winter night. It’s OK to sleep through a workout during a busy week. It’s OK to give myself a Guinness mustache at the end of a long week.

(Or at least it would be OK, if I lost a few pounds.)

There were a few reason I admired her so much. It wasn’t just the beautiful voice, it’s that she knew what to do with it. You never got the sense that she was foolishly pushing her limits. Unlike a lot of singers I hear, who try so hard to sound a particular way that they lose their own unique voice, Whitney always sounded just like herself. She was doing what her voice was meant to do.

In the same vein, her voice was not meant to shout. She sang, exploring different colors, different mixes of head and chest registers. She sang instead of shouting, and she sang every note. It is so tempting only to focus on the money note, the one that makes the highlight reel (think “and the rockets red glare” of her legendary Super Bowl Anthem). But she really sang every note, the high and the low, the long and the short.

I was really interested to hear Adele sing last night after her vocal surgery. In addition to doing proper rehabilitation, she appears to have rebuilt her technique as well. With all admiration for her previous powerhouse performances, I love this new style.

Once again, I admire the lack of shouting. Rather than muscle her way through every single note, it now sounds like she is finding more of a balance of lighter and stronger production. This is difficult to do: it means a choice on every single note, a choice of balance and mix. It means relinquishing the mark of overwhelming force with which many voices are branded, and behind which many artists can hide.

Regular readers have probably already recognized the extended metaphor here. We get one unique voice. I am not immune to the desire for someone else’s voice (if only I could belt a little higher! If only I had that stupid high E!). Sometimes it’s not the physical voice I want but some other combination of traits and gifts (if only I were quieter, or politer, or more diplomatic, or not me). But this is what I got, and this is what I’m made for. This is the voice I was meant to sing with.

And there are subtleties and colors throughout my one unique voice, and I do myself a disservice if I just muscle through all the time, trying to find the power and the expense of the beauty.

Even as I write that, I rush to add a lot of qualifiers: my case is really mild, I’m on a low-dose med. I hardly have any trouble. My nutrition is fine. I am not what you think a Crohn’s suffer looks like (especially if your mental image includes chronic diarrhea. My symptom of choice was compulsive vomiting, which for whatever reason is less embarrassing).

And once I write that, I’m desperate to qualify some more: I know I shouldn’t be complaining. Some people have things so much worse. It’s not fatal. Imagine the kids who have to suffer with this stuff when they’re so young! I would never get all woe is me over something like this. I’m not that kind of person.

I was diagnosed about two weeks ago, and went to the medical center one last time yesterday to have a CT scan done. I didn’t know much about the procedure, and I was relieved to get it over with knowing that after they took these pictures of my small intestine there would be nothing left to take pictures of, and I’d be done. My compulsive joke-cracking really rears its head in medical situations, and I was in fine form yesterday as I checked in and started pounding some barium sulfate. I was taken into another room so that they could insert the IV.

IV???? I thought in a panic. It’s not that I don’t like needles, it’s that they don’t like me. If I don’t drink a ton of water before something as simple as blood donation, my veins are undetectable. I hadn’t had a ton of water. This wasn’t a big deal. I’d been through this before. “Go straight for the hand” I told the nurse, “My veins are hard to find”. So he did. The vein in my right hand burst 30 seconds later and a blue lump formed just north of my wrist. He got someone else. Bam! My left hand vein burst.

And then it happened. I thought to myself “Oh shit I have a chronic illness. This is my life now. IVs and hospital bracelets and trying to entertain the nurses”. And I had the breakdown I had been putting off since the first time I couldn’t stop vomiting, months ago. The nurse (the second of three to take part in the six-attempt search for a vein) thought I was crying because it hurt. I felt weak. I’m not that kind of person.

I’m also not the kind of person who has a disease with a funny name. I have always been healthy, just like my parents and the rest of my family. It’s part of who I am, how they are. There is a part of me who would go back to vomiting every day, who would suffer every pain just to not have this diagnosis, to not have this label. In my crazy little head, vomiting isn’t the same as being sick.

There is a nice list of labels I have given myself, and I cling to them as if they are what make me myself. One of those is gone now, so who am I?

Still me. Because the million boxes I fit myself into aren’t who I am. In truth, I cannot define who I am. No matter how counter-cultural this may sound, the definition comes from outside me, in the eyes of the people and the God who love me. If my mom was asked who I am, she wouldn’t say “she is a healthy, independent singer with a great sense of humor”, no matter how valiantly I project those categories to the world. She would say “she is my daughter” and she would see me as more than a set of labels. Viewed through the eyes of love I become who I am: beloved.

So too in the eyes of God. Rare are the days when we can relax into God’s loving gaze. Rare are the days when we can accept that we are loved by the Love that made the universe. But the God who views each of us as precious children, who calls us by name, has made us into us, and that is who we are. Behold God beholding you…and smiling. (Anthony deMello).

The Latin term salus that in liturgical texts is translated as “salvation” more often meant “health” to the Romans. I have always viewed myself as possessing the latter. I am healthy. Even now, as I write, having taken my six anti-inflammatory pills today to keep the pain and nausea away, there is part of me that doesn’t believe there is anything really wrong with me. Yet it’s not health that saves me. It is God’s loving gaze, the glory of being created solely to be me, that in the end will be my salus.

Still, two stories I read today in short order helped me get my anger back. One was from the den of iniquity usually referred to as “the British Media” about a publication that joked to young men that they might as well take their chances because 85% of rapes go unreported (they went on to call those who were offended ‘dykes’, natch). The second was from a college near to my heart and home, at which a student comedy show was criticized for a sketch making light of rape. The first offense is clearly worse than the second, but they highlighted an alarming pattern.

“We joke about everything else” you might be thinking, “why can’t we joke about rape?” Because when we joke about murder or other forms of violence very few of us truly feel the threat of that violence. But women live under the threat of objectification at best and sexual violence at worst every day, and I’d wager most of us feel it.

Our culture tells men to pursue getting off at any cost, and tells women to shut up and take it if they want anyone to pay attention to them. To use an appropriately vulgar metaphor, we’re all screwed.

God willing, most of us will not be raped in our lifetimes (although looking at the statistics, that depends on what your definition of “most” is). But I have yet to meet a woman who doesn’t know that feeling: When you have gone from a real person to an object of base, physical gratification. It can happen with a look, a gesture, a catcall, or an act. All of the things we have worked for, all of our accomplishments and hopes and dreams, all of the people we love and who love us cease to exist. Like a dirty picture or inflatable doll, we are something to be used to get off. We are something to have power over.

Even in the safest of environments, women live with a reality of physical vulnerability which can be terrifying if contemplated. As the world becomes more aggressive and as more males use violent pornography as their main form of sex ed (and for those of you uninitiated it is all violent, it all teaches men to get off on degrading women. ALL OF IT) the more likely we all are to be degraded.

Sometimes I envy the women who buy in, the ones who say “if my power is in being f*ckable, then dammit I’ll take the power”. I want something to make me feel powerful. I want something to distract me from this terrible world where male sexual aggression is lionized and even institutionalized. I want something that gives me ownership over my situation, that lets me have control. Because no amount of advanced degrees or impressive job titles or even loving family and friends can protect me from that feeling.

Nice girls don’t write about rape. But when we don’t write about it we let those who don’t care about propriety set the terms. I’m done with that. Sexual violence is not a joke, objectification should not be the status quo and I refuse to be complicit anymore with those who pray to the god of getting off.

Like a good cynic, I usually come to spiritual direction expecting nothing to happen. And lest my director takes this personally, let me clarify: I expect it to not be fruitful because I fail, which will be because I have nothing to say, which will be because I haven’t prayed enough.

So a few weeks ago I rushed to direction with my usual low expectations. I rattled off the few experiences I had planned to share, and then remembered something.

Let me preface this story with the blissful admission that I live in a bubble. The people with whom I work and socialize are good people, to put it mildly. They think deeply about how to do the right thing. They value honesty and service. They work hard and treat people kindly. They value following their hearts over chasing the dollar.

Back to the story: A few weeks prior to direction I went to a party at which I knew very few people. I usually relish such experiences: new friends! New interesting people to talk to! This crowd was different, however. There was plenty to talk about, but it was a lot about financial ambition and steering children into “more practical” majors in school.
In the middle of the night I cried for about an hour. It took me until morning to realize why: I felt ashamed. I was surrounded by people who didn’t value who I was or what I did. They spoke a different language and lived in a different world and I tried to be dismissive but in truth I was ashamed. I was *just* a teacher and *just* a singer and I had *only* studied music and theology.

As I wrote previously, I set out on this path because I knew it was right. But the shame I felt for having made these decisions made me realize it had been far too long since I had checked in, and been reminded that this is a path of integrity and grace.

I don’t want to step out of the bubble, but neither do I want to let it make me complacent. I don’t want to forget why I do what I do. I don’t want to forget the conviction that led me to reject the values of the world and to cling to the values that I own.

I don’t do what I do because I am a failure. I do it because it was my response to the call of God. I have nothing to be ashamed of.

For all of my teenaged faults (and there were many!) I knew how to seek the voice of God. This wasn’t in an “open the Bible and point to a verse and do what it says” sort of way. More like “God is peeking out at me from unexpected places”. I found encouragement and consolation in the world that I was just discovering, and so much was so new to me that everything was so exciting. The world was charged with the grandeur of God.

And so I listened. I went to college and found that there were things I was passionate about and I was pretty good at them. That was enough of a sign from God for me to ignore the people who asked “Music and theology? What are you going to do with that?” When I came home from the mail room one afternoon, dejected to have been rejected as a Fulbright scholar, and saw a flyer on my door recruiting full time volunteer teachers in an urban school, I knew that was God too, calling me to a future beyond my wildest imaginings.

Life was a lapping ocean and I was lying on my back, rolling with the tide. For all the craziness of my life at the time, I was still able to relax into grace and providence. I was young. The signs were obvious and the stakes were low. I listened and obeyed.

So, for a decade, nearly everything I did from when I got up in the morning to when I went to sleep at night was based on those first few inspired decisions. I did good work and I worked hard. The current I had chosen to ride was a laborious one, but I was confident that it was right. And I was comfortable.

“If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts”. In my defense, I really thought that i was still listening. But truthfully my heart became hard. I thought that since it was listening that led me to this life, that I could be done with it. I could cling now to the certainty and stability that have always been my biggest temptations.

I have always just wanted things to stay as they are. Recently, when God tried to tell me things I hardened my heart and try to tune it out. I was doing the things that were right ten years ago, so they must still be right. Maybe they are still right, but I won’t know until my heart softens.

It is hard because I am scared. I know that when I ask God for the truth it may not be what I want to hear. God’s voice can turn my world on its head. I know that it is for the best. I know that I can trust. I believe that I won’t be asked to deny the people and values that really matter to me. But all of the rest of it? The comfort of knowing? Of control? I might be asked to sacrifice that.

Once upon a time I was brave or foolish enough to listen. If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your heart.