Thoughts on Ash Wednesday

So it's Ash Wednesday. The start of Lent. And I have a meeting with the rabbi* this afternoon and then a class on Shabbat tonight. It's weird. It was plenty easy for me to forgo mass these past, oh, 10 or so years. Actually, I think I probably went to mass for Ash Wednesday all four years of college, so that would make it more like 8 years without going. And I always hated it as a kid. Ash Wednesday was the worst. Even though I was in Catholic school and everybody had ashes on their forehead, it was so embarrassing. I was always convinced that whichever priest ashed me, the cross on my forehead was the darkest and thickest (and probably sprinkled all over my face for that five o'clock shadow look). But it felt like such a sin to wipe it off at all or even touch it. Somehow, amazingly, perhaps miraculously, all the popular, pretty girls' crosses never seemed so prominent, and something about their skin seemed to make them fade throughout the day until there was only the slightest hint of a cross by the time we got out of school.

I would think about my parents and how they would wear their crosses all day at work or doing errands or whatever. They seemed far less ashamed of them than me, even though they were not constantly surrounded by other people with the same thing on their heads. Of course, I'm not saying that I knew I didn't want to be Catholic from birth. I know it was about insecurity/social hierarchy in school that made me feel so bad. But I never did feel what my parents seem to feel.

So now I'm back on the East Coast, in a very Catholic part of the country. I wonder what I'll see today. I wonder how the people with the ashen crosses feel. I hope they feel good. I hope they feel proud. But it's not that time for me. I won't give anything up (can't even remember if/when I ever did, that whole deal used to make me kind of mad). Not until Pesach. And then I'll give up all things leavened. But before that, we party on Purim, making and sending hamantaschen and getting so drunk we can't tell Haman from Mordechai...while trying not to break anyone's desks. Sounds okay to me.

*I almost always write "rabbit" and then have to fix it. Whoops!

P.S. Still can barely walk today. What did that man do to us?