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| | © Istockphoto.com / Bill Elliot | |
There was always one kid in catechism class who raised his hand and asked if he could give up homework for Lent. I was not that kid. I dug deep to find the thing whose absence would most torture me — usually chocolate. As an adult, I gave up coffee one Lent. That nearly killed my body, but had no discernible effect on my soul. In retrospect, it was pretty grandiose to suppose that God would care about my caffeine intake.
For my 33rd Lent, I was in chemotherapy. I had a hard time keeping anything down, making the idea of giving anything up redundant. I told people I’d given up dying for Lent, which was a lot like giving up homework. But I also resolved that if I lived to see another Lent, I’d find a way to spend those 40 days productively. From that point on, all my self-denial had some purpose. For instance, I gave up my lunch hour every day one Lent to write letters for Amnesty International. It wasn’t the giving up that mattered so much as the taking on.
My biggest effort came during the Lent I resolved to stop saying unkind things. It was harder than giving up coffee, soda, and candy all at once. This is proof of flawed character, compounded by upbringing. I was raised in a large family in which wit was highly valued, sometimes at the expense of kindness. Insulting each other was a sport. As I grew older and spent more time with people outside my family, I noticed our dinner table banter could be hurtful to people not used to it. Sometimes I curbed my tongue. But too often I left a trail of nasty remarks like ground glass in my wake.
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My remarks struck me as
not unlike what Bette
Davis might say — and not
in one of those movies where she
turns out to be good in the end. |
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I remember a party to which an acquaintance wore a red leather mini-dress with an oddly
shaped cut-out in the back.
“What’s with the back of that dress?” my husband asked me.
“That’s where the batteries go,” I replied.
My remarks struck me as not unlike what Bette Davis might say — and not in one of those movies where she turns out to be good in the end. And I found myself making comments like these all the time.
So I decided that during Lent I would carry with me a large coffee can, dropping in a quarter whenever I said something unkind — more if it was especially wicked. People asked me what I was doing, and I explained. When they asked me
