Ash Wednesday

I went to the grocery store to buy beer after attending Ash Wednesday services at the local Episcopal church. I stood in the checkout line, knowing that the kids working behind the counter were actively ignoring the fact that I had a black cross smudged across my forehead. I could be a crazy lady who doesn't know she ran out the house with dirt on her face, so desperate she is to buy alcohol! English teachers! In Louisiana the cross and the beer wouldn't raise an eyebrow. In this small southern Protestant town, both raise eyebrows, and combined I lose all eye contact from the good teens working at the local Harvey's.

I'm not Episcopal. I'm not Catholic, but I have attended various Methodist churches that indulged in ashes, or at least a beautifully dour Ash Wednesday service. But First Methodist in this small town only has a Wednesday night fellowship, just like every Wednesday night that I don't attend. I'm usually hanging out at my friends' house. With a Wednesday after-work beer in hand, I watch as my friends (AKA the Man Candy) wind down their weekly volleyball scrimmage, and I gossip with the "better half" of the host volleyball couple and the other women there about work, shoes, who's hotter--Alan Rickman in Diehard or Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter films (an issue still not completely resolved to date).

But we didn't have our weekly game. The couple took off to visit family out-of-state. So I went to church instead.

Lent has historically been that downer post-Mardi Gras time in cold February or early March where everyone I know spends too much money in an attempt to fight seasonal depression (I include myself on that list of offenders). Or more piously, it is the season awaiting Christ's resurrection when believers work on personal penance. At tonight's services, however, I was reminded it is also a time when one may prepare to join the church or even more fitting for me, it is the time when she who has fallen away from the church works her way back.

Am I a prodigal daughter?

How cliché.

When I first moved to Georgia, to a town that is seriously the smallest place I had ever lived or even thought I would live, I was lonely. I would call my best friend who still, at the time, lived in Louisiana, and I would joke, "Jesus is my roommate. I just wish he'd pay rent."

Years later I have many friends, some who have become family, people I choose to love and not because of the accident of birth.

The first step of this return began about two weeks ago with an experience that I still can't interpret. Out of town for a meeting and alone in hotel room, I spent almost three hours one night trying to download my email on the slow hotel wireless while I also absorbed Celebrity Rehab on a marathon run. Because I don't have cable at home--only PBS--and thus no resistance, I was sucked into the prurient human multi-car interpersonal pile-up that is this kind of realty television. I then topped off my binge with a bonus episode of Plastic Surgery Obsession. When I cut off the TV and brushed my teeth, I started thinking about what depressing toilets we have made of ourselves and of the world. But I wasn't even depressed by this; I just felt it like gravity. Then I got in bed, cut off the light, and stared into the darkness.

That's when I felt something. A presence. Something or a Someone who said, "It's OK. I'm here."

I didn't actually hear those words BTW. I just had a feeling that I can only loosely translate into those words.

Since then I have been slowly trying to figure out what that experience meant. I've had a feeling that something more must be with us, but it was never that . . . personal.

But what did that experience mean that night? What does it mean now? I suppose the Lenten season is as good a time as any to try and figure it out.

At least I might learn why I have always loved John Donne's "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/sonnet14.php