I’m Probably Going To Just Peacock My Way Through Lent

I’m pretty sure I’m going to need to depend even more than usual on my emotional support peacock to get through Lent. But I seem to have misplaced it, since I can’t find it anywhere in this cluttered house, so I should drop everything and look, since I know that if I just search hard enough, it will come to me. I’m gonna do that instead of other things.

Like finally deciding what to give up, besides sin obviously, for the next interminable forty days. And don’t tell me that Jesus fasted so what’s the big deal. If you don’t know what the big deal is, you are probably doing it wrong. In the past I’ve given up Not Buying Flowers–thereby disciplining myself to buy flowers once a week. I’ve also given up Not Resting. As in, I tried really hard to take a whole day off, just one, in forty days, but failed utterly. Turns out it’s easier just to keep working and never stop. Another year I tried to give up swearing but that didn’t go well either. Trying not to swear made the profanity rise ever more powerfully in my throat. Still other years I’ve just tried to remember to read the Bible at all. Or tried to give up complaining about literally everything.

So I still don’t have a plan. The old standby of Just Be A Better Person Already failed sometime midmorning yesterday. And who’s with me on not wanting to think about it overmuch in case the black depths of sin and rebellion against God become even faintly visible through the terror of placid and, what’s the opposite of rigorous, self examination? Anyone? Anyone?

Surely, as I say every year, the purpose of Lent is to embrace the failure. You’re not supposed to become more holy in forty days. You’re supposed to try really hard and fail and then beg Jesus to help you. You know how to beg, surely. You huddle in the corner of the shower, or lie awake at night, or drive around in your car and implore God to do something, hopefully not just anything, but something to make it possible to go on. Your emotional support peacock is missing, you explain, and you can’t stop eating sugar, or you can’t raise the dead, or you can’t stop reading 50 Shades of Whatever, or you can’t make your child’s little life and world perfect, or you can’t find the money you need, or you can’t get a handle on the grief and anxiety. You stare out into the darkness, or the drops of water, or the gray sky and beg. “Please Help Me,” you say, “Please Do Something.”

Nobody really wants to beg, though. Everybody, including me, would rather lecture or complain, or just try to deal. It’s humiliating to ask God for help, even the help of salvation. It means admitting that there’s nothing you can do, and that it has Come To This, that you Really Need God After All, not just yourself.

When God answers my begging prayers, which he always does by the way, I’m not usually euphorically happy. I’m still just a teensy bit bitter, because I really did want to fix it myself–my primordial, cell level toddler spirit never ever goes away completely. But I’m getting better at saying thank you, at swallowing down my egoistic misery and asking at all, and then expressing gratitude.

So, now that I think about it, I must be awesome after all! I should treat myself. Now, for heaven’s sake, where is that wretched peacock?