While Marked with the Sign of the Cross

I don’t have anything easy to tell you.

I have been healing in public, or trying to, stumbling through a very difficult life and writing about it because it’s all I have to write about, for the longest time now. And here it’s Lent again. I used to love Lent.

I have never been a person to come to for simple, triumphalist answers. I can’t give you platitudes about Catholicism. I can only give you myself, a traumatized Catholic.

Nothing has ever hurt me as the Catholic Church has hurt me. Nothing ever could hurt me that much, because the Catholic Church is the way I met Christ. The Catholic Church is the glass through which I first saw Christ, darkly. Everything I know about the mercy of God I’ve learned because or in spite of the Catholic Church. I don’t have cheerful, simple or triumphalist things to say about her. She crushed me, and she’s part of me. I still see value in the things I’ve learned through her. I believe the sacraments are real. No matter how many times she’s driven me away, I keep coming back, back to the margins, not trusting anybody, but trying to hang onto the hem of Christ’s garment. And here I am. I can never be a good Catholic again, if I ever was one. I can only be myself. But part of what I am, is a Catholic.

For the last few years I’ve not been able to observe Lent at all, due to the religious trauma. But I’ve decided to observe Lent this year, in any way I can: testing everything, retaining what is good, refusing to accept that anything abusive is from God. Sometime last year I felt ready to go to Mass again without having to stand outside on the church porch, and I manage to do that without a panic attack most Sundays. During Advent I was finally ready to go to confession again, after explaining my difficulty to an understanding priest. Now I’m ready for Lent, gently, on my own terms. I just had to figure out a way to observe it. I had to think of a penance I could perform.

I certainly couldn’t go to Mass, because the Ash Wednesday Mass is a bad trigger for panic attacks.

I don’t know if what I did counted as fasting. I’ve never been sure I’m observing a fast day just right. I didn’t eat any meat and I didn’t eat between meals, and I only ate three times on Ash Wednesday. But there was certainly some rich food in the house: I was teaching the children at the church outreach a lesson on Mexico, so I made tres leches. It seemed strange baking something so decadent on a fast day, but the children are used to an interesting new dessert from the country we’re studying every week, and it was either tres leches or find an easy way to scoop a dozen identical servings of rice pudding. I sliced some fruit on top of the cake, so I would remember to teach them that fruit is expensive where it grows.

There are all different denominations of Christian who teach at that church, and all different denominations of child who come to get lessons and snack. Oftentimes I can’t tell who’s a Catholic and who’s Protestant. I certainly don’t ask because it’s none of my business. I just sit and have a good time with them, and try to teach them some things.

But on Ash Wednesday, most of the Catholics had black crosses of ashes smeared on their foreheads, and the Protestants didn’t.  That made it easy to tell.

In the classroom, I put out trays of watercolors and pieces of paper. At one point I’d planned elaborate crafts for every geography lesson, but what the children like best is painting. Now I just hand them paper and tell them to paint whatever they like while I talk. This time, one of the Protestant children got a funny idea, and watercolored a cross on her own forehead, and then several other children painted themselves penitential crosses as well. We all sat together, Catholic and Protestant, making beautiful things and listening to Mariachi music, eating a ridiculously sweet cake, marked with the Sign of the Cross.

Now that I write that down, I suppose it’s the best description of Heaven that I could ever write.

I suppose that the only God worth my time is not the morose and angry god of the Charismatic Renewal, but a God Who welcomes everyone in to be happy, and learn, and do beautiful things, while marked with the Sign of the Cross.

I suppose that, if “penance” really does just mean “turning around to face God instead of the wrong direction,” then cake on Ash Wednesday might be a good penance for me to start with.

And we’ll see where we go from there.