Tomorrow is the first day of the season of Lent in 2012. Before a couple of years ago, any of the few times in my life I had ever thought of Lent, I categorized it as a “Catholic thing”. I occasionally saw people with ash-black marks on their foreheads on a certain day of the year and never gave mind to the possibility of having anything to do with whatever it was they were observing. About two years ago, though, after meeting and becoming friends with some people new to me, I saw that some of these people, non-Catholic people, made a decent-sized deal of Lent in their own lives. This was the beginning of my mind and heart being opened a little wider. I started really asking questions the following year. I wanted to know why my friends – any of them, Catholic or no – observed Lent, what it was, what it meant to them. I think I had an itch for it but didn’t know.
Since last year, I’ve been set on observing Lent when I next got the chance. I’ve had a whole year to think about how I would do it and what I would give up. At the beginning of this year, I started praying deliberately about this. I asked what I needed to give up for a time, what might be something in my life on which my dependence is unhealthy or somehow surpassing dependence on God in my mind. The first thing that came to mind was food. Ha. I do love food. The idea of not eating for 40-ish days straight, though, was… um… daunting. Plus, I had actually begun to sense a strange overdependence on food for comfort some months before, and I was now able to say that it wasn’t my biggest issue. I decided giving up food (oy) or meat or pancakes or whatever wasn’t going to be it. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine who was raised Catholic let me know that Lent isn’t necessarily about giving something up. It’s about enacting discipline. Interesting. She told me she used to promise to make her bed every morning for Lent when she was little :) Now my prayers shifted from, “God, what do I need to give up?” to, “God, what do I need to just do?” A few days ago, I arrived at the answer!
Music is one of the biggest passions God has given me. I love listening to it. I love making it. I’ve said for years that I want to be good at the making part. I often daydream about writing amazing songs – enough of them to put out a solid, lyrically and musically breathtaking album. However, while I am probably one of the best dreamers in the world, I am not very good at the actually-doing-something aspect of it. I’m in awe of some of my favorite songs, but I tend to turn this awe not into motivation to write like these artists I admire but into discouragement at the “fact” that I’ll never be able to write something as epic or clever or honest as what I love to listen to. This is a problem. I need to grow out of it. SO! For my first observation of Lent ever, I will commit to writing about any topic for 10 minutes straight every one of the 44 days of the season. There’s a specific exercise I’ll do, where I’ll literally write for 10 minutes straight – the pen will not leave the paper for 10 minutes, whether I think I’ve run out of things to write or not. 10-minute sessions every day for the next month-plus will be great, much-needed practice. It will also give me more written raw material than I’ve ever had in so much time before. Because of this, I’ve also set a more fluid goal of completing 2 new songs by Easter, when Lent ends. An even more fluid “goal” will be to update this poor, neglected blog as I go. I do not plan to update every day. Not in the least bit. But if I update just once during Lent, that will make two blog posts within a month and a half of each other, and that’s pretty good for my record.
Here goes!
