When young, I anticipated the arrival of Lent with equal parts trepidation and excitement. Trepidation, because my parents forced the whole family to give up all sweets every Lent. As a sweets aficionado and a kid who regularly ate a full-sized candy bar as a bedtime snack, my sadness was probably mixed with actual biochemical withdrawal.
But before the sugar fast came Ash Wednesday, my chance to claim my identity publicly. In my small hometown school, Methodists outnumbered Catholics, and walking around with a smudged cross on my face proclaimed that I was one of the elite. We were all going to die eventually, but Catholics owned it. I preferred getting ashes in the morning before school so I could keep them on all day, resisting any urge to rub my forehead when they tickled my skin and checking them out in the mirror every time I went to the restroom. I was a goth kid wannabe in the ’80s, and reminding myself of my mortality (and everyone who saw me of theirs) felt deliciously badass.
Like 43 percent of Americans raised Catholic, I no longer belong to the church. But as almost every ex-Catholic I know agrees, you can leave the Catholic Church, but she doesn’t leave you. My parents were of wildly mixed heritage, and they clung to very little of it—Catholicism was our culture. Our rhythms were set by the church calendar, our celebrations all based on holy days. As a character in the current Netflix hit series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast says, “DNA doesn’t wash off. It’s like Catholicism.” So what do you do when you’ve walked away from your culture, but it still thrums in your veins?
I talked with some friends who are also former Catholics, who I’d originally met through an online group to which memento mori was important. “The idea of sacrifice and drawing closer to God always appealed to me,” my friend Cashel says. “I do think there are benefits to sacrifice. It’s not a dirty word. But it’s been glorified in church, and for those who are scrupulous it can be a stumbling block. It felt punitive, like we must punish ourselves.”
Cashel’s observation brought me back to second grade. I was one of “those who are scrupulous.” One Lenten Friday, I was so hungry from fasting that my growling stomach distracted other students, so I bought a bagel and ate it between meals. After, I was consumed by the fear of going to hell. (I realize now that I was too young to be required to fast, but that age distinction either didn’t exist in 1978 or it wasn’t explained to us.) I could not rest until I got to confession, and I couldn’t bear to explain my agony to my parents out of shame. I do not miss scrupulosity.
Cashel told me that since last Lent, her family focuses more on choosing something to do together to benefit their immediate community. “We were all feeling impotent and insufficient,” she said. “This gives us a kind of focus to not feel like the world is burning.”
Some of my Catholic-haunted friends cut ties more completely. “It’s not a hard time for me,” says Beth Violette, who told me she now goes to church in the woods. “I’m so relieved not to be practicing Lent. There’s enough suffering in our lives; I don’t have to do extra for extra credit.”
When I first left I had a difficult time letting go of the Lenten pulse. The first Ash Wednesday, my parish offered drop-in ashes in the narthex. I approached the familiar building with my stomach in knots, as if asking an ex for a favor. But the woman dispensing ashes remained neutral, even soft, as she recited, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” I replied “Amen” and that was that—I returned home and went about my day, my mortality firmly planted on my forehead and in my mind. The following year I couldn’t leave the house, so I burned an old palm at home to give myself ashes, with malodorous results.
Although I’ve felt a pull to observe Ash Wednesday since leaving the church, I’ve had no desire to give something up for Lent. I still relish remembering my mortality, and I have numerous memento mori symbols about the house, many received as gifts. If I fail to see those, I can’t forget the frequent doctor bills that come with being middle-aged.
This year I set out with the intention of working through the book Word Made Art: Lent by Heather Caliri, which leads you through exercises in which you cut up, color, and scribble in a Bible to make art out of it, in an effort to “bring your messy, honest self to God.” I’d heard the exercises were healing. But I had trouble finding an old Bible at a thrift store, and couldn’t bring myself to cut up the copy I had previously used. It holds too many memories from over a decade of a Catholic Bible study that I left in frustration for a variety of reasons.
See? Haunted.
Instead, I am working my way through Mirabai Starr’s Ordinary Mysticism (HarperOne) with a group. It encourages a direct relationship with God, determining for yourself what is holy. It turns out that, without realizing it, I’d set up an altar near my work space. It includes a sheep made from a gourd, a blown-glass pumpkin, a reminder from a friend and mentor to include play in my work—and, yes, a memento mori.
Image: Unsplash/Josh Eckstein
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