Why I Don’t Give Up Food For Lent Anymore
after we’d filed into our high school gym one by one so Father Tom could smudge a cross on our foreheads with the pad of his thumb, we sat in prayer. Once a month, the gym became a church for us. Chairs faced center court in neat rows, the marching band played hymns, and the bleachers held the wafers and wine for the students selected to bring it up to consecrate into the Eucharist. Ash Wednesday was no ordinary Mass, though.
“Dear God,” it began. “Thank you for nourishing me with the body and blood of your Son.” I don’t remember what came next — maybe I thanked God for other things, too. She was not the only woman to starve her body so that her soul might be fed. Beatrice of Nazareth claimed that even the slightest whiff of meat would make her throat close up. Columba of Rieti once thwarted a gang of rapists who, when they pulled her clothes up, saw her emaciated form and mutilated breasts and hips, and retreated. Marie of Oignies starved herself too, hermiting herself away and cutting off small pieces of her body, which allowed her to empathize with the crucified Christ.
As I bloomed into adolescence, I learned new ways women’s bodies were dangerous, ways I hadn’t fully considered until I started developing breasts and hips. In our religion class, we avoided any sexual education other than a scant week on “natural family planning,” the method our religion teacher, with eight children, told us he used. An older woman in our parish’s daily Mass prayed “for an end to abortion and euthanasia” so regularly that her prayer became background noise.
Back at our pews, we listened to the bishop’s sermon, and by the end it was time to file up again, this time to receive Communion as adults, on equal footing with our parents for the first time. But when my row stood, it was like someone had dropped a black veil over my eyes, and my head felt loose on my neck. I slumped down and began to dream. When I woke up, several people stood over me with cups of water.“It’s too hot in this church,” my godmother said, fanning me with her hymnal.
I realized that feeding myself allowed me to do so many more things than I had been able to do when I was hungry.
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