Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

 I remember the season of Lent from my childhood as being the dark side of the year.  The church waited for weeks in quiet somber shadows and the adults in my life behaved much too seriously.  Perhaps it had something to do with fasting.  As children, we were exempt from fasting, but our teachers and parents still encouraged us to give up something.  The trick was to avoid giving up anything too tough.  If, in a guilty moment, we gave up something like dessert, well, we still had Sundays.  Technically, Sundays were free days and didn’t count as Lent.  Sometimes we tried to give up things we hated, like cauliflower, but our parents and teachers were on to that ploy.  As kids they had probably tried the same thing.

We kept our Lenten pledges on the honor system.  One time, one of my classmates spread the news that he had spotted me eating forbidden Walnettos at the matinee.  The chiding I received from the class hurt more than the frown from Sister Mary Louise.  Lent was not my favorite season.  In fact, I always seemed to get sick during Lent.  Do you think it might have been from a lack of sugar?  I wish I had thought of that reason back then. 

Lent has changed a lot over the years.  There are not as many rules.  Fasting is down to a few days, and with a variety of frozen entrees abundantly displayed at the market, meatless Fridays are a lot more “user friendly.”  Younger people today don’t realize how tough it was back then before the invention of pizza.  All we had were limp grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.  Occasionally, a perch or two showed up on the table, but by the time you ate around the bones, you didn’t get much.

It seems as though no matter how the rules change or what we eat, the real “meat” for Lent is always in the readings.  Scripture takes us back to our beginnings with Abraham and our other faith ancestors and leads us to our end with the death and resurrection of our Lord.  These scriptures provide a six-week course in Life.  Here we find wandering and searching, sickness and healing, depression and joy, dying and rising.

As a child, I viewed Lent as a chore.  At this stage in my life, the old rules of fasting and abstinence have taken on new meaning.  A quick glance at my profile in the mirror provides a strong argument that I might want to embrace a Lenten lifestyle on a year-round basis.  What was once seen as a chore has become a “health initiative.”

For many of us, this dark side of the year has become a welcome opportunity to look at ourselves both physically and spiritually.  Lent offers a new opportunity to refocus our lives through our journey to Easter.