Ashes

I know that I won't make it to mass today, as I haven't been to mass since the Friday after September 11, 2001. Perhaps I'm a little jaded with organized religion - maybe I'm just scared that it will be too weird to jump back in. Maybe I just get annoyed with all of the people just going through the motions, because then I start to wonder if I am one of them. I don't know. But I do know that I am going to get on the metro this evening, see all the people with smudged foreheads, and I am going to want to be one of them. But is that fair - show up at church for the first time in years, just to get ashes to be part of a clique? I don't think so.

What I do know is that I am surging ahead full speed with Lent. I figure, if I can't make myself go to mass this year, I am giving up pop. Soda. Soda pop. This is huge.

I gave up pop for lent during my senior year of college. I seriously went through withdrawal - I had headaches and I got the shakes the first week. But that was because I never replaced the caffeine. I made it all the way to Easter, and at my aunt's house, I cracked open a Coke, and couldn't finish it because it tasted so foreign.

Then a week later, I was back on the sauce.

So I am giving it up this year too, but now I can drink green tea (caffeine!) like I have been, and everything will be peachy keen. At least, that's the plan. Just because while I feel more spiritual walking in the woods than I do in mass doesn't mean I can't participate in some way.