Fasting this Lent

Lent is about to draw to an end. It's the 5th week and Palm Sunday is coming up.

This year I gave up "meat" except for the Sunday feast days, "meat" in the Catholic sense where fish isn't meat. Given that I rarely eat meat except for at dinner, and I'm Chinese, and I like fish, this has not been nearly as burdensome, as say, the first time I gave up news and politics. When I have fasted from food, there has been visceral craving, emptiness, and a need for immediate comfort. I have not experienced that at all.

Instead, this year, since not eating meat is different but not wholly painful, the experience has been very different. What I've found is that I just generally long for Easter to arrive. There's a bit of a quickening in my chest, a little bit of tightness, low level anticipation. Part of me just wants to get back to my usual routine, be able to cook more meals that both my husband and I can eat, not worry about meeting up with other people and so on. That part says, "Let Easter come for my convenience and food reasons." That doesn't feel that holy at all. But part of me wants to embrace all the flavors that are out there, to savor steak the way I savored it a couple weeks ago on a Sunday feast day, to not take such moments for granted. That part says, "Let Easter come so we can celebrate Jesus and the new dawning he brought, the freedom, the grace, the wide open wonder." That feels expansively glorious.

Raised in the American Evangelical culture, Easter can feel very plastic in a wash of limp pastels. But the celebration of the resurrection should be the biggest event of every year marking the biggest event in human history. This is where divinity intersected humanity and love triumphed over death in the gory, most real, most definitely not-a-Hollywood-romance-or-Mel-Gibson-Passion-of-Christ way. I have to admit that Easter still does not outrank Christmas or March Madness on my anxiously-gripping-my-seat meter. But with every year, with every observation of the Lenten season, I find myself ever more drawn into the drama of Holy Week and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.