Lent in the Real World

            As a cradle Catholic, this is my 23^rd Lent.  You might rightly think that at this point I would be pretty familiar with the routine.  Yet, this Ash Wednesday was something of a shock to my system.  You see, I spent the previous four Lents in Catholic Disneyland, also known as Notre Dame.  Prior to that, I attended a Catholic High School, and prior to that, a Catholic Elementary School.  Without intending or realizing it, I had been living in a sort of Catholic social bubble my entire life.  This Lent, my 23^rd, is my first as a fully integrated member of secular society, or “the real world” as it is known among college students. 

Notre Dame is not a monastery.  The students get up to the usual college shenanigans, and break the rules just as frequently as they are broken anywhere else.  In fact, your typical Notre Dame student may break more rules than the average college student, just because Notre Dame has a few more rules that can be broken with typical student behavior.  Despite this, Notre Dame has an astronomically high number of actively practicing Catholics for a modern University.  Every dorm has a chapel which hosts a weekly mass, and probably around 75% of the students attend these masses.  Religious participation at Notre Dame crosses political divides, gender differences, and geographic background.  

So, when Ash Wednesday rolls around, you can be pretty well assured that at least half of the people you see walking around campus or in class will have the tell-tale black cross smudged across their foreheads (especially by the evening, as a sizable percentage of college students of all faiths find it difficult to wake up before 10 a.m.).   When you eventually make it over to the Dining hall (which is actually quite good) for dinner, they go out of their way to facilitate the Catholic abstention from eating meat on Ash Wednesday and Friday’s during Lent by presenting you with a vast array of seafood and vegetarian options, and offering no meat dishes of any kind.  It may be harder to slip up and eat meat on Ash Wednesday at Notre Dame than anywhere else in America.

This Ash Wednesday, I informed my boss I would be in a bit late, woke up early, and attended Mass, where I let a priest smear the remains of burnt palm leaves onto my forehead in the shape of a cross, just as I had every previous Ash Wednesday, Then, as soon as I arrived at work, I realized that the vast majority of foreheads there were clean of ash.  My first thought might have been, “Well, I guess everybody must be getting their ashes in the evening”, except that befuddled stare I received from every third person I encountered made it clear that here, in the real world, having an ashen cross drawn on your forehead like an extra from “Braveheart” was not normal behavior.   

Further compounding my feeling of “otherness” was the fact that Wednesday is chicken quesadilla day at the office cafeteria.  Words cannot express the deliciousness of these quesadillas.  They bring light and meaning into what would otherwise be an almost unbearably dull job.  On three separate occasions, people came by my office and cheerily asked, “Quesadilla day! You coming?”  When I did tag along with some of my coworkers to the cafeteria, I discovered that everything on offer had meat in it, except for a rather small tuna sandwich.  When I selected a pathetic little tuna sandwich over a filling, succulent quesadilla, it naturally raised some questions among my astonished coworkers.  I’d like to tell you I answered their questions with a well thought out explanation and defense of Catholic tradition, but I didn’t.  The best I could come up with was, “It’s Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and Catholics don’t eat meat today”.  Why? “It’s tradition”.  There’s some brilliant insight if ever I’ve seen it.

Finally, that night, at a restaurant which I had selected specifically because of its excellent mussels, all of the specials were meat specials.  This didn’t affect my order at all, but I did find it slightly surprising.  It was not the fact that they were serving meat on Ash Wednesday that I found surprising, but rather the fact that of the three specials on offer, all of them were meat dishes.  It really reinforced the fact that here in the real world, there was something a little bit unusual about being a practicing Catholic.  That might be the point of Ash Wednesday in the modern world, to remind Catholics that while we are members of society and live by society’s rules, we are also a bit different, and have to abide by another set of rules as well.  We’re not necessarily better than anybody else, and the purpose of Ash Wednesday is definitely not to produce a “holier than thou” attitude, but we are definitely a bit different.  Yet, I hesitate to say that this was the most productive Ash Wednesday of my life, because while this one definitely reminded me that Catholics are a bit different, the four Ash Wednesday’s I experienced at Notre Dame gave me a great sense of camaraderie with my fellow Catholics, and enabled to me to really appreciate Lent in the real world.