Roll The Stone Away

Here I am nearly a year and a half into this whole separation/divorce business and I'm still sorting through new experiences. I know some people would find the idea of a constantly forming and reforming emotional lifecycle to be exhilarating as some kind of constant perspective paradigm shift, but not me. I like my paradigms where I can see them, and preferably in the fixed shape of something I can recognize, like maybe a television with some premium cable channels. My normal approach to shifty personal paradigms is to whack them with a fireplace poker until they stop kicking. Please note that this is not generally applicable advice. It will also work with, say, snakes, but I don't recommend trying it on Jehovah's Witnesses. Fireplace-poker subduing is a slow, labor-intensive business requiring most of your attention and the JWs almost always roll three deep. And it turns out pacifism has limits.

This past Sunday, it happened not to be my weekend with the kids. It also happened to be Easter. Now, plenty of things have changed over the past year-plus besides just the divorce. I've replaced some fat with muscle tone. I've been known to roll out in public in the occasional pair of Levi's middle-aged-single-man ballcrusher specials (all of the ubiquitous culturo-fashionable indifference of denim with none of the comfort!). I've dated a few women here and there. I've exponentially improved my ability to use innocuous euphemisms for anonymous, spirit-breaking sex. The alterations are subtle, but noticeable. Mostly in the way I walk. It's the chafing.

A slightly bigger deal is that as I've had more time to myself, I've crept more and more toward a truly secular and humanized state of being. More than any other Christian sect in the US, I think, Catholics tend to be more socially churched-up than others. The historical depth of the liturgy and ritual give the practice of the faith that deep thrum rhythm that comforts underneath the accelerating high-pitched scree of one social convention shattering after another.

Even those of us who lapse still feel the draw of the liturgical calendar. There's something comforting about dropping the exhausting just-me-against-the-whole-of-existence position of the truly secular and giving yourself over, if only briefly and entirely superficially, to some aspect of faith. For Catholics, this often means opting in to the least convenient and longest obligation block of the year, Lent right through to Easter.

It's not that the divorce killed my faith. I think it was that, with no one else around, I couldn't think of a good reason to make the effort. Last year I believe was the first in a long time that I skipped the Lenten sacrifices entirely. The formerly-inconvenient Girl Scout cookie season came and, with the resultant unhooking of calories and sin, an abomination by Thin Mints was realized. This requires you to know that I always gave up dessert for Lent. I tried a few bullshit other ideas for the interval ("I'll write every day, Jesus, honest!"), but I always felt like, somehow, the omniscient God would eventually figure out it wasn't the fullest effort I could make to better myself.

But that was all behind me. And this year, with the kids out of the house, it was my first fully-realized non-holiday holiday. No baskets, no plastic grass, no home-invasion by an existence-by-implication world-touring lagomorph. Not only have I made the leap to irreligious, I've even left the cultural bits behind to.

I wish I could say it was entirely liberating, but here I am, with no leftover Easter candy to pick at for the next month. The church has it's good points, but I think it's the gluttony I'll miss the most. It was its second-most tolerated mortal sin, right after pedophilia. But I could never quite bring myself to be THAT Catholic anyway.