Appropriately enough I received a follow-up call this morning from the Oncology Center regarding my anemia. Time for another infusion of iron and injection of B12! I appreciate that life has that much of a sense of humour.
Probably in tandem with my recent rage I’m also enjoying the sickest bent of humour in society lately. This is the type of mood wherein I laugh at bleak jokes. Then again, I’m always one to be struck funny at funerals. It’s not polite, but there you go. I’m ghoulish. I’m repeating here the thing that happened yesterday and was posted to facebook because I want to keep it for always and if there’s one thing about FB that sucks it’s the complete lack of permanence. Everything ostensibly stays in their vaults but YOU can’t access it. Sometimes I wonder if they don’t do that on purpose. For whatever reason it means that although I may use the site as sort of a micro-blog it is in NO way a journaling tool. If you don’t want to lose a recipe you have to put it in bookmarks or Pinterest. If you don’t want to lose an anecdote you have to blog it.
Thus beginneth the repeat:
I was watching a true crime show where a woman’s dismemebered body was found floating in a lake near her family home. There was the requisite segment where those who knew her talked about how devastated they were by this. (And of course we had to hear the usual tommyrot about “why kill her? She was so pretty!” As though we are fine with ugly people being slaughtered.) Her former boss, the editor in chief of the local paper said that everyone was asking “why? why? why? And it was because Karen was such a bouyant young woman and everyone liked her.”
That really happened. And it will never not crack me up.
Thus endeth the repeat.
And yes, it is Ash Wednesday, which means that we begin Lent. I didn’t grow up practicing Lent. It’s one of those High Church things that the Mennonites abjure out of tradition as much as anything else. It wasn’t until 2000 that Lent became more of a practice in the Low Church; now most places at least name-check it. I personally have a philosophical objection to the Give Something Up idea; since I didn’t grow up in a church where it was a matter of course and therefore part of the fabric of my tradition it strikes me now as odd. We’re celebrating Christ’s sacrifice that allows us to approach the throne of Grace…by focusing on _works_? It seems wrong-footed to me. I do use the 40 days to focus on Wandering and to ponder the miracle of Grace.
For me the worst part of Lent are the casual jokes: “Im so ready to get back to eating chocolate! I can’t take it!” It seems to make too light of something that is very essential to the faith. Which I realise now is odd coming from a woman who just 300 words ago admitted she laughs at funerals.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I personally believe the best funerals are the ones where you laugh, because then we really are celebrating the life that was lived instead of wallowing in our own sorrow.
I’ve never been one for giving up things for Lent, either. But in our worship this evening, the pastor challenged us to observe these days “with prayer and fasting,” and that is a huge deal to me. Remind me to blog about that later…
I think giving things up for Lent is kind of a half-task way of sorta kinda fasting but not really because that would be too hard.