One of my newer hobbies is looking at Amazon's top 100 free books list every few days. There is a new self-publishing industry on there for ebooks that is thriving and honestly I've enjoyed some of the books I've gotten on there as much as some traditionally published books I've read. Now, I'm pretty much just looking at the romance books on there-which there is a wide selection of. Yes, minus my book club book of the month I'm pretty much sticking to short love stories with happy endings and occasional steamy scenes. Its pretty rare that I can't predict the conclusion within the first 10 pages but I'm totally okay with that. Even in normal books I tend to read the end first so nothing new there! Can't say its great literature or necessarily mentally stimulating (although in other ways...) but I read for entertainment and entertainment it is!
I downloaded a book called "Angela's Song" a few weeks ago. The summary described it basically as a young widowed woman trying to move on with her kids after her husband's recent death, and finding love again. Okay, I can do that. What I didn't know until I started reading it, is that its a book written by and about a very devout Catholic. I was raised Catholic and still attend church almost every week, but this was a type of Catholicism I've never seen in person. I'm talking daily Mass attending, very modest clothes wearing, natural family planning, and no kissing before marriage type of Catholicism. Honestly I'm not sure I realized that kind of Catholicism existed-it seemed more like an Evangelical or Mormon faith practice than the Catholic one I'm familiar with.
What would certainly have turned off many readers (at least my fellow Fifty Shades fans), actually drew in my curiosity. I began a deeper exploration of my own faith, and religion as a concept, in college. Not necessarily in the spiritual sense, but in the intellectual sense. I'm fascinated what religion prompts individuals and groups of people to do. It amazes me how people who profess to belong to the same group "Roman Catholic" can live the faith so differently. The priests at Ascension and St. Clements regularly remind us to live our faith not only on Sunday during Mass but throughout our daily lives, but even in living our faiths, they're not expecting Dan and I to bless each other before making love. Yes, that is exactly what happens in this book, after the couple is married, of course. The man is a 40-something year old virgin, for real.
It was and still is important to me to marry a Catholic guy-one of the many items on my checklist that Dan meets. But even the way we practice our faith is very different. He's a once-a-year (or maybe more depending if I'm mad at him for something) church goer, which is okay. What is important to me is being able to bring up my children in a shared faith-with both their parents as role models-so I'm letting him off the hook now...knowing he'll have many years of weekly Mass attendance coming his way.
Although I'm nowhere near making the move to align my lifestyle like the characters in Angela's Song, the book did compel me to think more about my body in a spiritual sense. I've never really done that before, besides thinking about whether my knees were bothering me too much to kneel for an extended period of time. I happened to read this book close to the beginning of Lent, for which I needed to come up with something to "give up". Basically think of this as a second chance New Years resolution for Catholics that you only have to commit to for 6 weeks. For years I did some variation of giving up sweets, which made me feel much better for 40 days but I always reverted back to my normal habits. Last year I decided to work on avoiding sloth (one of the seven deadly sins as my AXO sisters can attest to!) by not hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock during the work week. Also didn't stick, but at least now I know I'm capable of doing it if I put my mind to it.
Every year I hear the same mini lecture from the priest at Ash Wednesday prayer service or Mass talking about how we don't need to "give up" something, we could do something instead. And if we do choose to give up something, we shouldn't brag about it or even tempt other people to say what they're doing by asking them. Granted, I got an email from Allison on Ash Wednesday morning asking me what I was giving up, so didn't avoid that temptation very well! We were also asked not to write anything on facebook about it....so I'm not, just on my blog :)
I didn't really want to give up sweets again and although I thought about giving up drinking alcohol I didn't really feel like that was doing much for God. I did recognize, however, that I've been under a lot of stress at work recently and it was manifesting itself in different ways. I've always been an emotional eater, I definitely take out my stress by being short with people I love (learned/inherited that one from my mom-thanks....), and working out normally takes care of any other concerns. For really the first time in my life, however, I had consecutive weeks with nearly sleepless nights because my brain couldn't shut off no matter what I did. Dan had to lull me to sleep by reciting FAA regulations one night and two other nights I finished entire books between the time I got into bed around 10:30 and the time I feel asleep around 1 and 3, respectively.
Tying together my recent literary adventure, my inability to decide what to give up for Lent, and new ways of showing stress, I was inspired to do some research on what the Bible says about the body. One passage stuck out to me, and in the end inspired me to make a decision on what to do for the next forty days:
"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit
within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were
bought with a price. So glorify God in your body."(1 Corinthians 6: 19-20)
Now I'm not entirely certain how I feel about that whole price thing, but that passage is a reminder to me that my body is only on loan to me for a period of time and I need to treat it well otherwise it will fail me. My personal mission for Lent then is a combination of both adding and removing habits in my daily life. As I replied to Allison's email, I'm going to find alternatives to body-harming ways of coping with stress. For me, that means less emotional eating, less drinking, and (hopefully) fewer sleepless nights. Instead, I'm making an effort to attend church, go to a yoga class, and run every week. I'm praying these are habits that I can continue with long past March 31st, guess we'll just have to see!
