Awake in the Waste Places 1 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

I received ashes twice yesterday: once in a cool, anonymous throng, and again in a friend’s living room, so full and warm that I could smell the evening’s food and sweat clinging to the bodies around me.

I was sitting on the floor, legs curled, then stretched so that the blood could flow, and when I leaned over to let a friend pass I felt the early, anxious hunger of the Lenten fast hovering in my stomach.

I had to give up the fast last year when I was sick. I wasn’t well enough to join my Russian Orthodox friends in Meatfare and Cheesefare; I couldn’t give up eggs or butter or meat without hurting myself, and it was hard.

The year previous had been my first Lent of gradually giving up those foods, of feeling the penitent season as a curious, quaking gap in my body. That first fast was odd and very powerful. Several times, as I tried to describe what was happening to me, I couldn’t speak but I could see my fasting body like a tuning fork: shivering, ringing, the movement and sound only perceptible to those who came close.

I mourned what I lost with losing that fast. But being denied it seemed somehow in keeping with the way God was shutting me down, burning me back to razed, fallow ground. I remembered the way the summer-burned mountains look in a Montana winter: black, sooty, strangely misty, with snow and ice crystals clinging to the broken stumps.

The Psalmist speaks of the waste places where the little owl lives, and those hazy, dirty, dead mountainsides were the only true waste places I had ever seen. Last year, Lent was like wandering up onto that mountainside, into the lonely place prepared for me.

Sitting on the floor last night, the much-missed hunger of the fast quavered through me and found my body alive, strong. I was coming down from the mountain; I could feel my hands and fingers again; I was breathing thick air. It was strange to sense this alteration, a state made all the more permanent and true by the face of a friend seated across from me, a woman whose mother died a few short months ago. Her face is still supple and open with grief, her body still soft when it moves. I don’t look like that anymore. I don’t carry my body with that levitation, that rooted emptiness.

For a moment, looking at my friend’s face, I wanted what she had. The hunger in my stomach seemed so small now. The desire was one part fear and one part reverence, made up of both the anguish of going on and the joy of seeing someone else so full of holy purpose. Our priest stepped around the room, wading through our kneeling bodies, and as he did he marked her, then me with weightless ash. We prayed and sang. Her eyes closed, the grainy black cross stood like a scar on her forehead. It made me reach up to touch mine, to make sure it was still there.