Clean Living 2 comments

By Laura Bramon Good

Being a cheapskate has its privileges: nothing curbs cupidity like a budget, where simple math tallies the fruits of unbridled consumption.

But sometimes, the inanimate budget is not bridle enough. I write this from our neighborhood’s hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, spiked and jittery from a chai and a monster scone, now nursing a two-dollar peppermint tea guaranteed to talk me down from the physiological ledge.

The chai was a feast-day risk, a dangerous splurge in a Lenten season that, per the modified Orthodox tradition my husband Ben and I borrow, empties a penitent of sugar, caffeine, and all manner of fats. Over the past couple of years, I’ve come to see the vegan fast as a cleansing ritual whose “backwards sacrament” allows the invisible graces of tempered digestion to effect the outward signs of a slower pace, a more tender spirit.

Put more simply, I’m a functioning hypoglycemic operating on limited reserves, and if I don’t want to lose my mind—literally—I have to live more carefully and calmly.

But today is Sunday and I couldn’t contain myself when I stepped up to the bar. The last time I stood at this register, I was “ma’am”-ed by a kohl-eyed twenty-one-year-old, and I will admit that this mortification may have fed the feeling that a plain, sensible chamomile tea would be an un-cool selection. My mental check of the budget revealed only a clean first-of-the-month slate, but I was sane enough to know that anything over four dollars—and espresso in any form—was out of the question.

So I ordered the fateful chai. And in fine feast day form, I drank the entire ten-ounce cup like a shot.

It was delicious: a steamy, foamy, whole-milk tea so heavily sugared that gritty crystals caught in my teeth. The hot flashes were instantaneous, but the delirium was a bit delayed. It took about five minutes for me to feel certifiably crazy.

Sitting here at the coffee shop’s front window, watching the hipster brunch crowd and the Ethiopian Palm Sunday families stroll the sidewalk, I think about Jesus’ parable comparing a man freed of an evil spirit to an empty, unguarded house. Without an indwelling of love, the man is doubly vulnerable to the demon’s return:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came.' And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.... (Matthew 12:43-45, English Standard Version)

Certainly, chai tea is not evil incarnate. But a bout of feast day mania is a good reminder that plain-faced legalism, no matter how pure its intentions, can never intuit the difference between learning, which kneads and strengthens the soul, and superstition, which enfeebles it.

A week out from Easter—only a few days from the year’s most joyous feast and, in its wake, the green tide of Ordinary time—it’s a good lesson to learn.