1: fast & faster

“What one change can you make in your body that will allow you to better serve your soul’s purpose?”

I feel I have to acknowledge Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, “Eat, Pray, Love” in that I cribbed the title of her book for the title of this blog series, fast | pray | write.

I also have to acknowledge that I have not read it.

The book is sitting on my desk because, as I flipped through it, I read a section about gaining weight that totally put me off.

On page 110, Gilbert describes herself as severely underweight as a result of “hard years of divorce and depression.” It took her four months of traveling and eating in Italy to gain 23 pounds, 15 of which she acknowledges she needed to gain because she was “skeletal.” The other eight pounds took her from just this side of skin and bones through comparisons to a cow and a pig finally settling on “buffalo mozzarella.”

Ha-ha.

I know it is not fair to read one chapter totally out of context with the rest of the book and decide that the book is not for me, but I did anyway. I am starting the book with a slightly hostile eye, and fear I will read it through a scrutinous and dismissive lens and disregard what the New York Times Book Review sees as “intelligence, wit, and colloquial exuberance that is close to irresistible.”

Though I suppose that is an okay place to be—scrutinous and dismissive—during Lent. It is a time of readiness in preparation for death and rebirth (literal for Christ, metaphorical for us), of shrugging off what no longer serves and becoming more of who I am meant to be.

I am meant to be more than just what my body dictates—which is not to say my body no longer serves me. My body doesn’t define my soul's purpose; it supports and enables it. I cannot be the person I am meant to be if my body works against who I am.

While cutting out sugar, not drinking wine, or giving up meat won’t, in 40 days, transform me into a fully-actualized version of my soul’s purpose on earth (and I am not doing any of that anyway), taking steps to ease the distractions and enhance the support my physical body gives my soul will help.

Today is a new moon—the dark start of the moon’s cycle. As the moon rests between the sun and the earth, with its back to the sun, its face doesn’t receive the sun’s light and we see only the moon’s darkness. As it moves around the earth, it waxes with light until it reaches the other side of the earth, the full moon, when the earth stands between the sun and the moon and we receive the sun’s light during the day and the moon’s reflection of it at night. The full moon is the bright pinnacle of the moon’s cycle.

Easter is calculated on the moon’s cycle, falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox, but I think Ash Wednesday falling on a new moon this year is coincidental.

Except for that it is not.

The new moon at the start of Lent gives double power to intentions and practices that show our higher power, our internal divinity, our source of faith that we are listening.