My Lenten "Vacation"

Back at work today, after taking most of Holy Week off.  Several people asked whether I had a good time off.  Of course I said yes.  What use to bother them with what the end of Lent is like?

I was glad that R. was able to come with me to all the Triduum rites:  The Lord's Supper and the Washing of the Feet on Thursday night, the Stations of the Cross on Friday afternoon, and the celebration of the Lord's passion and death, with the Veneration of the Cross.

We usually go to the Easter Vigil on Saturday evening, a long service, not heavily attended, when the new fire is lit and candidates are baptised and/or confirmed or received into the Church.  This year, we were scheduled to serve as eucharistic ministers at the SRO Sunday 10:30 Mass, with babies, Easter outfits, and people lining the walls.  I think I must have gotten a lot of the standing crowd, because I was the last one left distributing hosts.  At least I didn't run out.

As of Sunday, I had gone 22 days smoke-free.  I had observed my "smoking devil" building a case for smoking again after Lent, but I was amazed at the struggle I had to put up to overcome the temptation.  I felt hungry for tobacco smoke, as if it were a food I was starved of.

 

Richard Klein's book, Cigarettes Are Sublime, is just about the last word on cigarettes, "with its origins in the author's urgent desire to stop smoking."

This book attributes to the cigarette a certain philosophical dignity that derives from its being considered a symbolic instrument, and lends it the poetic qualities of a sacred object or an erotic one, endowed with magical properties and seductive charms, surrounded by taboos and an air of danger, a conduit to the transcendental, and a spur to repression.