Of Baby Slings and Chocolate Pietas

The five foot high chocolate Pieta was not the biggest shock that Kathy and I discovered in the Barcelona Chocolate Museum while visiting our son. That biggest shock was the discovery that in the Middle Ages, chocolate was developed as food during Lent, to replace the calories provided by the meat that was forbidden during that season. Food! It was made in the monasteries all year long and sold to the people during Lent as FOOD! Why the heck did we give it up? Why were our childhoods tested by looking at Easter Baskets for days and days before finally being able to dive into them on Easter morning . . . after Mass? What a rip-off, I thought; what a waste! My inner child pouted, my bottom lip protruding in protest of a wasted youth. Why do we give anything up? Why do we fast?  Fast. The word comes from the same root that is used in the word fasten. It means to attach ourselves to something. 
When our daughter Amy came home from the hospital with her first daughter, she looked deeply into Kathy’s eyes, and into mine, and told us “David and I are going to be raising Nadia in a certain way, and I need you to accept it. This is the only time in my life that I will have the opportunity to live life through a baby, a growing child, undistracted from her, present to her and aware of her every moment. If we are blessed with another child, my attention will be divided, and this opportunity will have ended.” She spoke the words with a voice at once quivering with emotion and firm with certainty. Like indigenous infants on the prairie, Nadia lived fastened to Amy all day, on a sling in front of her that made nursing natural. At night Nadia slept not in a crib, but in a “co-sleeper” a crib with the mattress fastened to Amy and David’s.
Amy and David’s fastening themselves to their role as parents was not an act of the will. It was an act of desire, fed by delight. Somehow Amy knew that her time as mother-of-infant, mother-of-child, and mother-of-adolescent would pass quickly, and her desire was to live every moment of it. And somehow David’s desire was to be her companion in this, to be fastened by his love to his wife who chose to be fastened to their child. 
Lent is not about fist-clenched determination to master our wills. It is fastening ourselves to our deepest desire, carrying it around with us no matter what we’re doing, knowing that it is in that desire that we find our truest, whole-est selves. Amy’s desire was to see the world through the eyes of her child. David’s desire was to share this experience with his wife. The parents in the camps fastened their children’s hands around crusts of bread to hold in their sleep out of desire that they have hope. Jesus’ desire in the desert was the spirit that drove him there: to follow The Voice, to discover what it meant to be beloved, to have the courage to speak. We did not need to jump from the parapet and be saved by angels. He was already being carried on wings of desire.
What is your deepest desire, the thing to which you would fasten yourself for these forty days?

Tomorrow – fear of fastening – the yoke story
Wednesday – finding your desire in your nightly Examen
Thursday – our whole-iest selves; the Good Story of the Transfiguration





FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.