Tuesday, April 05, 2016

My Lenten Voyage Starts with a Shower


Warm water enveloping my head in a forest rainfall. Everything is quiet and I can meditate. That is my morning ritual. My bride, the Love Goddess, enjoys the “massage” settings that punches her with water 1,492 times a minute. While she is free and relaxed I have the percussion section blasting Carmina Burana at 300 decibels. The thump reverberates through the whole house.

Next morning I change our shower back to the Serene Forest rainfall and the Love Goddess will turn on a Jackhammer. The pattern has repeated itself for the last 7 years since we got the new shower head. Last week, after my shower, I changed the shower to Jackhammer mode for the Love Goddess. She was startled. She had never heard how loud the shower was before. She still likes jackhammer mode, but is aware of how loud it is.

That’s when I realized that Lent is about getting out of the shower. Seeing yourself from a different perspective, getting clean from a spiritual perspective. What the Love Goddess didn’t know was the shower sounded rocks in the garbage disposal. It’s not bad, it’s self-awareness.

Getting back on the spiritual path is as easy as jumping into the shower only drier. Make the effort to get to church, do an extra prayer, skip that dessert, etc. Shake things up and intensify. I’ll paraphrase CS Lewis “I didn’t know what a straight line was until I saw one. I had been looking at curves that I thought were straight.” So the moral is – take a shower and get some perspective.

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