She Has Risen

Happy Easter!    Full of ham?  I am. Which is close to miraculous. Our standards for the miraculous are very high.   I could have used an actual miracle. Instantaneous and unexplained.

I had quite a time of it this week.  Whatever I had hoped to accomplish by giving up things for Lent was trumped by the most brilliant opportunity for suffering and an end, once and for all, to my dilemma of the McDonald Fish sandwich.

We had quite the plan, lining up the Easter lilies for the altar, and the other Easter decorations so that we'd have a smooth transition from the stripped down sancutary to the Glory of Easter.  We were like a well oiled machine! The florist was on board.  The white drapery for the cross was at the dry cleaners.  We spent the day with the plastic bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap and some elbow grease and got to work on the pews.  Sister St. Aloysius started on the left and I began on the right.  We had Sister Mary Fiacre parked in the middle.  She turned out to be a rather good marker as to where we were in our work.

The Friday before Good Friday.  We had had such a productive day I decided to throw caution to the wind, and my Lenten fish sandwiches issues, and grab one.

It will be a cold day in Hell when I do that again.

Within about two hours, I realized that the fish sandwich was very much still with me.  Three hours, four, still tasting the tartar sauce. My stomach started to hurt.

I'll spare you the gory details.  Let's just say I had a lot of suffering to offer up. For about five days.

I thought about what that poor soul said when he visited St. Catherine.  She had been at his death bed only an hour before and there he was, asking her to pray for him. He told her he had been in Purgatory for sixty years!  She felt really bad having to break the news to him that it had only been an hour that seemed like sixty years.

This week seemed like sixty years.

We had to call in the troops.  The Ladies of Charity brought food that I couldn't eat. The doctor put me on a liquid diet and antibiotics.  The Ladies of Charity brought jello.  Peach and strawberry.

On Holy Thursday, I graduated to mashed potatoes.  I rediscovered ginger ale.

Poor Sister St. Aloysius  had to do everything herself.  Well. not all by herself. The Ladies of Charity chipped in.  But she is really not comfortable with bossing people around.  Bossing is called for at every turn.

Like Jesus, I rose from the dead for Easter!  Sister St. Aloysius and the gals did a wonderful job.  Not the way I would have done it, with the lilies sort of scattered all around instead of grouped together, but the effect was lovely.  Perhaps we'll keep in that way next year, unless some fussy old goats fuss about it.  You wouldn't believe the things people fuss about, even on Easter.

So here I am back at work and ready to tackle all the questions that have piled up during my trip to Little Purgatory.

And I'll never have to think about those fish sandwiches again.

Or...

I'll go ahead and eat them and offer up my suffering at the very thought.

The dilemma lives on.  Oh well.