Well, you should have seen me the year that I was sponsoring a RCIA candidate who was a coworker of mine. It got ugly.
Roz was like many converts: bubbling over with enthusiasm for her newfound faith and impending baptism, confirmation, and first communion in the Church. We were both dancers with New York City Ballet.
Ash Wednesday morning that year I had gotten up at 5 AM to warm up for an eight AM rehearsal. As I was working out the phone jangled. It was Roz, who proposed that we both quit smoking for Lent!
It must have been the hour, or maybe, as her RCIA and soon-to-be confirmation sponsor, I thought I should be a good example of being Catholic. Regardless of the reason, I stepped up to the proposal. She said, “Great! I’ll stop and pick up some nicorette for both of us,” and hung up.
You have to realize, ballet dancers live a pretty ascetic life to begin with. We don’t eat all that much, and most of it is pretty healthy, heavy on the vegetables and protein, and drink little alcohol, if any. Our bodies just can’t tolerate the extra calories if we’re performing. So the usual suspects of most Catholic adults, booze and candy, were already off the table. All we had was smoking, since back in the day a lot of us used it (erroneously) for weight control.
By Friday of that week tempers were flaring, jaws were aching from chomping all that nicotine gum, and the language was starting to get ugly. So Roz, ever the creative catechumen, came up with the idea of a “cuss jar.” When we started to dissipate into nicotine deprivation-fueled epithets, we were to put a quarter in the jar, and on Sundays in Lent, the jar would get dragged to the church and dumped into the poor box. The jar got pretty heavy to lug to Sunday Mass pretty quickly. I estimate that we contributed at least twenty bucks a week from our self-imposed cussing penances, despite our very best efforts to not smoke and not cuss!
I think Our Lord must have gotten a good laugh out of two ballerinas trying to impose this version of a Lenten discipline, very much Lucy and Ethel style! If we entertained God with our attempts at self-denial, I am very grateful. We certainly were entertaining to our colleagues and to the parish priest who was supervising the RCIA classes.
We were both coryphees, meaning, we had small solo parts. One day Roz had to rehearse her small part, and the artistic director was riding her like she was a thoroughbred. She came into the dressing room puffing away on a hairpin as if it were a Marlboro and muttering under her breath. Then she reached into her wallet, pulled out a five dollar bill, put it in the cuss jar, and let loose with a stream of profanity that would make the Third Fleet blush! Then she saw me sitting in the corner of the dressing room, stretching, and froze. I think she thought I could rat her out to Father about her cussing.
Then she said, “Look, Odile, I’m just on the pre-pay plan!”
We gritted it through Lent, and Roz got baptized, confirmed, and made her First Communion that Easter Vigil. We didn’t smoke. And the poor got comforted by our fairly generous contributions.
And early Easter morning, both of us ended up at the same deli, getting a pack of smokes!
Like I said, it got ugly,
Rethinking the whole thing, I think we should have asked for God’s help on a daily basis to adhere to this small mortification. I don’t think we really did that, relying too much on our own human will.
But Roz became a Catholic, I found my faith challenged and stretched my knowledge and understanding of the faith as I studied right alongside her, and eventually, both of us did manage to quit smoking.
So I guess some graces were poured out on Lucy and Ethel, despite our pretty insane attempts at Lenten discipline!
