March 25 (M)
I know, I know. We’re supposed to be done with everything up to Good Friday. And we’re many months overdue. But taking a two-week break from blogging (thank you grad apps and career coaching) helped me realize that I forgot to include one key event of my Holy Week:
My first secular volunteering gig in Orange County!
Enter: Community Action Partnership of Orange County. Based in the Garden Grove/Westminster area, CAPOC is a network of warehouses, distribution centers, and even a farm that gets food and supplies to people in crisis. It doesn’t scratch my Palestine itch, but it’s local (enough) and offers shifts on Mondays that aren’t people-facing.
And that’s why I spent the morning of Holy Monday in an assembly line, stuffing cereal boxes and nutrition flyers into cardboard packages.
At first, it was just me, so I had to do everything: get a package from the wooden palette, fold it up, tape it down with the tape dispenser, fill the package with stuff, and put it on the conveyor belt. But I was a complete klutz with the tape dispenser (thanks autism), and enough people trickled in that I found myself only packing boxes.
And for once, I didn’t really mind that I was bad at something.
Maybe it was that I got my nose smushed by some high school kid reaching out a little too far for a stack of packages. Or maybe it was that we had a few guys that worked just a little more slowly than everyone else. They both wore some kind of hearing aid, and their aide watched them like a hawk, switching them out every thirty minutes or so when they began to tire.
We somehow managed to fill up the conveyor belt with stacks and stacks of packages.
As I hopped in my mom’s car to leave the warehouse, I reflected on how the shift went for me. It felt good to work with my hands. I was actually doing something that was feeding the world (and not just the bourgeoisie). And it was refreshingly boring. A little too boring…
Then I realized CAPOC also had a farm.
So I hopped onto VolunteerHub and signed up for the next Monday shift there.
March 30 (Sa)
After almost two years, I finally baked another cake!
The first cake was a TastyKake imitation, which I baked during my LearningWorks days. That was a whole ordeal - I was working with a whole new recipe, traveling back and forth from Aldi’s to get new ingredients, and dealing with the autistic “I hate change” impulses.
All for the kids to tell me that they liked the “brownies.”
Jokes aside, cakes take a lot out of me. The recipe I was trying out came with its own complexities - lemon syrup and lemon icing, to be exact. And because it was a sponge cake, I had to be careful not to overfill the baking pan.
But I love working with lemons. And after all of Lent’s shame spirals, I really wanted to do something special for Easter. And judging from the church’s eating habits, a platter of Disney World cookies simply wouldn’t cut it.
So I spent the evening dicing lemon skins into tiny little pieces while listening to GLAD’s Christ the Lord is Risen Today on repeat.
I don’t really have any spiritual takeaways from Holy Saturday. But I know that I love feeding people. And Jesus loved feeding people as well.
This reminds me of a hot take from one of my mentors: Jesus died so we could consume him, not other people.
Before you clutch your pearls…know that we are already consuming each other to survive. Whether we are overworking autistic people, laying off senior teachers, or bombing Palestine, metaphorically cannibalizing Jesus is the least of our worries.
And yet Jesus sees us in all our greed and depravity, and tells us “This is my body - take this instead.” (Mark 14:22)
Of course, you’re also allowed to take my lemon sponge cake with buttercream frosting and call it a day.
March 31 (Su)
And it was Easter.
I was sitting in church, listening to Erin ramble about vernal equinoxes and the Gregorian calendar. I knew he was trying to say that Easter theology has departed from its original intent. But I was annoyed at how his hook had departed from its original intent.
But I should have been more annoyed at myself - and how my Lenten journey had departed from its original intent.
Lent 2024 should have been a reflective ritual of processing my shame and laying it down at the feet of Jesus. It became a self-crucifixion ritual where I threw myself into one shame spiral after another: privilege guilt, rumination on missed opportunities, and the Korean church complex.
And yet Jesus always stepped in to talk me down from the ledge.
Sometimes Jesus was subtle, like when He placed certain people in my life or nudged me to call my friends after work. Sometimes He was very direct, like when He practically ordered me to go read my yearbook inserts.
But Jesus was always there. And those moments where He showed up and spoke will forever define Lent 2024.
This reminds me of something Erin said after he stopped rambling about ventral equinoxes:
When the resurrected Jesus shows Himself to the disciples, His body is riddled with gashes and lashes. His wrists are so shattered that the disciples can stick their fingers in the holes.
“It's not a cleaned-up Jesus,” Erin said. “It's a Jesus whose body has been mutilated by Empire.”
The worst part was that the disciples did nothing to defend their master. The women could only watch and cry as Jesus breathed his last. The men ran for the hills, swearing in their thick Galilean accents that they knew nothing of Jesus of Nazareth.
And yet Jesus greets His disciples with this: Peace be with you.
Jesus is not interested in vengeance or judgment. He is interested in giving his disciples freedom from fear. So Jesus invites the disciples to rejoice together…and they do.
What does it mean to rejoice together with Jesus? What does it mean to accept His forgiveness and be free? And where does Lent fit into all of this?
Maybe we can start with autistic priest Mark Nolette’s call for “new wineskins for neurodiverse people.”
In his blog Autism Consecrated, Father Nolette laments how the neurotypical way of setting resolutions for Lent is like “taking our familiar flight plan and adding in several detours and extra stops – without the allowance of more time in the itinerary.” In demanding that neurodivergent people overstretch their processing systems, he says, neurotypicals set them in “a straight line to crash and burn.”
For the longest time, I took it upon myself to set time blocks for additional spiritual practices and course-correct when they don’t work out. And every year, I would crash and burn because these extra practices demanded far too much maintenance. And I would always blame myself for not having enough cognitive flexibility, when in reality it was the strategy that wasn’t working.
The tough part is that Father Nolette doesn’t give me a whole lot of alternatives beyond saying no to extra stuff. And part of making a season special (if not sacred) is adding something special…
But what if that “something special” was one consistent practice that was clearly defined? And what if that practice expanded beyond the arbitrary forty-day time limit?
I’ll give you my rough answers to these questions in my next series: Living into Lent.
Do you have any observations or questions that you’d like to add? If so, let’s chat. Email me and we can get the conversation going.
As always: fight proud 📢, fight strong ✊, and fight on! 🗡️