Lent Has Come, Just In Time

God's timing is perfect

From a fresco at the tomb of the Apostle Saint Andrew. Here he appears after death with the baby Jesus, in sacra conversazione, or eternal communion with God.

Confession: In the last few months, I began to indulge in the venial sin: despair. The Golden Age is upon us, the last few years of the best American president of my lifetime, a top three all timer, but when you live in California, in Los Angeles, that glory is drowned out by the crushing weight of living under an idiocracy.

We would never, it seems, clear out the miscreants and parasites siphoning off our precious dollars into their fraudulent scam businesses. We would never deport more than a handful of illegal aliens and visa overstayers.

We would never clear our streets of homeless junkies and the attendant misery. We will never boost the plummeting birth rate.

No one wants a baby anymore. Babies are outré. You can’t give babies away anymore, at least, not to women. There are plenty of all-male couples who are busy procuring themselves bespoke infants from leased uteri, but potential mothers can no longer be bothered and don’t have the bandwidth or the willingness to endure even temporary beauty deficits or economic hits.

And can you blame them? Have you seen the price of diapers and daycare?

I despaired of ever seeing California, land of my birth, my ancestral homeland, ever rid itself of its endless parade of hideous dolts who pretend to be in charge of anything other than their own wasted lives. As sure as the Palisades burned down last year, the rest of the city is doomed to fall into slow-motion spiral of decay and horror.

I started to despair that I am doomed to spend the rest of my life in this house, on this street, condemned to continue coughing up untold and enormous piles of cash that grease the pitiless wheels of the very government that seeks to abolish me. I am funding their efforts to erase me and my family from existence!

They are confiscating most of the money my husband and I earn through unbelievable sacrifice and pain and agonizing hours away from each other in order to shower it onto the newly arrived mothers and children I pass each day on my way to drop my own children off at private Catholic school.

These women are as wide horizontally as they stand vertically. They lumber into the public school that is rated a 1 out of 10 on Great Schools followed by a few seven year-olds wearing Deadpool backpacks, holding large iPhones, and as addicted to the same brain rot as all the rest of the kids in America are.

(It costs Americans $44,000 a year to send each child in Los Angeles to public school each year, but these women pay nothing, because it comes out of property taxes and federal income tax, which they also do not pay.)

I started to despair that despite the many positive developments and discoveries and progress since the inauguration 13 months ago we would not see any more good news once the Democrats swept the House. I started to despair that professional nitwit Gavin Newsom would somehow, despite having nothing to run on, could worm his way past J.D. Vance in 2028. After all, the kids say Newsom mogs J.D. J.D. face card declines. Clavicular said so!

I started to despair because I had the great luck to be born at the perfect moment so that my lifespan coincided perfectly, synchronously, with the upwards trajectory of the highest-ever peak of the Great American Empire. At the exact moment my peers and I were at our own life peak, filled with exuberant youth and buoyant self-confidence, so was the entire country.

And then we began to age. And the country that kept getting higher, baby, like it wouldn’t ever come down, seemed to follow us as we slid helplessly into our chopped era.

And so, one begins to despair. And despair is an addiction. In some ways despair is a comfort. If you just despair enough, cling tightly enough to the contours of your particular sack of personal despairs, at least you have something to hang on to! When you are in despair, you are suddenly relieved—of the burden of worry. Relieved of the excruciatingly difficult task of being happy and grateful just to be alive.

And so, here is Lent, again, right on time. This Lent I am going to try as hard as I can not to give into the facile pleasure of wallowing in despair. I am going to practice strict despair hygiene. I am going to do what old ladies do, knowing all the hard and big work of their lives is done: take pleasure in the single bud that bloomed early on the lone rose bush in the garden.

Lent is about fasting, prayer, and preparing for Holy Week. It is about giving up your comforts to get closer to God. Most of us can’t give up our comforts for five minutes. I know I can’t. But Lent makes comfortable people suffer, just a little bit, to remind you that you don’t even know what real suffering is.

And so I am going to give up despair and negativity and blackpilling for Lent. My three favorite things!

Instead, I am going to try to revel in the elemental ecstasy of knowing all of my children are, miracle of miracles, safe, in their beds, asleep and warm and fed, at night. Food will appear on the table. Bills will be paid somehow, God willing. The days will continue, inexorably respawning every 24 hours, from a mysterious spring that endlessly produces them for us, for free, giving us all a fresh chance to start over and beg God’s forgiveness for all our woeful idiotic mistakes the day before, seven times a week.

One day they’ll stop coming. For me, that is. But they will keep rolling, an undying endless scroll of time, for all time, forever.

And so, honestly, why despair? It all ends for us. Might as well take a deep breath of sweet, free oxygen, let it fill your lungs, let yourself taste the quiet peace of existence.

We are alive. We are Americans. We are going to ask this Lent for God’s infinite mercy to be shown to us, and maybe he will grant it to us.

And that’s pretty good. That’s enough, in fact.

Thanks for reading.

What will you give up for Lent?

—Peachy