An excellent amusement at the Claremont Colleges last night would have been to make a few hundred small crosses (say three feet high) and hammer them into the grass all over campus so people found them this morning.

What are they for? Are they because it's Ash Wednesday today? Because of the movie (Mel Gibson's Passion opens today)? Because of the cross-burning?

What would the administration do with them? Pull them up and throw them out? Certainly not burn them!

There is a 4-kg bag of sugar in my cupboard right now, and it's nearly full. I could go and eat it all. It would taste good. I would surely be sick later, though, and because I know that would be the consequence, it's hard for me even to seriously consider doing it.

I came up with this example this morning as I was thinking about the more adult forms of self-denial that I should (or do) practice. Often I feel an impulse to self-denial -- or I know I should feel one -- but I do not know the consequence well enough to have that as a reason to follow through. Perhaps I don't understand viscerally what the consequence will be (as I do with the sugar), or I simply don't know or can't predict the result of my action. And so I am left with an impulse to self-denial warring with my desire.

This morning I asked myself: When I came to the Church, did I really expect that it would always be easy to do what was right? Did I expect that I would not feel temptations, or that if I did they would be easy to overcome? Did I expect that I would not be tested?

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a day of fasting and abstinence. It's a good day for it outside: there is a heavy fog, unusual for Edmonton, and the air itself looks ashy. The fog reminds me of unpleasant things; to me it is the miasma of the whole human race, a visible manifestation of our sins.

Cheerful, yes? Usually on Ash Wednesday I read T S Eliot's poem of that name:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.