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Today is the first day of the Season of Lent. Are you giving anything up for the next 40 days?

This is my first Lenten season as a nonpracticing Catholic because that's basically what I've become in the last year.  I had this pangs of guilt all day when I ate meat and didn't fast and hadn't decided on what to give up.  And this is probably the first Ash Wednesday I haven't gone to mass in my entire life.  I stopped going to church when I moved to Florida because I haven't found one that I liked.  In Ann Arbor, you could find a mass that was interesting and not full of Catholic rhetoric.  In Florida, priests like to talk about the evils of abortion and gay marriage (one priest even joked about it once and I almost walked out).  We found one church which was ok, but once the campaign started, I quit going completely since Sunday morning were my only 3 hours off all week.  And then one of my volunteers was handed Republican Party lit at her Catholic church the week before the election and I was outraged.  And I've only been back in a church twice since then – once for my cousin's wedding (a painful Latin mass during the Ohio State/Michigan game) and once for midnight mass on Christmas Eve).

I've always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to church, but I've also always gone to mass despite it.  This is new territory for me and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

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