This is the Bainwell podcast with Marty Solomon. I'm his co-host, Brent Billings. Today I'm with

Redent to gorge ourselves on gluttony in its many forms. So there's this great book that we read

every year at Lent and Easter. It's called Bread and Wine. Reings for Lent and Easter. And it's just an

anthology of a bunch of different entries, excerpts, passages. This one that I want to read to start

is one that actually I think about all the time. I read it even when it's not Lent is how much

of an impact it makes. And this is just the first few paragraphs

of it. But I find it relevant to the conversation, obviously, and to the culture. So this is from a

woman named Barbara Cawthorne Crafton, who's an Episcopal priest and spiritual director. And the excerpt is entitled Living Lent.

We didn't even know what moderation was, what it felt like. We didn't just work. We inhaled our

jobs, sucked them in, became them, stayed late, brought work home. It was never enough, though, no matter how much

time we put in. We didn't just smoke. We lit up a cigarette, only to realize that we already

had one going in the ashtray. We ordered things we didn't need from the shiny catalogs that came

to our houses. We ordered three times as much as we could use, and then we

ordered three times as much as our children could use. We didn't just eat. We stuffed ourselves.

We had gained only three pounds since the previous year, we told ourselves. Three pounds is not a lot.

We had gained about that much in each of the 25 years

since high school. We did not do the math. We redid living rooms in which the furniture was not

worn out. We threw away clothing that was merely out of style. We drank wine when the label on our

prescription said it was dangerous to use alcohol while taking this medication.

They always put that on the label, we told our children when they asked about this.

We saw that they were worried.

We knew it was because they loved us and needed us.

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