Can you really go to hell for eating a muffin?

It's Ash Wednesday - a day of fasting and abstinence. It's harder than one might imagine when you're doing Weight Watchers and already feeling somewhat deprived. It's also hard when you have the overwhelming urge to scream obscenities at the heavens for the injustice done to your little family. It seems like God is asking a lot of me today.

But maybe I'm just being a drama queen.

Anyway, on our way back from the funeral parlor My Beloved and I were discussing my tummy and its desire for a muffin. The thing is, you're only supposed to have three meals and no snacks on Ash Wednesday. I knew that - I knew I couldn't have a snack, but I really wanted the muffin. I had the weight watchers points left, I'd just spent the better part of an hour at a funeral parlor where the almost inconsolable widow clung to me and sobbed low, guttural moans in my ear while I whispered "I'm so sorry" over and over - and I wanted the damn muffin.

It was even low fat. It was all good, except that God, apparently, would send me to hell for eating it.

My Beloved, ever the voice of non-organized-religion reason, gently suggested that maybe it was okay for me to have the muffin. It wasn't, after all, like I was killing anyone. He doubted very much that I'd go to hell for snacking on Ash Wednesday. He even did a little skit about it. This is how it went:

Two damned souls meet and begin chatting while languishing in the depths of hell...

Hitler: So, yeah, I killed six million Jews. What are you in for?
Me: Me? Um, well....uh.....I ate a muffin.

My Beloved has a way of putting things into perspective like no one else I know. But did his short, one-man play convince me to break cannon law (or whatever law it is) and have the snack I wanted so badly?

Well, I'm now sitting here at 11:52pm with a lightly buttered (margarined?) low fat honey bran muffin on a little plate beside me. In 8 minutes I'll eat it. It'll be tomorrow by then - a regular old Thursday.

I know it's stupid. All logic and good sense tells me that I won't go to hell for eating a muffin on Ash Wednesday, but since things haven't particularly gone all that well for me in the not so distant past, I'm not all that interested in tempting fate or angering the gods. I can wait eight more minutes for my snack.

I hope someone up there is making note of this. Seriously, when I die and me and Saint Peter are flipping through my files, I'd better see that someone noted my decision not to eat a muffin on Ash Wednesday, 2006.

Anyway, much as I'd like to stay and chat more about my eternal soul, it's now just after midnight and I have a muffin to devour.

So there.