Buenos Aires. Easter. 2014.

Ash Wednesday.

If you are lucky enough to have lived, and survived, Catholicism as a young child, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Catholicism is a moveable fast.

(Apologies to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”)

But Ernest might have done his borrowing from the Catholics, because Easter is probably the original Moveable Feast—a feast preceded by a season of fasting—which begins on Ash Wednesday. Every year, the fasting and Easter Sunday feasting move around on the calendar.

Pope Gregory XIII, (and his posse of astronomers), created the Gregorian Calendar in 1582 seeking, in part, to honor the origins of Easter established by the Church in AD 325. It’s a calendar still in use to mark the comings and goings of days, weeks, months, seasons, years, decades, centuries, eras–and birthdays. This year, my birthday falls on Easter Sunday, April 5th. At last! All my life, I’ve come close to having an Easter birthday, but never have the planetary gatherings of the universe been just right.

Easter moves every year to the Sunday that falls just beyond the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox, or first day of spring, is March 20. Themes of rebirth and resurrection dominate celebrations this time of year.

I am not a Catholic. But, I was lucky enough to be raised one, so the best of Catholicism stays with me. The religion began losing credibility for me when I learned, as a little girl, that I could never be a priest—because I was a girl. And it wasn’t just me—not one single woman in the entire world could ever be a Catholic priest.

I tried, over the years, to forgive Catholicism for continuing to believe in its regal patriarchy. But it wasn’t just the patriarchy that bugged me. It was an arcane system of rules and sacramental process and expected behaviors that I could never live up to. I didn’t even come close. Not even if I went to Mass every day and confession every week would my failures and ineptitude and attitude ever reach worthiness. I was, in that religion—as a woman—never to be good enough. I was expected to make confessions to men. Men who weren’t supposed to have sex, get married, or father children.

Then, I went to Italy. I went to Rome. I went to the Vatican. Never in my life had I come upon such a shameless display of wealth, ruled over and carefully hoarded by a cult of men, living as the holiest of the holy. I could not take my eyes off the opulence, the excess, the treasures, and the uncommon wealth of a religion devoted to a common man, Jesus Christ.

The Vatican is an astonishing place to visit. But it should be a museum to something that once was.

Nevertheless, as a fallen Catholic, I did know how to behave in the Vatican and in St. Peter’s Basilica. So I slipped behind oppressive velvet curtains to find hidden chapels where priests were performing Mass in Latin using my favorite religious theatrics: Incense. Chanting. Heads bowed deeply into chests. Nuns lined up in the first pews in front of the altars.

The devotional fervor in these chapels suppressed my punk attitude. I prayed. I cried. I lit votives. No matter where I travel, I visit churches and light votives.

Afterwards, in the bars or over dinner or strolling through the Eternal City with my true love, (who was once an altar boy), I returned to my habits of questioning religious authority and history.

The truth is Catholicism stays with me and since today is Ash Wednesday, I stop to think of expected behaviors—like fasting and the prayerful observances of the Lenten season that might draw me closer to the teachings of Jesus Christ and deepen my quest to be a decent human being.

I think of the vernal equinox and Easter. I think of patterns and symbols embedded into my heart’s memories by Catholicism. I think of the catalyst this year’s Easter Moon could be—because it will align with the Sun and Earth and become eclipsed in the shadow of Earth—the shortest total eclipse of the Moon in the 21st century. I think of using all of these signs and symbols and celestial and religious phenomena to give me an excuse to have a grand fast leading up to a grand feast for Easter and my birthday.

I happened to look up the actual date when Jesus Christ was killed. No one knows for sure, but several experts claim he was killed AD 33, Friday, April 3rd, and, if you believe the stories, his resurrection was AD 33, Sunday, April 5th.

Sometimes I believe the stories of the resurrection. Most of the time I don’t.

But every year, I stop to think about it all over again.