Lenten Mysteries

– by Nicholas Ellens

Growing up in Lent our evening devotions changed tune and we relished in older traditions, borrowed from various cultures, times, and places.  As children, we enjoyed the baking of fresh, triune-pretzels on Sunday afternoons and our epicurean awareness of the liturgical season culminated in Good Friday’s hot crossed buns with the pregnant expectation of Easter’s pascha, a Ukrainian concoction described in A Continual Feast as made of “farmer cheese and cream, butter, eggs, and sugar: just about everything (except meat) that had been given up for Lent.”

While Lent in my childhood involved some forms of abstention in subsequent years, I performed a few silent and secretive fasts, as well as more publicly fasting from coffee and facebook most recently.  In truth, I am not quite sure what I think.

Today, I logged on to facebook (which I clearly have not given up this time around) to find a friend’s post as follows:

thoughts on Lent from Chocolat: “I think that we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do. By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create and who we include.”

I enjoyed Chocolat, though I found the related Babbette’s Feast to better present the salvation from self-imposed, excessive stoicism.  This post was met with an array of responses, ranging from “I have always felt lent was a silly pharisaical [sic.] way of going about things. ‘look how holy I am!’ to ‘I believe that experiencing the depths of God’s goodness (in whatever form) requires times of voluntary abstinence and restraint. We may assume that a song which contains more notes would be more beautiful and powerful; but it’s the spaces between the notes that gives the piece it’s depth and power.’  I am not alone in my inability to make sense of the observation of the season.

I am sceptical of whether I can apply the messages of Chocolat (and Babbette’s Feast) to a culture of grotesque over-consumption and insatiable desire for personal ‘happiness’.  There is certainly truth in what I will call the simple answer, that the observation of Lent is only important as far as it reflects an appropriate state of mind and heart.  But what of the importance of liturgy and religious practise as more than simply a reflection of the life of faith?  What of Jamie Smith’s argument that we are liturgical creatures who inevitably live liturgical lives which in turn form us?  The alternative—choosing to live without liturgy—is based in the Modernist myth of the ‘rational man’, or so the claim goes.

And so I enter Lent torn. It remains unclear to me how, why or in what fashion we should think of this Season.

– submitted to After Hours by Nicholas Ellens.

More: read contributing editor, Alissa Wilkinson’s, reflections on Lent at Living Jubilee.