Let’s Give It Up For Lent
9th February 2008


“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
In the church a long line of worshippers shuffles silently towards the altar where the priest stands holding a large cup filled with ashes. As each person kneels before him he dips his thumb into the cup, bends down and, murmuring the incantation, inscribes an ashen cross on each forehead. The worshippers return silently to their seats, ash-marked heads bowed in prayer.

As Waitangi Day swirled through Aotearoa this week a couple of older, darker celebrations tangled in its coat tails. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar, a six week period of abstinence that culminates in Holy Week, the great celebration of Easter. Because it is tied to Easter Ash Wednesday does not fall on a fixed calendar date – it is a ‘movable feast’. This year it happened to fall on Waitangi Day.

In my Catholic youth I attended Ash Wednesday mass to be marked with ash on my forehead and reminded of my mortality – “and to dust you will return.” Back home us kids would peer in the mirror, rubbing in the ashes with our fingers or teasing each other when soap and water failed to remove them.

Then our conversation would turn to what we were ‘giving up’ for Lent. Giving things up for Lent was the most significant calculation in a Catholic child’s year. We were expected to sacrifice some small pleasure or privilege for six long weeks. This, along with praying our rosary beads every night and abstaining from meat on Fridays, was intended to strengthen our faith.

Usually we gave up eating sweets – which wasn’t such a great sacrifice in an age when sweets were not as mainstreamed as they are today. Sometimes we sacrificed pocket money or a favourite TV programme. Alternatively we could take on extra duties around the house: hanging out the washing or bringing in the firewood.

We resisted these sanctions and tried various strategies to avoid them. We proposed giving up homework or spinach. I remember one of my sisters offering to do the dishes more often and my brother generously agreeing to give up his share of dishes duty so she could meet her goal.

Mum invariably quashed these creative solutions.

However, in a brilliant theological sleight of hand we managed to convince her of a loophole. She agreed that giving up eating sweets did not mean that we had to give up buying or acquiring them. So we accumulated our sweets, hoarding them in glass preserving jars under our beds, counting them up as we counted down the days until Easter. Lent for us finished on Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week and I remember the agonies we suffered after gorging ourselves on lollies. To this day I cannot face an acid drop without thinking of the yellow candlewick bedspread and dusty carpet of my childhood.

Like many Christian festivals Lent overlays older traditions. In the northern hemisphere Lent coincides with the end of winter and early spring (in Dutch ‘Lente’ means spring). For our ancestors this was always a lean time, when food supplies were running low. They fasted by necessity. The Christian church simply appropriated the practice as yet another expression of faith. It was a clever move – a rumbling tummy was easier to endure when one believed it was earning a few credits in the afterlife.

In hindsight I was short-changed as a child. It was many years before I discovered that Ash Wednesday was the second half of a double act: that it followed Shrove Tuesday, pancake day, Mardi Gras (literally ‘fat Tuesday’ in French). And it wasn’t until I travelled to Holland in my twenties that I discovered Mardi Gras is the climax of Carnival.

Carnival is a pagan festival the Church never completely subdued. It continues to this day, mostly in Europe and Latin America, a raucous outpouring of parades, masks and grotesqueries; of eating and drinking to excess; of sinning and confessing (being ‘shriven’). No wonder it was mislaid in my small Catholic childhood.

Times have changed. Lent has vanished and now every day is Carnival. Carnival suits the spirit of our age, where we are expected to live to excess. In a consumer society there is no room for abstinence, fasting or restraint.

I miss it a little. Giving something up brought a sense of accomplishment. Wouldn’t it be refreshing if we revived Lent. Imagine if the big box retailers announced they were putting prices up for a few weeks to reduce sales, or they were closing every Friday until Easter because we all had enough stuff. Imagine if we shunted advertising from our TV screens and junk mail from our letterboxes.

I’d happily give up sweets to see that.