It's now Lent going into Easter and the time for embracing austerity and abstemiousness is upon us.
For Lent is the 40 days of asceticism before Easter.
Believers are supposed to prepare themselves for Easter week by prayer, penitence and self-denial through fasting and other acts of self-deprivation. Traditional Lent is not at all Gen X and Y. In fact Lent is very confronting to all of our modern hedonistic senses.
Constraint and abstinence seem so last millennium. I know that I was lost to Judaism when I discovered that feasting on lobster was out.
It is the abandonment of our modern self-gratification that must confront those priests and ministers trying to sell Lent to the faithful and not so faithful. The concept is that we need a time of abstinence to prepare ourselves for the solemnity of Easter. It starts on Ash Wednesday, so called because the ritual calls for the daubing of ash in the shape of the cross on one's forehead. It is preceded by Mardi Gras (literally ''Fat Tuesday'' in French) or Shrove Tuesday where one can party on prior to the severity of Lent.
My reservation about Lent, other than the little quibble that I am not a believer, is the potential for damage and weirdness from the ascetic nature of Lent in particular and many faiths in general. I know our world is too self-indulgent, particularly when one has an eye to the world we are leaving future generations.
But something in me rails against the forced frugality and self-loathing of some aspects of faith.
For this view I owe much to Reverend Don Cupitt, a leading Anglican thinker who I encountered when I was hanging around the Divinity School at Cambridge for a couple of years (un-enrolled I hasten to add).
Paradoxically he used to flagellate himself about many problems of faith including flagellation.
For he felt that faiths are often too admiring of Spartan self-denial. Faiths often mandate all sorts of self-deprivation and sacrifice and deem some pleasure to be sinful. There are restrictions on sex. (What is so wrong with orgasm I ask you?) There is submission to superiors without question, as Job and Jonah came to understand. There are food taboos in many faiths and the promotion of fasting. There are flagellations, crucifixions and restrictions on talking, owning possessions and outside relations in faiths from Buddhism to Judaism to Christianity.
They all love to self-loathe.
I am sure part of this comes from a good motive. One of the ways of dealing with suffering in the world is to emulate it in order to empathise with weak and the poor. And the notions of guilt and sacrifice sometimes engender a sense of nobility.
But over time, the objectives seem to have been perverted.
Of course in the proper context, restraint has its place in human life. But when institutionalised in faith, it can be destructive. Many experts feel this self abnegation can affect our mental health. Take St Catherine of Siena, the senior female Italian saint, who starved herself to death at 33 in 1380 after beating herself for hours a day, embracing chastity and poverty and wearing a horse hair shirt. She only ate pus from the wound of her patients and Holy Communion. She was clearly bonkers. But she exemplifies the weird outcomes ascetic faiths have on followers.
So part of me wants to rebel in Lent because of some of the appalling outcomes of religious ascetic rules.
And part of me wants to re-visit the idea in these days of obesity and environmental crisis. How do we moderate those modern plagues? Self-restraint over the years became perverted and our health and planet suffer. The challenge this Lent is to think of ways moderation can be embraced without the over indulgence of today and the weird self-abasement of yesterday.
The godless don't seem to have embarked on this discussion yet. What is your view?
PS By the way, I would have loved to have covered the Global Atheist Convention but I was not given a media pass. Here is the letter of rejection, which came after a blog foreshadowing the Convention might be less than perfect:
'' . . . they have all already been allocated. However, as you were dreading the Convention and only planning to attend out of duty we trust you won’t be too disappointed to miss out.''
I can't help but feel that my previous reservations about the Convention (alluded to in the second line) were not appreciated. There is nothing more unforgivable as someone from your own side not toeing the party line. Sometimes I feel we atheists don't really welcome anything other than sycophantic acclamation. Hence their delight in ruling me out.
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