The six-week period is embraced by Christians and non-Christians alike – and is more a measure of our mild collective anxiety
Lent was, historically, an annoying idea: take a time of year when there is nothing to eat anyway, and then dress up your abstemiousness as an article of faith. That is how it must have seemed, I am sure, to the medieval, lukewarm Christian. A bunch of people eschewing strawberries that hadn’t come up yet, to kid a God who knew as well as anyone what harvested when.
Modern Lent is less annoying, but more peculiar. Driven by neither scarcity nor faith – non-Christians go as crazy for self-denial as they do for Christmas – it is more like taking the temperature of mild collective anxiety. Anything you are really worried about, you will give up permanently, not just for six weeks. Classic Lent denials are all subsets: I’m not giving up screens, I’m giving up Twitter; not meat, just bacon; not alcohol, just spirits. It has a performative element, because if you didn’t want to tell everyone else, you wouldn’t do it at the same time as everyone else. But it is not a very exciting performance, since it is never personally very revealing. The air of religiosity around the tradition, regardless of how devout the Lent-observer is, means that even the thing you are giving up has to be broadly wholesome. Nobody gives up porn for Lent.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TklZWX
via
0 Comments