What are you giving up for Lent?

The Lenten practice of fasting tends to irritate some people.  “Why,” they ask, “should I give something up?  That is so old-fashioned.  Isn’t it better to take something on instead?”  Well of course, there is no reason why you cannot do both.  But secondly, in a continent where so many have to ‘go without’ each day, voluntarily making a sacrifice is a way of walking in their shoes at least for 40 days.  When I lived in a refugee camp, a directive came through from Rome reminding Catholics that they should not eat meat on Fridays in Lent.  Since the refugees ate meat about twice a year this was a cause for great laughter.

Research conducted in the UK a few years ago showed that while only 15% of Catholics go to church once a week, 30% give up something for Lent.  It seems that ‘fasting’ is one of the key ways in which people remain tied to their faith.  Every time over the next 40 days, we reach for the sugar or a cigarette or gin, and have to pull back when we remember it is Lent, our action is a prayer for those in need and a prayer for ourselves to remember that all we have comes from God. 

Perhaps that is why this Wednesday our church like so many around the world will be packed – morning, noon and night – with queues of people coming to receive ashes as mark of personal repentance.  There is a parish in New York City where priests stand outside the church on the street from 6am to 8pm constantly giving ashes to people passing by. 

To the outsider it sometimes looks as if Catholics are more interested in sin than in salvation.  In fact in many countries the two busiest days of the Church’s year are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – even though neither is a holyday of obligation!  We do come from a tradition that has drilled into us from an early age the sense that we are sinners.  We do not give children First Communion until they have gone to First Confession – no dessert until you have had your vegetables?  Psychologists might wonder what kind of person wants to be publicly reminded each year that ‘dust you are and unto dust you will return’.  Should we not be reminding Catholics they are born to be saints not stressing about whether they are sinners.

But interestingly, the word ‘sincere’ appears more often in the documents of Vatican II than the word ‘sin’ or ‘sinner’.  The image of the Church preaching hellfire and damnation is a caricature that may suit cartoonists but is far from the reality of today’s homilies.

However, there is still a place for sin – and it is in church!  To quote the American Agony Aunt ‘Dear Abby’: “The Church is not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners.”  (Or as Jesus puts it in Mark 2:17: “It is not the healthy who require a doctor but the sick”).

So Lent provides us with a time to remember our spiritual sickness – our neglect of God, our neglect of others, our excessive focus on ourselves – and to address these with the Church’s threefold prescription: prayer, charity, fasting.