Privation and discipline

What a subject for a rainy day. But Lent began Wednesday and Lent may be the most famous example of institutionalized privation in the western world. Ramadan would easily seem to be second best known nowadays, whereas only a few years ago most people would have responded, “Rama what?” if you’d said it.

I have not studied very deeply all the religions of the world, but of the ones I know there is a dose of privation and discipline in each. There is something you cannot eat, cannot drink, cannot do or even cannot think. Remember President Jimmy Carter’s lust of the mind? I felt deeply sorry for him because he felt guilty about having perfectly human thoughts in response to perfectly human signals. If God hated you to think that way, he wouldn’t make the opposite sex so cute, right?

My experience of privation began very early. One of my parents was Catholic and the other was not. The non-Catholic parent had only the sketchiest idea of what was required, but undertook to rear us kids Catholic anyway. Why someone on the Catholic side of the family didn’t decide to step in and set out the simple rules, I don’t know, but no one did.

It was accepted that one did not eat meat on Friday. If I could list the dishes we were presented on Friday nights you would understand perfectly why tuna noodle casserole and macaroni and cheese were occasions for joy. If you have never heard of salmon wiggle, count yourself among the lucky ten per cent of the world. It’s something of a miracle that I am not sitting at the family table this very day, graying hair, ragged clothing and uneducated because I was not allowed to leave the table without finishing it. I will never know how I gathered the strength to swallow the last cold remnants of it. Today fish is expensive and a real luxury for many, but still it is on our list of foods for fast days. Not salmon wiggle, now or ever. I would rather bare my neck to the sword!

Lent was understood to begin on Ash Wednesday and end on Easter. So far so good, but no one apparently ever mentioned carnival. Privation was applied, but there was no preceding period of richness, silliness and feast. Will it surprise anyone that the non-Catholic parent was a direct descendent of the Puritans? You would see the people of New Orleans parading in glorious dishabille for Mardi Gras, and the mind-boggling gyrations of Brazilians samba dancers at Carnival, but as they say these days, “What happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans.” We had no idea that those parties had anything to do with us or our lives. All we got was the chance to eat salmon wiggle on Wednesday as well as Friday.

Come Easter we had a really nice meal after unpacking our Easter baskets. I don’t know about you, but although Easter baskets are pretty cool, I don’t find them adequate exchange for Carnival.

I admit to some leftover prejudices from those early years of wholesale, half-informed religious training. I can’t eat rabbit. It turns my stomach to think of it because I was taught it was “unclean”. I have for years used Lent (Quaresima) as a period in which to do something difficult, usually an end of the winter diet, because after all, anyone can do almost anything for forty days. Besides, Lent occurs mostly in a period of very changeable weather of a type that restricts activities, so why not get something accomplished in it?

There used to be a tradition of giving something up for Lent, and announcing it at school, which was pretty cool. I was trying to think of something to give up for Lent, and since I am already on a diet and continuing to be cigarette free I couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t be damaging to my health, mental or otherwise. It’s taking pretty much all my self imposed discipline just to do what I’m doing. It would be too easy to claim to give up something you can’t get anyway. Dates with movie stars, cheddar cheese, flights to anywhere … I can deprive myself of all that and more. I am also doing without pedicures, massages and gossip magazines.

Even if these privations were real, what could they mean compared to gathering with millions to walk into a river and wash away my sins? How many die in those crushes every year? Or how about walking hundreds or even thousands of miles in a pilgramage to some place holy to one’s beliefs? Think of never killing anything. Not a spider nor a mosquito nor even a poisonous snake. Millions swear to remain celibate all their lives. Others surrender all control over their reproductive processes and bear as many children as are sent to them.

Privation and the discipline with which to bear them are common to all belief systems that I know. If there is a form of suffering, someone exploits it as a way to do something to yourself. Being cold, hot, wet or dry; starving and feasting; pushing your physical boundaries or remaining completely still; raising your voice or taking a vow of silence; reading one thing all your life; following laws which have no application in modern life; refusing to follow any laws made by man: all these and more appear in belief systems.

I used to wonder why they all seemed to be about privation and then I realized that once upon a time, unlike our day of ease and plenty, no one had much and so giving up something was meaningful. Even rich people were poor compared to us.

How much more meaningful, it seems to me, to vow to do something positive instead. I could clean up all the trash along a part of my road, for instance, or I could gether up threads and twigs and leave them in a safe place for the birds who will be nesting here soon. Or I could give up one meal per week and donate the money saved to one of the Haiti rescue funds. I could actually do all of those things, because each one is so easy.

So what do you think? What can modern people do that feels relevant, and is this kind of spiritual discipline still of any use to us anyway?

After all, even these efforts seem pretty mild compared to daubing one’s nude body with mud and standing on a plinth in a public space for years. I think it’s clear why that one never got beyond the Indian sub-continent.

List me some disciplines. I may just take some of them up.

photo of a Sadhu courtesy of BBC