I’m not religious, or “spiritual”, or anything like it. I was raised high (ish) church Anglican, though, and the older you get I think the more inclined you become to the view that maybe previous generations didn’t get *everything* wrong.
If I believed I have a soul, I’d say the liturgies and music and buildings of Anglicanism are baked into it, and one thing I think we all need is a bit of ritual, a bit of ceremony. I often wonder if the many benefits of a more secular age haven’t come with a cost we haven’t quite counted yet. Religions do understand a bit about human nature: that’s why the people who insist Christmas is “just a day” are missing the point: all cultures have feast days, they’re a human need – and most cultures also have one at midwinter. There’s something in us that needs the old ways, I tend to think.
Anyway, my little bit of keeping it trad takes the form, this year, of observing Lent. Again, like a lot of cultures, ours has a tradition of fasting over a given period. I think there’s a lot to be said for it: imposing a self-denying discipline that’s entirely voluntary, breaking a habit just to see if you can, swimming against a cultural tide that so often says you’re a mug if you’re not self-gratifying every other second. A bit of low-key asceticism is deeply non-zeitgeist, but feels all the better for that.
So I’m giving up Twitter*. I don’t tweet all that much, but I rely on it for news, and for chatting with friends, both real and electronic-only. I’ll miss it. My corner isn’t the howling void of hate that Twitter is for many, and it took me years to find a balance that worked, but I did. I’ll miss it. That’s the point. It’ll be a tough 47 days, especially at first.
Anyone else embarking on a Lenten fast?
(*but apparently not bathos)
@hedgepig
Lent has gone up from 40 to 47 days?
It’S true what they say, Inflation really is getting out of hand…
Apparently the 40 days is weekdays only.
It’s cheating – it’s not as if Jesus got to go home from the wilderness at weekends.
My parents’ explantation for the ‘weekends off’ Rule of Lent was that pride is a sin, and there’s a chance that you’d get a bit pleased with yourself if you successfully gave stuff up for the whole month. So obviously it was your Christian duty to have a couple of swift large Scotches before lunch on Saturday and take it from there.
Love it @chiz!
That and confessing your sins…sorted!
Surely, having absolutely no sins to confess would be a sin in itself?
They’ve got a point – at the end of most of my weekends I don’t have a shred of pride left.
I have given up watching and reading all news coverage of Putin’s war; it’s just too upsetting. If I’m about to be vaporised by an evil Russian dictator there is little that my mental health will gain from the endless speculation of a BBC journalist. It’s dogs doing funny things on Instagram from now on for me.
Giving up news is an excellent idea. Quite apart from a cancelling a massive voluntary downer, it removes the apparently irresistible temptation in middle-aged and elderly men to pass off something they read this morning in a Guardian thinkpiece as their own hard-won expertise in foreign policy and military strategy. So, win win.
Coming soon to Instagram – irradiated mutant dogs with six tails and three ears doing funny things in a dystopian post-nuclear apocalypse landscape
Hope
Unfortunately despair is a mortal sin, so Lent is the absolute last time you’d be allowed to indulge in it. How about sweeties instead?
Alas I have no concept of the sacred and eternal, though like yours my family background is high Anglican. My father was a church organist and choirmaster for most of his life so clergy were part of his social life, but mixing with them made me less sympathetic to the spiritual if anything.
Easter eggs.
Pancakes
I’ve been on a similar 40-year spiritual journey, from pre-teen indoctrination to snotty, sneery rejection, and then at least part of the way back. It’s taken me many years to realise that pointing out the absurdity of faith, and the very obvious point that thousands of competing truths can’t all be right, doesn’t make anyone feel better, least of all yourself. People need answers to impossible questions – okay, they do tend to go with the first answer they’re offered, a bit like buying a car at sticker price – but if makes it easier to get up in the morning, then well why not.
I like churches and some of the music’s great. My mum, a life-long Anglo-Catholic, will these days admit she’s in it more for the cake and the singalongs than anything. Considering she’s a few steps closer to heaven that she used to be, that’s quite a bold move, if the Big Man gets wind of it. She admitted recently that she knows four clergymen who have spent time in prison for doing the thing that priests do. One was a bishop. Even at 85 you can still think for yourself.
Didn’t realise it was Lent to be honest. I always thought today was called Ash Wednesday because it’s the day everyone gives up fags for a day.
Boringly, I have gripes galore with the Catholic Church and the extent to which its adherents are being complicit in faciitating its evils. But on a positive note, it’s good to see the Italian government is finally being put under strong pressure to investigate child abuse within the church, which very much gets covered up still (swapping accused priests to different areas etc.).
TS Eliot – Ash Wednesday
That’s it – I’m giving up peaches.
You wouldn’t dare.
I’ve already parted my hair behind. The full Colin Crompton.
I trust you’ll wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled, too, Moosey.
Somewhere to keep me tab ends.
And walking on the beaches
That gives me another idea: I’m giving up heroin.
The next time The Light thinks I’m wasting time on The Afterword I can tell her that we’re gentling ribbing each using ontological theology with relation to the works of TS Eliot.
Be sure and roll your trousers up first
and the floors of silent seas
and King William Street
I’m giving up talking of Michelangelo. He never talks about me…
Ash Wednesday is my favourite Eliot. He’s at his best when he’s at his most mystical and mysterious, I think, and as much as Four Quartets fit that brief amply and are gorgeous, AW was the first non-Possum Eliot I ever read and it blew me away in all its opaque referential impossible beauty. Like @chiz says: the first answer always sticks.
Yeah. I went through a Dawkinsesque sneery phase with it all, and I just find that embarrassing now. Rude. Unnecessary. I find proselytising atheism really cringe in anyone but quite young people now, probably because I think my own was rooted in the sort of insecurity that strains to seem clever. (Cleverness of all kinds is much less attractive and aspirational to me these days, and strainingly clever-clever is pure yuk. Anyone who wants to be the cleverest person in the room in adulthood needs to go back to grown-up school, and that does still sometimes include me, when I catch myself at it. Hey, it’s a day of repentance, after all.)
You’re a teacher. If you’re not the cleverest person in the room, who is? Tarquin?
I’m definitely not, most of the time. I know more, but the little bastards will catch up. Luckily they’ll have left before that happens, though, so I don’t have to worry about it. 😉
The vital distinction between knowledge and intellect. Knowing stuff ≠ clever. Another thing it’s taken me a lifetime to understand.
I am, actually. Coffee. I don’t particularly like it, and it upsets my stomach and makes me anxious. I got into a habit with it, feels like a good excuse to try and break it. I much prefer tea anyway.
Excellent. Giving up coffee would be a bridge too far for me. I have no other addictions, and I love it, and giving it up would make me miserable, but more power to yer elbow!
I’m going to do that too.
I recently confessed to roasting my own beans. Well not my own beans, ones I’ve bought. I don’t own a plantation or anything. I did a batch at the weekend but left them a bit long in the thingie. They’re as black and brittle as dehydrated beetles. I thought I should probably throw them out, but that’s wasteful, so I’ve just had two cups from them this morning and ITSHADNOEFFECTONMEATALL
Personally not interested in religion or Lent as I adhere to my own faith built up quietly over years without the need of guidance from Church goers who are no more enlightened than I am as far as I can see. It always perplexes me that formal religions portray their teachings as beyond reproach. I prefer to believe that faith is a personal belief that can be challenged and altered by progressive mental development.
Regarding Lent I don’t really see any point in giving something up as an offering to the higher being. Presumably he will decide which way we go at the gates and it wont be based on us having a few less packets of biscuits.
Quakers officially don’t follow any Christian festivals or other events of the liturgical calendar, but they don’t pretend that they don’t happen. This site does a nice little potted explanation.
That being said, my wife and daughters are evangelisch*, so we are all giving up something for Lent. I will endeavour to do no screen time outside of working hours (laptop, tablet or smartphone).
Also I will be swimming (though not against the tide) – we have a swimming pool 2 minutes from the front door, and I am trying to do 20 lengths before the start of work 2 days a week. That’s not really a Lent thing, but it is a good discipline. I’m already feeling the muscles building (which is terribly vain).
*This just means protestants in Germany – they don’t go round knocking on doors or anything.
My house is on the market so my ritual will be to give up a ritual. All my records have been packed away in the interests of “decluttering”. So no decca feather record cleaning brush, no making sure inner sleeve go back correctly etc.
My parents were quite religious and my grandfather was a minister but I dont recall us ever observing Lent. We were Congregational > Uniting Church.
Nice piece of writing , by the way, Hedgie.
Growing up in a catholic household, Lent involved no TV for the entire 6 weeks. We did this for many years. As we all got older, this reduced to just Holy Week itself – and then just Easter weekend – and then just Easter Sunday.
No harm missing tv on Easter Sunday – probably just Charlton Heston talking to a burning bush or a Songs Of Praise-athon all blimmin’ day..
Great post. I have no religious faith at all, and never really have. Even as a child it seemed obvious myth and story-telling to make points about being human and eternally fallible.
I can be very dismissive about it which can irk me and others sometimes. But point me at a cathedral with a Christmas carol service going on inside and I’m front and centre. It’s a deeply enjoyable thing to sing out in a such a glorious space. Familiar tunes with lyrics exhorting us all to be grateful and nice. I feel included despite me being there for the sound and the vibe rather than the love of G.
I agree that we need ritual. Our habits and routines pull us through life.
Back to the point – am I giving anything up? Not specifically for Lent but the past two years of lockdown and working from home a lot I have developed a bad television habit. During my breaks I turn on a rolling news channel and let it burble. It’s become a distraction to thought and action. I can listen to a headline story, then find myself slack jawed at a correspondent speculating off the cuff about something because they have an eternity of broadcasting to fill.
No one can possibly need this. I don’t. And it’s stopping.
I grew up in a methodist home, church was front and centre all the time. I got away from it as soon as I could, basically on leaving home at 18. Don’t recall any one giving up anything for Lent, that’s probably because our family had no vices! Don’t really bother with it but sugar intake needs to be considerably reduced and not just for the next 6 weeks
I don’t know when Lent is, but from March 1st I decided – no more drink, or, at least, sneaky drinks. It’s what Fat Boy J. would do. It’s the only thing we have in common.
Bollocks to that – two days in and two days defeated. Why would anyone not want to drink in 2022!
News… hmm… good idea… my new angle is to get two hours of work in before turning on the news at about 8.30 a.m.
I was brought up in a household that was agnostic, at best. My mother describes herself as spiritual, but not religious (yech), while my father once responded to my mother’s suggestion that my brothers and I be baptised with a threat to enroll us all in the Communist party in retaliation.
I do quite like religion though. Not the mad, let’s kill all our enemies, you must wear this type of religion, obviously, but the religion we more typical encounter day to day. Normal people engaged in communal rituals and attempting to live their lives in accordance with a set of tenets, whoever vague. There’s a lot to be respected in that, and we probably all do it to some extent, even if we don’t have faith/call it religion.
A very dear old schoolfriend of mine was an Anglican minister for a time, before ultimately losing his faith. I had some wonderful conversations with him as a teenager that set me straight on a few things. Not least of which being the belief that religion should be looked down upon because its claims couldn’t be factually verified; as my friend pointed out, if all this stuff was verifiable it would be science, not faith.
I don’t go to church, and I can’t imagine I ever will. My sense is that faith is something which either sparks within you, or not – it’s not really something you can talk yourself into. I don’t feel the existence of a higher being, although nor can I rule it out. What’s important is to show some respect to people who feel otherwise; I’ve always found the sneering talk of “sky fairies” and so on to be quite grating – that false assumption of intellectual superiority.
Not giving anything up for lent. I’ve concluded that I’m self denying enough as it is.
I’m happy to describe myself as atheist. I’m trying to give up excess news coverage. Informed not overwhelmed is my current mantra. That said I do find myself asking God for help and guidance even though I absolutely know he’s not there, never mind listening or able to help. There’s a 12th century Chapel near where we live and I’ll occasionally find myself sitting alone in there and just thinking about things that trouble me. It’s incredibly peaceful, calm and dare I say healing. So what I’ve decided is that I like the idea of being religious but cannot believe in it nor join in with it. Hypocrite? Maybe. I’ve lost my thread now. Great post Hedgepig.
Not by choice; my hearing apparently…got struck by Conductive Hearing Loss last night and now I’m walking around feeling like my head is stuck in a fish bowl, with some added buzzing in my left ear. Hopefully it won’t last all of Lent; only a couple of days!
(I had to wiki the name of this condition in English, it’s very dull IMO – in Swedish it’s known as “having lids over the ears”, which is a much better description!)
Not religious, but I choose to believe in God. With the emphasis on Believe; I don’t Know what God is, if God is X or Y or how it all works, and I don’t try to guess the answers to any of it – because if I (or anyone else) can guess it: that’s probably not the answer.
I have zero clues about Lent – I “left” the two churches I was officially part of as an adult, never having been a part of them growing up anyway. They were the Swedish Protestant church (from being born here) and the Roman Catholic church (from being baptised there to please my Italian set of grandparents).
Since we are vaguely on the topic. Here is the oldest Catholic Church in Australia st John the Evangelist church in Richmond Tasmania.
I love old churches. I just hate what goes on inside them.
What, gigs by winsome singer songwriters attended by middle-aged blokes with beards?
Titfer! To be fair, Lich cathedral has hosted many a good gig I have been to. And they have a full bar available too, so not everything in churches, I concede.
God is music. Listen.