As I have mentioned in previous Slant articles, I am not the most devout follower of an organized religious inclination. For those of you who are, I tip my hat to you and continue along my merry way because, in my opinion, a belief in a belief system is a personal choice.
All that political correctness aside, this whole Lent thing infecting campus lately has been making me wonder about our society’s modern interpretation of a religious tradition. For those readers who are unfamiliar with this old world, vestigial practice carried over from the motherlands, allow me to provide the brief, graphic novel overview.
According to the sanctified Book of Wikipedia, Lent is essentially a “fasting” of sorts willingly performed by a faith’s devout so that they may relive a small piece of the suffering their proclaimed savior, Jesus Christ, experienced as he wandered in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights all the while being tempted by his arch-nemesis, Satan, to eat. Though I’m sure Satan was only hoping to prevent his enemy’s premature demise by way of voluntary starvation, because then what would happen to his acting career and the viewer ratings if the rest of the hit series came to an abrupt halt before it reached its narrative climax? Pious followers perform a less intense version of this starvation to prepare themselves for a faith-gasm about a month and a half later.
Additionally, according to the wisdom found in his “The Tussin” epistle, the electric prophet MC Chris tells us that the whole experience is Tantric, “Frankly, the feeling’s fuckin’ fantastic. I’m trippin’ like Jesus in the desert when he fasted…like you’re at Epcot Center on acid.”
Profound sub-textual drug allusions located in rap sermons or not, I grew up around a family of Catholics in New Orleans, a land essentially run by Catholic-lites, so I am quite familiar with the idea of Lent even if I find it slightly comical. Having readily-available, fresh seafood made the whole “meat-free Fridays” thing more of a convenient excuse to get all your “religious” friends together and throw a beer-and-boiled-crawfish party rather than suffer any sort of self-inflicted puni
shment. Religion acted like a sort of food stamps program for us during Lent; we physically ate better every Friday because we couldn’t spiritually afford to eat meat. Blessed is he who caught and cooked the crustacean.
And let us not forget about Mardi Gras Day either. It’s just one gigantic-ass, city-wide, month-long, debaucherous festival culminating on a single, Fat Tuesday of drunken orgies, fried-food gorging, and the gathering of materialistic baubles thrown to willingly breast-exposing women from men covered up in silk and sequin dress gowns. And then the next Wednesday morning, the revelers recover from their hangovers and the previous night’s sins by getting some burnt palm branch’s ashes crisscrossed on their foreheads and all is forgiven. Blessed is he who upholds that where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.
Yeah, I love my city and its customs. We know how to embody Father Ludacris’ wisdom of wanting “a lady in the street but a freak in the bed” perfectly. Yeah, the Usher agrees too.
Nevertheless, my question remains as follows: Why must we, as a society, need a religious tradition to remind ourselves that we should stop repeating, or at least decrease the frequency of, the activities that cause ourselves long-term pain in exchange for short-term pleasure?
Followers force themselves to give up chocolate everything, incessant Facebooking, and being misogynistic assholes to women for a period of 40 consecutive days and nights. Yet, most of those who sacrifice do so begrudgingly because they are not fasting willingly in order to reach a higher understanding of their faith, but they are doing so out of familial, peer, or religious pressure. Most observers of Lent hungrily count down the days until they can down a bottle of Hershey’s syrup, scrutinize every single one of your latest Facebook albums, or return to their common vernacular of calling every passing college girl, mother, or nun a “crazy-bitch-ass-ho-bag” and rate their hotnesses as they simply try to cross the street.
If you’re going to “follow in the path of Christ” and refrain from an activity or behavior for Lent, then do it for the whole period. Don’t bitch out and consider every Sunday during that six-week period as a mini-Easter. You think J.C. kept some bread up his sleeves to eat on Sunday afternoons? No, because if he did, he would have been cheating, and it also would not have made for as interesting of a chapter in the story. And who likes a superhero that needs to eat? Nobody, that’s who.
Perhaps we could consider practicing a general level of self-restraint so that we wouldn’t need a religious holy-month-and-change to purge ourselves of our accumulated evils and addictions so regularly. Just an idea.
As an alternate option, we could all just go balls to the wall with the full religious experience and spend a third of our summers walking around the Mojave Desert trying to find edible rocks that could pass for bread. If someone pulls that off before death ensues, he might be able to spawn a new religious following of his own. I only ask that he makes sure to post the video highlights of his heat-stroke wanderings on YouTube so that the general public can all feel that holy spirit with him and vicariously follow his footprints in the sand from the comfort of their desk chairs.
But only the highlights; the viewers might tire of watching the whole experience.