Aliens in This World

Every year on St. Blog’s, I encounter what Jimmy Akin calls “the annual Lent fight”. For some reason, some people think it’s their duty to impress other parishioners with how spiritually hard and buff they are. Others love to tell other people that their Lenten practices are just not good enough.

Fish? Not penitential enough! Bread and cheese? Only for gourmands! Bread and water? You slacker! Water? Well, if you’re a weak and stomach-loving guzzler, I suppose….

That’s pride, not penitence.

I don’t want to discourage people who feel called to do something extra for the Lord. But if other people are following the Lenten rules (and heck, even if they’re not), how they do it is not your business. If they want to eat lobster and you don’t — why do you care? If they want to eat swordfish and you think sardines aren’t penitential enough — why do you care?

If you’ve got time to gossip about other people’s Lents, then you obviously aren’t working hard enough on your own.

(And if you’ve ever wondered why the Church has so many rules — well, it’s not just for the slitherer-outers. It’s for the auto-elected burden-binding buttinski bishops in the pew, too.)

So why do we fast? As penitential behavior, yes. But getting a penance doesn’t mean “I feel like crap”. It can, but that’s not the purpose. The purpose is to do something extra to help make up for past sins, to help repair things, and to help you get better. It’s medicine, not punishment or torture.

If you feel faint and sick and headachy all day, can’t be productive at work, your hands shake while you’re going home, and you’re not sure whether you’re going to faint on the road, how is that helpful? Does it fit in with Jesus’ advice to look cheerful and go about your business? Or are you endangering yourself and others out of spiritual pride, and damaging the mind and body God gave you in stewardship?

God gave you brains and judgment. Use them. Your Lenten duty is to fulfill the Lenten regulations safely and prudently, or cheerfully to admit that you physically can’t and submit to the Church’s discipline for medically unable people — ie, not fasting.

Furthermore, if you are raising kids or feeding other people, it is your duty under natural law to ensure that you provide them with a Lenten meal which is, to the best of your knowledge and ability, a healthy and dietetically complete one. I’m pretty sure this applies to yourself, too, unless you’ve gotten dispensed by some sort of spiritual superior to do really ascetic stuff. If you’re only going to eat one meal a day, feed your body something it can use all day.

There is no particular reason why you should worry about whether said food is “penitential enough”. All food is a good and tasty gift from God. There is no food, no matter how gourmet, that tastes better than something with calories when you’re really hungry, and no drink that tastes better than water when you’re parched. The point is not “eat crappy food”; the point is that you are being asked to stay out of one corner of the food world. That’s penitential enough — just ask Adam and Eve, or Jewish people keeping kosher.

So abstain from what you’re supposed to abstain from, do what you feel called to do, eat what’s on the menu, and don’t spend a lot of time worrying about it.

Finally, a lot of us can only afford to eat fish frequently at this time of the year, or are glad to have a reason to make fish an occasion. I assure you, we don’t need any help designing a diet that is in solidarity with the poor. We eat and are thankful. So leave us alone.

We ate the lobster five Fridays ago and forgot about it; but you’re still looking at claws instead of the Cross.