Spiritual loss in a secularised Lent

Mary Kenny
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.THINK. WHAT made the Easter of my childhood so wonderful was the
preceding season of Lent. We were so aware of the deprivations of Lent. You observed fast and abstinence days. You didn't eat sweets. There were no parties or festivities.
Marriages, save for urgent cases, ceased during Lent. In those days — before what Francis Fukuyama calls "the great disruption" of the 1960s — wedding and engagement snapshots were an everyday feature in the national press. The honourable state of matrimony was regularly displayed before the general newspaper reader with pictures of brides and grooms, and their attendants.
These would be studied carefully. "Bridie O'Reilly from Ballyjamesduff? Let me see now.... yes, I knew her aunt at school. She seems to have made a good match." Such diversions ceased in Lent. You felt, keenly, the desert of the season.
Holy Week — now sometimes so erroneously called "Easter Week" — was ferociously stern. You did not go to the cinema during Holy Week. Well, maybe you would sneak a visit on the Monday, but not once the penitential
week had started properly. I remember seeing The King and Ion what we called "Spy Wednesday" — that is, the Wednesday of Holy Week, (before Holy Thursday, which the English called Maundy Thursday). I must have been about twelve and I felt almost deliciously guilty sitting in the Carlton cinema in Dublin, which was otherwise virtually empty — only strange folk would be going to the pictures on Spy Wednesday.
Perhaps because of the circumstances, or perhaps because of the quality of that film, I still remember The King and 1 with especial vividness. I couldn't bring myself to see its song-less successor, recently released. But I still recall, too, the sense of breaking a taboo by going to the pictures in Holy Week. You can break taboos, but you are aware of doing something against the law.
Even so, one is never free of such rules for which, afterwards, we may be grateful. Not because all petty ordinances contain, in themselves, profound moral truths, but because they teach us that somewhere, there arc parameters, and, as the Book of Ecclesiastes says, there is a season for all things.
Good Friday itself was liter
ally a day of mourning. You did not listen to the radio (nor, later, watch TV) before three o'clock in the afternoon. You didn't play music on the gramophone. You ate the minimum. You went to the Stations of the Cross, and I was enjoined to read the Passion in the Gospel. If you could, you kept silent between noon and 3pm. The churches closed after that, their statues covered in the purple of penitence.
AND SO WHEN Easter Day dawned, with the Mass of the Resurrection, it was a new season of sunshine and light. Nothing ever tasted so delicious as that chocolate Easter Egg on Easter Sunday, and all the other sweeties and goodies you had saved up throughout Lent. They played "Easter Parade" on the wireless a lot, and
indeed you sometimes did have a new set of clothes, with a new Easter bonnet, for Easter Sunday.
It was, unbelievably, a great treat to eat a chicken, which was then a luxury food, and not the mass-produced factory-fed tasteless white meat of today. Although we lived in a Dublin suburb, we had a few hens and chickens in the long back garden, and before eating a chicken for your dinner, you would first wring its neck, then pluck it, eviscerate it and clean it.
I saw my mother do just that, without blinking an eye. You were aware of the steps in the food chain that brought such a reward to the table. People were less squeamish in those days.
Even suburbanites knew more about the inherent harshness of Nature.
Today, we are less supported, as it were, by the surrounding culture in our journey through Lent. There doesn't seem to be much variation in the level of festivities, one way or another. Whether people get married or not is seldom a matter of note in the national newspapers, and Lent doesn't make much difference one way or another.
Television is as secularised throughout Lent as at any other time of the year, and Holy Week is an occasion for holidays.
This should not matter to us: perhaps it is better for us to observe Lent, and then Easter, as a counter-culture — in spite of, rather than with the support of, the world outside. Yet it somehow offends me to see every variety of Easter egg on sale in the supermarkets before Ash Wednesday, just as there are Christmas lights before Advent.
How can you be worthy of an Easter egg if you haven't made the sacrifice of not eating sweets for Lent? Will our children ever really understand by experience that "less is more", and that rewards are better savoured if there is first deprivation, even a measure of suffering?
Will they ever even know that food itself belongs to particular seasons, now that we have strawberries in February and "new potatoes" all year round?
Much is gained, of course, by prosperity, development, and the notion that Lenten practices should be voluntary, not coercive. But in the disappearance of these rhythms, something is lost too. Something very profound disappears.