Pop 89: Giving Up

By Madonna Hamel

I’m giving up coffee for Lent. For some reason, I can give up certain habits more easily for Lent than for a smaller size of jeans. But the point of “giving up” is not, as many believe, to virtue signal to the world that you are willing to suffer under the punitive hand of a nasty and narcissistic God. It is to be consciously aware of what we have and be thankful for it. To give the five bucks a day you spend on your latte to the local shelter or food bank. And, to develop, over the period of 40 days, healthy habits that hopefully stick and strengthen us long after Easter. 

It turns out giving up coffee is way easier for me than giving up smart-ass remarks about both liberal and conservative politics. I am in need of a rigorous habit of not stooping to polarized mud-slinging. (In retrospect, my last column was my equivalent fo Mardi Gras - the gluttonous, free-for-all Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.) So, last night, I attended an Ash Wednesday service.

I shuffled forward in a slow-moving line of devout and lapsed Catholics toward an ancient priest who would smudge my forehead with last Easter’s Palm Sunday palm ashes and remind me that “we are born from dust, and unto dust, we shall return.” The gesture was humbling.

Unfortunately, on the way back to my pew I spotted a so-called Christian newspaper with a picture of the American president on the cover, glowering like the new punitive and narcissistic God he’s become. I couldn’t help but grab then paper from the foyer table and stuff it into my bag, even though I knew I was providing my smart-ass self with fodder for another rant.

I could hear the clever devil on my shoulder winding up with a few choice words for the president: “If you send all those bad immigrants back home how ever will you support your billion-dollar incarceration industry?” “Don’t go there,” my good angel answers back. Not because it’s not a good point, but because it points outward, at others, and this service is about looking inward, taking care of my side of the street. Maybe even stepping back and getting a look at the bigger neighbourhood, then acting locally. 

“Act like you actually believe it when you say the kindness of strangers makes a real difference. That politics should not dictate whether or not I help a person out of a car burning on the side of the road,” my angel whispers. “This Ash Wednesday reminds us we are all precious in the eyes of the Great Mystery, and we’ll all end up little piles of dust, too. And yes, we are all flawed. We are not made to agree on everything; but we start where we are.”

The priest opened his homily with a joke, a classic toastmaster’s trick. But the joke was all I heard, because it encapsulated where we are today. It spoke to how often we compartmentalize our suffering from our successes, our crimes from our kindnesses, our hate-ons from our help-outs. How we can laugh at mean-spirited language hurled by our own team, but cry foul when similar remarks get lobed at us.

Here’s the joke: A young man holds up a priest in an alleyway. The priest, reaching for his wallet, reveals his collar. The young man immediately apologizes: “Oh, I’m sorry father, I didn’t know you were a priest.” The priest replies: “ I’m sorry, son. I have no money in my pocket. But I have some cigarettes, would you like one?” “Oh no, father, I gave up smoking for Lent.”

At first, I thought, cute. But then, I realized, this is us. This is who we are. Flawed, broken, messy and sometimes way off the rails, so much so we rob old men in alleys to get what we foolishly spent on drugs or what was robbed from us when our jobs ended and were farmed out to cheaper labour. We make mistakes that lead to bigger mistakes. We rob others and ourselves out of desperation, compulsion, selfishness and fear. We are all that young thug. 

But how many of us are the priest? I know - you would never be a priest because all priests are child-abusing misogynists. But, stick with me on this - in the story, the priest represents our Good Samaritan self, our spiritual self. The priest is in an alleyway, after all, not a gated community. He’s there, not because it’s a bad neighbourhood, but because this is where humanity could use a little good will. It’s where he’s more likely to encounter trouble and be of service. 

And he’s broke. He can’t give the young man money, but hey! I’ve got a half-pack of smokes - want one? Cigarettes were, when I was a reporter, a means to getting a story. Standing and smoking on the sidewalk outside a press conference often gave me access to people in-the-know who happened to be smokers. In the priest’s case, it predisposed him to a possible heart-felt relinquishment of a long-held story of woe. But the young man doesn’t smoke. It’s the one thing he can give up for Lent - a remnant of a childhood religious tradition he mysteriously held on to. 

Do we gasp at the glaring disconnect between robbing and Lenting? Is this the kind of compartmentalizing that allows people to gobble up reality shows designed to denigrate contestants, and then recoil in horror when their country elects one of its biggest “stars” because, yes, while he’s “horrible for the country, he’s great for ratings”? 

Or, is it an example of the young man in us, trying to do something right, get a foothold into our spiritual self? It all depends on whether we step toward erecting walls or bringing them down. On what we keep and what we give up.