Pop 89: Lent for the Bent
By Madonna Hamel
Forty days and forty nights of fasting, alms and prayers. That’s Lent, in a nutshell. It starts with Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, where we take the opportunity to do it up big tonight, because tomorrow we’ll be living clean for the next five weeks.
I’ve been to New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival, and it is The Most sublime sensually sublime I’ve ever had - there’s live music everywhere, and they invite you to join in. People barbecue on their front lawns, and they invite you, too! But Mardi Gras can get a little crazy, thanks to drunken tourists who stagger about and yell at women, “show us your tits!”
To my thinking, that kind of Mardi Gras-ing has a touch of the addict in it, as in: “Fine, if I’m going to rehab tomorrow, if I must abstain and sober up in the morning, I’m binging tonight.” Kind of like a guy who gets laid at a stag party the night before his wedding, do it now while I can. If that’s what marriage portends for you, perhaps don’t tie the knot?
Back to Lent. Fasting is meant to alert us to hunger, our deeper hungers and the very real hunger of others. Rather than spend over $5 on a latte we could give alms for the poor. Lent reminds us that the spiritual path is one of subtraction, not addition, of emptying, of lightening the load. Fasting is also a way to bring on visions and continues to be used in many traditions by various cultures all over the world. Suffice it to say, it’s not just a quick weight-loss scheme, which is how it’s most often undertaken in our consuming binge-purge culture.
As I age my desire to be serene trumps my need to be skinny. So I’m more motivated to give up certain foods for Lent than I am to fit into a smaller dress. But what I really want to fast from this Lent is my need to be important, my urge to make a significant mark in the world, to see my name in print. It’s not that I shouldn’t have goals as a writer; I just don’t want to be pinning my serenity and sense of worth on it. I yearn for a life free of anxiety and worry over petty details, like whether or not someone approves of me or do I look fat in this?
Lent is not a time of punishment, but it is a time of relinquishment. It is not a time to prove that I am holier than thou, but it is a time to widen my scope to include others who are suffering. With every Lent, I get a broader sense of what this season is really all about. It’s a time to undo the kinks and release the resentments, to straighten out the parts of me that have gotten all bent out of shape.
I was thinking on these things when I scurried to Diana’s to feed her cats. These cats are not fasting, they are well-cared for, with two squares a day and plenty of fresh water. Lately, the weather bureau has been issuing daily “bitter cold” warnings, so I’ve had to break the ice in their bowls and add boiling water.
Today, while waiting for the kettle to boil, I flipped through a book on Diana’s kitchen table. It’s called “Buddha’s Brain,” and it’s by Rick Hanson, who is both a Buddhist and a neuroscientist. “The brain,” he writes, “detects negative information faster than positive information.” Therefore, “negative events also have more impact than positive.” And “bad information carries more weight.” So, it’s not just me! “Your brain is built more for avoiding than approaching because it’s the negative experiences, not the positive ones, that have generally had the most impact on survival.”
And that’s why, according to Hanson, when it comes to human relationships, it takes five positive interactions to overcome the effect of a single negative one. Of course, it’s not an exact science. Some of us never get over bad behaviour, convinced others intentionally mean to harm us. But “we should be careful about attributing intentions - most of the time, we are just bit players in other people’s dramas.”
Today is Ash Wednesday, when the priest rubs ashes on our foreheads to remind us that our days are numbered. That we began as dust and end as dust. I once did an interview with my friend and priest, Fr. Pat. We squatted around his hibachi while he burned last year’s Palm Sunday palms to make this year’s Ash Wednesday ashes. He told me his father once said to him: Pat, you’re either going to become a priest or you’re going to jail. Fr. Pat is my kind of priest. He also told me God comes disguised to us as our lives, and if you pay attention, you will spot the many ways the spirit is trying to grab you through so-called coincidences. “Like the night my friend died. I walked to my car and thought how she was some kind of wonderful. Then I started the ignition, and blasting out of the radio was Grand Funk Railroad singing ‘some kind of wonderful.’”
Lent, at the very least, is an excuse to work free of the holds all our nasty habits have over us, including getting bent out of shape over someone else’s dramas and using those dramas as an excuse to reach for the bottle or the cake or the chatline. So, I guess it’s no coincidence that Lent is like rehab. No one wants to do it, but after forty days, we, at least, get a taste of what it feels like to be clean.
“Renunciation is the antithesis of clinging, the radical path to happiness,” writes Hanson. Give up being important. Renounce seeking approval. Sage advice from a Buddhist in my first week of Lent.