The debauchery on Fat Tuesday at our house was sustained, insistent and very, very fatty. Frankly, it may take 40 days just for our stomachs to contract back to normal. While costumed revelers were partying in the streets of Rio and New Orleans, you see, we were devoting ourselves to gorging on all the things from which we’ve vowed to abstain during Lent. Given the number of renunciations people have listed on the kitchen bulletin board, this took some work.
Within moments of arriving home from school, the children were jowl-deep in slabs of rich, sugary, homemade lemon cake. Wiping the crumbs from their cheeks, they dispatched their homework at top speeds, after which those under the age of 12 rushed downstairs and, in defiance of all normal practice, were permitted by their controlling legal authority to watch television on a school night. I know: pretty depraved!
At dinner, there were glazed meats and buttery pastas and creamy salads and crisp-roasted vegetables, all washed down, in the case of the adults, with fermented liquids that would soon be verboten and all followed by more dense lemony wedges. By the end of supper, even the teenagers were pushing their plates away in groaning self-defense.
As for the controlling legal authority, she was waving her hand feebly in the air apparently in the hopes of summoning strong bearers with a litter who might take her to a gauzy bier where she could recover from the unbearable fatness of Tuesday.
Sadly, here was a taste of the penitential season to come, for there were no bearers and there was no bier: only a vast pile of pots and dishes to wash and — ugh, still! — at least another two pounds of that cake.
No one went for a run on Tuesday, or even a brisk walk, because that’s what Lent is for. Lent is also for not gobbling sweets, not drinking wine or coffee, not overeating, not gossiping, not staying up late on weeknights, not eating meat on Fridays, and generally not living in the soft, sybaritic mode that typically prevails.
What I’m describing may, I realize, sound like a type of austerity more appropriate to a toxin-purging spa visit than to the time of spiritual deepening that Christians have observed since the second century A.D.
Yet a few weeks of abstemiousness can work wonders in the heart, if only by awakening a sense of gratitude for ordinary pleasures. Gratitude leads our thoughts both heavenwards, and outwards to the people we love. There really is a direct line between self-denial and fulfillment, but sometimes we have to pay close attention to see the connection. Lent gives us that chance.
Plus, Lenten privations are voluntary and reversible. In one family I know, the father gave up coffee last year because he thought it might make him a kinder and calmer man. After a week of Lenten fasting and unbelievable grouchiness, his wife and children begged him, for mercy’s sake, to please, please have an espresso. He did, and harmony resumed.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
