If Christmas is the season to be jolly, is Lent the season to be gloomy?

There was a similar mentality regarding fasting during the time of Christ. Fasting was to be accompanied by a gloomy face – perhaps not the exact words, but that was the drift - or some other visible sign to tell everyone that you are fasting. Christ criticised this attitude.

Lent is not a time for gloom. On the contrary, it is the preparatory period for the greatest feast in the Christian calendar – Easter. It is a time for reflection on and examination of our basic choices and fundamental options.  This, truly, can bring some pain with it; but it is pain of the redemptive kind, that is pain that leads to healing. The recognition of our basic sinfulness is a painful exercise which is however tempered by the realisation the God of Love waits for us to embrace us. A good physical workout in the gym is also painful. We do it to burn unwanted calories. We believe that it makes sense to invest in this kind of pain to benefit from a healthier and – hopefully – happier lifestyle. Believers feel that it is similarly beneficial to burn dross that is worse than extra calories, that is sin.

The penance which Christians were traditionally asked to do during Lent does not make a lot of sense today. Abstaining from eating meat on two days in the year is hardly a penance when we are encouraged by nutritionists to keep away from certain kinds of meat all the year round. Besides is abstaining from meat a sacrifice when one can legitimately eat fish?

The same applies to fasting. The way the two days of fasting are regulated would be considered as a  nice break by anyone who is on a strict diet most of the year.

Besides, the concept of sacrifice has one meaning during times of economic boom but has a totally different meaning during these times of austerity. Most people are today doing harsher sacrifices each day of the week than we are ever asked to do by the Church during Lent.

We have therefore to think anew the true meaning of fasting, prayer and almsgiving, the tripod on which Lent stands.

The Resurrected Christ is the first of the new creation. This new creation means the renewal of the ‘old’ order of things and the heralding of a new order. The way of the world is based on consumption, production and money. In the new creation these three realities are to be radically restructured. Lent is the ideal time to put aside the ‘old man’ (to use Pauline terms) and bring forth the ‘new man’. Fasting, prayer and almsgiving are the antithesis of consumption,  production and money.

Fasting is a declaration that we can live without making consumption our idol. During prayer we ‘waste’ time, according to the logic of the ‘old man’. Prayer does not produce. When we pray we are making a strong statement  that progress is not achieved by production alone. Almsgiving undermines the secular dogma that only money can make the world go round.

During Lent we are expected to nurture the belief in the definitive victory of the Resurrected Christ and the feasibility of the new creation fashioning present life on earth. We are invited to exteriorise this belief though concrete actions. The declaration  - made through the acts of fasting, praying and almsgiving -  that God is more important to us than consumption, production and money is eminently  a spiritual statement and as a consequence it also included the taking of a political stance that will be actuated by incarnating the Gospel in the socio-economic-cultural structures of current society.