What did you give up for Lent?
One year, I went to the campus’s Newman Center for Ash Wednesday mass. This day marks the beginning of Lent, the liturgical season leading up to Easter. The priest told us a pretty good homily. It started with a joke:
A priest was out walking one night when he suddenly heard a voice behind him. “Put up your hands, turn around slowly, and hand over your money.”The priest then launched into a pretty detailed history of the practice of giving up stuff for Lent — which Wikipedia sadly lacks, and which I mostly forget. I vaguely remember something about new converts to Christianity voluntarily wearing a sack of ashes over their head and rolling around in the dirt, or something similarly odd, but I’m probably mistaken about that.
The priest put up his hands and turned around slowly, as instructed. But he answered honestly, “I’m sorry, I haven’t got any money.”
The robber’s eyes widened upon seeing the priest’s collar, and he lowered his weapon. “Oh man, I didn’t know I was robbing a priest! Now I feel really awful. I’m sorry, Father.”
The priest responded, “Well, of course this isn’t right, but I understand that you’d only resort to such measures if you felt driven to it. I wish I could help you. All I have on me, though, is a cigar.”
“Oh, no thanks, Father,” the robber replied. “I gave up smoking for Lent.”
The point, anyway, was that there is nothing in the Bible that specifies this practice. Jesus never said to give up stuff for Lent. New converts had done this as part of a voluntary ritual to demonstrate their commitment, and somewhere along the way, the Catholic church decided it made for good doctrine. Here, though, our priest told us outright that we shouldn’t bother giving up stuff just because we had been told that we had to do this — we should only do it voluntarily, as early converts had done, as a gesture of our commitment that we find personally meaningful.
That may sound pretty commonsensical to you, but let me emphasize what a big deal this is. I went into a Catholic mass — something many or most of us only do out of a lingering and vague sense of obligation as it is — and the guy running the mass told us that we should think for ourselves, not just blindly follow the doctrine of the church. What’s more, he pointed out that the Church’s doctrine is more or less arbitrary.
I wanted more priests like this. I wanted the whole Catholic church to have more priests like this, and indeed, I have met a few others. I found out later, though, that this particular priest was in the Newman Center after having been booted from other parishes for being too liberal. That was when I started wondering how much longer I could really continue to call myself a Catholic.
