Lent is not that hard

Blimey. Can Lent really be upon us again? Yes, it can. How time
flies when you are old and unemployable. The arrival of Lent has not
caught commerce sleeping. Barclays has once again, and to its credit,
given permission for its headquarters at Canary Wharf to be used for
Ash Wednesday Mass, which this year is to be celebrated by Archbishop
Vincent Nichols. About 500 people, not all of them Catholics, are
expected to attend.

The supermarkets have been pretty pro-active, of course. My local
Sainsbury's has been selling hot cross buns for about a month now - two
packets of six buns for the price of one (89p) - and pretty soon its
shelves will be groaning with multiplying Easter Bunnies.

To some tender souls, the six weeks of the penitential season seem like
six months in chokey. I know that feeling, but Lent is not what it was.
Within the memory of men still living - as I see from my 1952 Burns,
Oates Small Missal - all the weekdays of Lent were days of fasting.

That may seem rather a tall order, but was it? Technically, as any
Pharisee will tell you, fasting consists of taking one full meal a day
and a couple of small meals or snacks as needed, which is what most
people survive on these days anyway, often getting fat in the process.

Yet now the Church treats us as delicate children with uncertain
tempers, and all that is required of us is that we fast and abstain on
Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We can do as we please on all the other
days of Lent.

Still, let's not get all fogey about this. There is, after all, nothing
to stop me from fasting daily, and it could be that the emphasis
nowadays on doing things rather than on not doing them encourages a
positive attitude towards the Faith.

Accentuating the positive need not be the easy way out. Imagine, for
example, that instead of foreswearing some good, you make it your
Lenten project to be kind to the people you love. Easy peasy? No. After
a week of smiling at your wife, your pets, your children, the strain
may become so great that you will wish you'd decided to go on a diet of
bread and water.

Nor is self-denial is always selfless. Even pagans give up health
hazards (smoking, drinking, rich foods) for Lent. When in my drinking
days I gave up alcohol for Lent, I was really giving up getting drunk.
I did not admit it, of course, even when I found myself celebrating
Easter by drinking too much.

Being bad, in other words, was my reward for being good. What I'd done
was to give up sin (or its occasion) for Lent. Come Easter and I could
get back to "normal".

Soon the more flamboyant among us will be telling their friends what
they are giving up for Lent. The one good thing I'd most like to give
up for Lent is tobacco, but I can't. The sad truth is that I no longer
smoke. If it did not make me feel ill, I am pretty sure I'd be smoking
still. It was something that brought joy to my youth.

Hang on. Might it be virtuous of me to take up smoking for Lent -
precisely because it makes me feel unwell? There's a thought. And who
knows? Maybe if I persevered, I'd get the taste back...

***

Barack Obama's decision to end manned expeditions to the moon has upset
some people, but I welcome it unreservedly. How could anyone object to
this giant leap backwards for mankind?

(OK, the Chinese will take up the slack, but we have got to get used to that anyway...)

I remember watching the moon landing in Sydney in 1969, when I was
working for Pacific Islands Monthly. Someone in the office, a Catholic
who should have known better, said we were witnessing the greatest
event in history.

Poppycock. What about the Incarnation and the Crucifixion? Come to
think of it, if you will forgive the sudden jump from the sacred to the
profane, what about the Beatles' first LP?

So far as I can make out, the moon landing brought us nothing but
conspiracy theories - apparently if you look at the film carefully you
will see that it was shot in a back lot at Universal Studios - and the
Teflon frying pan. We could live without both.

***

When I was walking my dog on Tooting Common at the weekend I looked up
at some green parakeets hopping about and screeching in the branches
above me and wondered idly whether it was against the law to shoot
these creatures.

Then I remembered how as a boy I used to shoot sparrows with my .177
air rifle, and my thoughts were no longer idle. My old pal Guilt popped
up alongside me and said cheerfully: "Wotcha, cock! Haven't spoken to
you since breakfast!"
Shooting at tin cans was fun; shooting bottles was better; paper
targets were a bit boring: nothing pinged or broke when you hit the
target, nothing was destroyed. That's why sparrows were such a joy. You
knew that you'd destroyed something when you shot a sparrow dead.

Obviously we liked a clean kill: we felt a bit squeamish if we winged a
bird and it lay twiching and flapping on the path. When that happened,
we had to reload the rifle, press the muzzle against the temple of the
bird, and, thwack, kill it.

The horror, the shame. What savages we were.

"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father."

***

A survey last week suggested that people who owned cats were cleverer
than people who owned dogs, because cat-owners were more likely to have
university degrees than dog-owners.

Well, OK, if you like. But even if they are a bit thick, dog people are
obviously nicer than cat people, no? Just think of the dog people...
er... well, me, Rod Liddle, Adolph Hitler. And the cat people? Benedict
XVI, T S Eliot. Time for a rethink, I think.

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