Secular suffering for nothing
Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.
While Catholic observances tend to at least somewhat baffle those who are not familiar with them, and therefore reinterpret them either though the bigoted Anglicization of popular history they've received, or through their own broken lenses on the world, lots of people are at least somewhat familiar with them. One of the things they're somewhat familiar with is fasting.
We've dealt with this before, but Latin Rite Catholics have a minimal duty of fast and abstinence during Lent. And it is indeed very minimal. The fast days are now down to two. There are more days of abstinence during Lent.
And this post isn't about that.
Rather, this post is about American secular suffering and its pointless nature.
I'm occasionally the accidental unwilling silent third person in a long running conversation between two people on diets, which they're constantly off and on. The oddity of it is that neither of the two people involved have any need whatsoever to be on a diet. They aren't even ballpark close to being overweight. None the less, they'll go on diets and the diets tend to be based on pseudoscience.
I don't want to be harsh on people for this as there's now so much pseudoscience in American culture it's simply mind boggling. We've gone from a society that in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized science to one that now abhors it and goes for non scientific faddism. There are so many examples of this that actually going into all of it would require a blog the size of the Internet at this point. Food faddism is common.
Not a day goes by when I don't get a bunch of spam posts (and how ironic that they'd be called "spam" devoted to dietary bullshit, most of which has to do with eating something that will "melt away fat", probably overnight so that you don't have to be inconvenienced while watching television during the day. It's not going to do that. A wild example of that is one that bills itself as some sort of ice cream, with the photographs in the spam showing chocolate ice cream. Chocolate ice cream is disgusting in the first place, and it's not going to make you think.
Anyhow, these two fit people are constantly on diets of the faddish variety, involving such things as "cleanses" and the like. None of that does anything, at least not in the way a person thinks. Some of it might, accidentally, such as abstaining from alcohol. That'll do something, but not in a cleanse fashion. And some of it probably does something as it approaches a sort of low yield style of intermittent fasting.
I've now watched people on diets for decades, and I'm wholly convinced that none of them doing anything whatsoever. I've watched people on Keto lose weight and then balloon back up to just as heavy as they were before, for example.
Nothing ultimately escapes from the basic fact that weight=calories in-calories out. That's it.
So you can be on keto, but if you eat bacon and eggs for breakfast, a ham for lunch, and then go eat a big dinner, you're going to be really heavy if you are an office worker. Pretty simple.
That is why, I'll note, intermittent fasting actually does cause people to lose weight, but it's not a diet, it's fasting. I'll also note that I'm not a doctor and I'm not telling you to fast to lose weight. If you need to lose weight, see your doctor. A real doctor. Not the homeopathic doctor of Burmese weight loss and orthopody. No, not him. A real bonafide physician. They exist.
Anyhow, I don't think that a lot of people need to go on diets at all, including the folks I just noted.
Now, some people really do. A lot of Americans are really, really, heavy. Some say a majority are overweight. I get that. But none the less I'd guess about 60% of the people I see on diets or discussing diets are not overweight. I don't think they go on diets, deep down, as they're overweight.
They do it as they need to be suffering for something.
Now, this gets back to Lent. Catholics don't fast and abstain in order to suffer. They do it in order to focus and build discipline, and sacrifice for their sins. If it involves an element of suffering, well so do a lot of things.
But devoted Catholics accept suffering as part of life. It's inescapable. Life is full of suffering. Part of that suffering is brought about by license.
The irony of freedom is that freedom to chose isn't freedom. License doesn't actually equal liberty. The freedom to chose is the freedom to chose wisely, and that brings a sort of real freedom. It doesn't mean, kid like, that I can choose to eat ice cream for dinner, and it doesn't mean, modern society like, that I chose all the members of the opposite sex, or whatever, that I might fancy at the moment.
And indeed, that sort of "freedom" leads not to freedom but to slavery. People become enslaved to their wants. A massive amount of American culture is now presently completely devoted to slavery of this type, particularly sexual slavery of both an intellectual and actual kind. The entire pornography industry is a type of "white slavery", involving the prostitution of women and the enslavement of men to lust.
Catholic fasting ties into freedom as it has as an element the concept of building resistance to enslavement. If you can say no to food you can also say no to alcohol, or tobacco, or to vice. It might take practice, hence the discipline of fasting.
Which is also why the slow Latin relaxing of fasting and abstinence rules was, in my view, a real mistake. The concept of the Church in North American, for example, that relaxing abstinence on Friday's throughout the year would result in the substitution of a meaningful personal substitute was, frankly, largely wrong.
And it achieves, of course, more than that.
Fasting, experienced as a form of self-denial, helps those who undertake it in simplicity of heart to rediscover God’s gift and to recognize that, created in his image and likeness, we find our fulfilment in him. In embracing the experience of poverty, those who fast make themselves poor with the poor and accumulate the treasure of a love both received and shared. In this way, fasting helps us to love God and our neighbour, inasmuch as love, as Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches, is a movement outwards that focuses our attention on others and considers them as one with ourselves.
Pope Francis, Lenten message, 2021.
Secular fasting doesn't actually achieve anything. But then, much of modern American life is aimless and directionless. It's been wholly focused on materialism and nothing else. People aren't rooted to place or people as those things interfere with "freedom". They aren't bound by traditional rules of right and wrong, obligation and duty, service to country and community, or the obligations imposed by law outside of the civil law, those being the walls of canon law and natural law, and biological law. They aren't even accepting of the final binds of death, which Americans don't acknowledge as real, and which provides the reason that at 40 years old you aren't going to be the physical specimen you were at 20, and things will certainly be different at 60.
Now, to be sure, most Catholics are no different in the modern world than anyone else. A people who were once outside of the culture as they were different, where they were a minority, and were outside the world in a way as they were distinct from it even where they were a majority, now fall prey to all the modern vices that are portrayed as virtues, and self excuse those that are regarded by the Church as sins. Some of the Church religious itself, mostly older baby boomer aged whose time is past but they don't realize it, still campaign to overthrow Church law in the name of temporal freedom, not realizing that they propose to bring in the chains of slavery. None of that, however, changes the basic point.
Humans sense that abundance can be slavery. They also reject so often the breaking of their chains. But even when they do, they reach out, darkly, to the disciplines that would free them. They sense they have to do something, and often substitute suffering, vaguely, for the practices that would open the manacles.
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent for Western Christians, Lent being the (approximately) forty day long penitential season preceding Easter. Great Lent, the Eastern Christian seasons, precedes Ash Wednesday and commences on Clean Monday for Eastern Christians on the new calendar, but not on the old calendar which has, of course, which departs from the calendar we're otherwise familiar with. The day is named for the Catholic practice, which is observed by at least some Anglicans and Lutherans as well, of placing ashes on the foreheads of those who come to the Ash Wednesday service, with the reminder being made that from ashes you were made, and from ashes you will return.*
For Latin Rite Catholics, Ash Wednesday is a day of fast and abstinence. I.e, they eat only one full meal on this day and it can't include meat, which under Latin Rite Catholic rules does not include fish. For Eastern Christians a much stricter Lenten fast and abstinence set of rules applies. This sacrifice serves the purpose of being penitential in nature.
It also serves to really set Catholics apart, as fasting and abstinence are the rage in the west now, but for purely secular purposes, not all of which square with science or good dietary practices.
For the members of the Apostolic faiths, Lent also serves as a time in which for penitential reasons they usually "give up" something. A lot of people have a really superficial understanding of this, assuming that Catholic "give up" desert or chocolate or something, and in fact quite a few people do something like that. Indeed, as an adult I've been surprised by how many Catholics (usually men) give up drinking alcohol, which means that frequent consumption of alcohol is pretty common society wide in a way that we probably underestimate.
Indeed, just recently, on that, I was asked by an exuberant Catholic Midwestern expat, who seemingly has no boundaries at all, on what I was "giving up" for Lent. This was the week prior to Ash Wednesday at which time I wasn't particularly focused on it myself. The same fellow asked at least one Protestant what she was giving up, with that Protestant being a member of one of the American millennialism religions, to receive a totally baffled reply. Indeed, I'm sure they don't celebrate Lent at all, so the question was odd. Anyhow, he was giving up alcohol and asked if I'd like to join him, to which I absent mindedly said sure. Later he was wondering if I thought it would be tough, which I'm sure it won't be at all and I'll have to find something else to mark Lent really. But that sort of "giving up" line of thinking is very common.
In a lot of Catholic cultures the Lenten penitential observations have traditionally been much stronger, which helps explain Mardi Gras as we just discussed. Even well after the Latin Rite rules were very much relaxed, in many Catholic areas, including Catholic areas of the United States, people engaged in much more extensive penitential observations with the "giving up chocolate" type thing really sort of an introduction to the practice. In Louisiana, without going into it too deeply, there was traditionally a big spike in births nine to ten months after Easter, which reflected a very widespread serious observation among Catholic couples as to their penitential practice, for example.
Some of that is really coming back, which reflects an interesting trend towards a deeper understanding of their faiths by members of the Apostolic faiths and even a return of Lenten traditions in some Protestant ones. During the full "Spirit of Vatican Two" era there was a lot of attention devoted to not giving anything up but rather to work on some spiritual need. I.e, be self reflective and work on what that lead you to. At the same time, the misuse of the word "fasting" became very common, with there being advice, even from the clergy, to fast from things other than food or drink. You can't really fast from sinful behavior, or from narcissism, for example. You can't even "fast" from the Internet, although "giving it up" for Lent might be a darned good idea (one that I really ought to consider, probably).
A lot of that is now passing and there's been a real return to more traditional observations of Lent, including fasting but also forms of dedicated worship and observation.
Which brings me to the next thing about "giving up". One feature of this season is that many Apostolic Christians, as it is the season of repentance, have used the season to break bad conduct when there's support, spiritual and temporal, for doing it. People with alcohol problems will use it to break them, smokers will quit smoking during Lent so they can quit smoking. And sometimes people with serious attachments to sin take it head on during Lent, with some people I've known even announcing the renouncement of what are very serious sins from a Christian purpose over Lent in the hopes of breaking from the permanently. And many who do that, succeed at doing that.
Which in turn takes us to our final observation. This season, which is lead by the Apostolic faiths but which is observed by at least some of the Protestants as well, tend to turn the self indulgent retained Puritan abstinence on its head. I've noted this before, but North American and the Northern Europe may have strayed enormously from Calvinist influence in terms of faith, but not in terms of the concept that public suffering is really necessary. That retained concept explains in large part the real focus in these lands, as opposed to others, in "giving up" something for no real purpose other than the sense it must be done. People give up all sorts of things that Apostolic Christians around the world give up for forty some days, and often on a declared permanent basis (they fail at it more often than not), with it being notable that the purely secular nature of that makes it shallow from the onset. Indeed, plenty of people who will spend Lent scoffing at Catholics for Lent will spend part of the season or all of it on some no carb, or no meat, or whatever, diet, for no real reason other than a constructed one. Suffering, in many instances, is the ultimate goal of those efforts, but suffering without something to redeem it.
For Apostolic Christians, all fasts are followed by feasts, and that's something to remember.
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*I don't think this is a practice in the East and its not a requirement for Catholics, something that in fact even confuses some Catholics. Ash Wednesday is widely observed by Catholics and the placing of the ashes isn't restricted to Catholics. Perhaps for that reason quite a few Catholics assume it is a Holy Day of Obligation.
One thing of note here is that Ash Wednesday also serves to point out to everyone who is a Catholic, as if a person has ashes on their head, they're probably Catholic, although not necessarily. By the same token, if you are known to be a Catholic and don't make it to Ash Wednesday you'll tend to get comments about it.
