IT SEEMS almost a rude thing to mention – but it is spring, you know. Birds are throwing shapes in the garden, there have been sightings of snowdrops and daffodils have materialised, as if by magic, at the supermarket checkouts. It is becoming less cold, which is the most we can hope for. Soon the lawns will need mowing. There is also quite a lot of daylight out there, if we could tear ourselves away from shouting at the news long enough to see it. And then there is Lent., writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
We will get to Lent in a moment; well, on Wednesday. But first of all we have to admit that never has spring been such a shock to a country. Nationally we seem to have been expecting, nay, looking forward to, a 12-month winter of black mornings, dark afternoons and unremitting misery. It’s no fun finding yourselves cast into the outer darkness, particularly with Brussels breathing down your neck. Now we’ll have to take the unremitting misery with a sprinkling of cherry blossom.
Presumably humans have felt like this before. The shock of spring does put things in perspective. Lambs do not really worry about recessions, and snowdrops carry on regardless. Even those of us who are not fond of them have to admit that daffodils are tenacious little blighters; truly, daffodils know the meaning of the phrase going forward, and they drag us with them. We do need reminding that there are alternative ways of looking at the world.
Lent, which also always comes as a surprise, starts on Wednesday. What can we give up, now that all our luxuries, if they have not been taken from us, have become socially unacceptable and must be enjoyed behind closed doors? How can we atone for all this sin?
There was a time, back in the 20th century, when Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, a man who has not been celebrated for his sensitivity, offered Dublin Catholics the option of taking Lent easy, on the grounds they were suffering enough already. That was back when life in Ireland was one long economic downturn, so things must have been grim that year.
At the moment there is a real argument for declaring the last six months as having constituted a national and indeed global Lent, and that 40 days of feasting should start on Wednesday with us breaking out the Easter eggs and the roast lamb. We know we were wrong, but how much sackcloth and ashes can one country wear?
For an entire generation Ash Wednesday has been pushed to the margins of our culture, but that does not mean it has not had its uses. Bertie was a great man for the ashes. The best ever photograph of our former taoiseach was taken on an Ash Wednesday; and there do seem to have been a lot of photographs of Bertie taken on Ash Wednesdays. This photograph showed a grinning Bertie, with the ashes on his forehead, attending a function commemorating the anniversary aircrash that killed the Busby Babes, stars of his favourite football team, Manchester United. Truly that photo said a lot about that mysterious man.
Bertie never let an Ash Wednesday slip, even at a time when we seemed to have skipped the atonement part of religion. We outsourced our sins and brought in a fantastic management package that allowed us to look penitent. You have to say it was a wonderful system, one that could only have emerged from a Catholic culture.
Maybe a bit of Lent is no harm. Although it has traditionally been soft on financial crime, Catholicism has always done sorrow and deprivation well. Ash Wednesday used to be one of the most powerful days in the Christian calendar. There was a grandeur about all those statues standing in the churches, covered in purple shrouds. And there is a nice privacy still in people giving up little comforts, such as sweets or alcohol, for the 40 days of Lent. It would be very interesting to see the statistics on that this year. But perhaps we should be grateful there is still one area of human activity through which statisticians cannot roam. I would find it difficult to give up shouting at the news for 40 days. I couldn’t hold out that long. It wouldn’t seem natural. Maybe I should try.
These days the most striking thing about Lent is that, like spring, it is a reminder of a different way to measure the passing of the year. It connects us with a time before our days were counted out by the television schedules and the greeting cards industry. The dominance of this new calendar is a shame, because there are times when the only thing to do is to wail and gnash the communal teeth – and not necessarily on Liveline.