'Doing' Lent may be a small first step in restoring us to reality, writes JOHN WATERS.
I’M OFF lattes for Lent. I haven’t “done” Lent for aeons, but this year, with all the talk about belt-tightening, thought I should. Actually, I’m off coffee, since it was pointed out by my ethical adviser that just going off lattes would leave a loophole which might permit me to succumb to, say, a cappuccino around St Patrick’s Day.
I don’t actually like coffee that much (Where I come from, coffee came in a bottle and indicated unhealthy social ambition). But I don’t think of lattes as coffee, more as coloured milk, which when sweetened make the perfect comfort drink. I developed a weakness for them in the Tiger years, so giving them up for
Lent is by way of reminding myself what life was like before we got rich, which I gather we did, and “lost the run of ourselves”.
“Doing” Lent is a bit of buzz in itself, since I only recently began to realise that, for most of my life, I had freedom the wrong way round. Lents past, I used to take up doing and consuming things I wouldn’t normally be bothered with, by way of elaborately repudiating the tyranny of imposed self-denial. I would eat fish any day except Friday and give up blueberry muffins as soon as Easter was over. Childish, I know, but there it is.
I had an epiphany recently in a Texaco station on the N4 near Lucan. I had fallen into the habit of stopping there whenever I drove west, for a fill-up and a beverage, finding few things in Irish life as exhilarating as driving west out of the dawn, with no company but Bob Dylan and a hot skinny latte. Then, last Sunday week, I encountered an “out of order” notice on the coffee machine and a truckdriver manfully making himself a cuppa from a jar of Nescafe Gold.
I was devastated. I don't mean I was a little annoyed: I was beside myself with disbelief and disappointment. This, I grumbled to Bob all the way to On the Runon the Mullingar bypass, was more of it – the constant erosion of the quality of life under left-leaning coalitions. I briefly considered calling Joe. I was bereft.
By the time I hit Newtownforbes, it had begun to occur to me that this was a disproportionate response to the temporary unavailability of coffee-coloured milk. That’s when I decided I should see how life felt without it. It is a modest sacrifice arising out of a minor hedonism, but in both the symbolic and practical senses it does something for me.
At the level of collective culture, our societies misunderstand addiction, thinking usually of chemical dependency and outright junkie disintegration.
But addiction is a much more subtle and ubiquitous phenomenon, having as its principal symptom the evasion of reality.
It’s not just the chemicals: sometimes it’s the distraction, the comfort, the habit or the sweetness, and always the blocking out of the real. Things we tend to think of as making us free are often the sources of our enslavement.
Sometimes it is good to contemplate that letting go of things we think essential may not cause as much pain as we imagine. Self-denial is not always a penance: sometimes it can become an exercise in self-liberation.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, on his recent visit, suggested that recession may not be an entirely bad thing for Ireland. The downturn, he said, “also allows your natural instinct, which may have been blunted somewhat by greed and riches, to return, to get back to the real you, and the real you is someone who will care”.
I’m not sure I’d go that far. Anyone who has been listening to the radio could be under no illusion that the downturn is about to make us more caring, the most audible elements of the discussion being smugness and rage.
I tend towards the analysis offered by the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, in his homily in UCD on Wednesday. “I do not like the ‘a little bit of recession is good for the soul’ argument,” he said. “The tragic thing is that those who lived well in times of prosperity will live reasonably well in times of recession. Those who were poor or in a position of precariousness will pay the terrible price of becoming poorer and find themselves in an even more precarious situation.”
This is so. And there is a further point to be made concerning the circumstances of the present meltdown. It is one thing to choose privation, and quite another to have it forced upon you. Those who predict that recession will be good for the soul of Ireland seem not to understand that what most people long for now is not an enhanced spirituality but the restoration of economic security.
This suggests that those who have been expecting the re-emergence of some putative suppressed Christian element of Irish culture are likely to be disappointed.
There remains a job of work to be done in talking us round to a coherent sense of our own natures and the reality of human desire.
Unfashionable as it may seem, perhaps “doing” Lent might be a good way to begin.