If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. Luke 9:23
It is commonly known that Carnival was born out of Lent. In the old days, Lent used to be very long, more than forty days of fasting, abstinence, penance, and sacrifice. Something like a period of mourning; there were purposely no parties or celebrations of effusion and joy, and no weddings were celebrated during Lent.
During this Lenten period, Christians were exhorted to do exercises of introspection that would lead to greater self-awareness, that is, to be aware of their life and responsible for their daily behaviour in an attitude of self-criticism with a view to a metanoia, that is, a change of mind and life, a conversion.
The days of Carnival, which preceded the Lenten season of penance and discipline, were the opposite of Lent. While during Lent you do not eat meat, during Carnival you eat meat galore. Carnival day, i.e. Shrove Tuesday, precedes Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of Lent. In the Italian and French tradition, it is called “Mardi Gras”, or “Fat Tuesday”, because it is the day on which meat was abused as a way of saying goodbye to this food until Easter.
If Lent is a time of melancholy, dolence and introspection, Carnival is a time of joy, extroversion, and revelry; if Lent is a time of discipline, Carnival is a time of unruliness; at Carnival take no offense is play time; "It's Carnival, anything goes”.
Breaking one day many of the rules, fasts and diets, a monk said to his scandalized and dumbfounded disciple, for a bow of arrows to work well, it cannot always be tense. Our people wisely say, "you only live once”.
The evil of our time is that Carnival no longer precedes Lent. We are back to the "bread and circuses" of the Romans as the only modus vivendi. There is Carnival, yes, and it is becoming more and more refined, but there is no Lent; Carnival stayed while Lent disappeared even in the Church where it still exists today. but in a light or decaffeinated mode.
The Devil fleeing from the Cross
The world has become accustomed to tobacco without nicotine, coffee without caffeine, Coca-Cola Light without calories, beer without alcohol; this paradigm of roses without thorns has easily extrapolated to other realities and areas of individual and social life, so that today we also have Christmas of the consumerist Santa Claus, without the birth of Jesus; Easter of the chocolate bunnies and eggs, without the death and resurrection of Jesus; Halloween, that means, All Hallows’ Eve, without the Feast of All Saints.
Extrapolating even further, we have sex without love of the one-night stand, living together without commitment, with the belief that it is possible to live without inconvenience, and hassles, suffering, discomfort, sacrifice, work, a definitive effort without a cross.
In a world where reality and the truth of things are contradicted, where we want both the sun on the threshing floor and the rain on the meadow, where we want our cake and eat it too, the words of Jesus inviting us to embrace the cross, sound counterculture and against the current.
We know from exorcisms that the devil flees from the cross; we are just like the devil when we flee from the cross because we shun that part of life. Life is not possible without suffering, sacrifice and effort. Although human maturity, as Freud says, implies abandoning the pleasure principle to embrace the reality principle, the world stubbornly settles on the pleasure principle.
Unlike the rest of the world, we Christians are called not to "run away in fear. As the Spaniards say, we are called "to take the bull by its horns", in embracing the cross and the suffering that life throws at us to a greater good and a better future.
Embracing the cross without being masochistic
The cross is the desert that the Jews crossed to reach the promised land; and despite the temptation to reject that cross, inspired by hunger and a return to the meat pans of Egyptian slavery, the Jews understood that freedom had a price, and they were willing to pay for it by moving forward and embracing the cross.
This story has become a paradigm for abandoning all repetitive, obsessive, and addictive vices and behaviours. Egypt is the substance or behaviour to which we are addicted, and which deprives us of our freedom; the promised land is the full freedom and regaining control of our life; at the center is the desert, that is, the cost of purging, purification; the temptation to go back to addiction is caused by the withdrawal syndrome. Without pain and sacrifice, we cannot give up drugs or alcohol, or start a diet, and be faithful to the end.
Everything good in life costs and has a price, either money, effort, or both. The joy of victory is not felt without the ardor and sacrifice of battle, and the more difficult the battle, the more intense is the joy of victory and its celebration. But there is no joy of victory without the ardor of battle.
The cross is always the means to the desired end. The student's cross is to force himself to study instead of going from party to party; the cross of those who want to lose weight is their diet; the athlete’s cross is the strict diet, the way of life and the training in which he invests hours to gain seconds to his own record.
Gymnasium and gymnastics of the Cross
Christians do not go looking for the cross, they only need to accept it when they come across it. In this sense, at first glance, the Lenten practices of fasting, abstinence and sacrifice may seem artificial and masochistic, but if we think about it, they serve to strengthen our willpower, spirit, freedom, and independence from the things of the world. In the same way as what we do in a gym, meaningless exercises, running and swimming without a goal, is aimed to strengthen the body, boosting health.
Conclusion – Carnival can be a liberating catharsis when followed by Lent. Without it, life becomes bread and circuses; that is, living for oneself on the margins of values, ideals, and commitments.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
No comments:
Post a Comment