The Christian calendar is as enriching physically as it is spiritually
Thank God: Lent’s over. There’s nothing like abstinence to make the heart grow fonder of sweets, chocolate and milk in your tea, which was the sum of my own privations. I know, it pales by comparison with Orthodox Christians who go vegan during Lent, or the Archbishop of Canterbury who gave up lunch (yes; I asked him), but really, I didn’t have the moral fibre to give up drink. Good Friday yesterday was a proper fast day, mind you, but now it’s over. We’re back to normal. Which, in my case, is Mars bars and tea with milk, prior to the Easter egg tomorrow.
This is the tradition we’re used to: a 40-day season of abstinence – starting this year on Valentine’s Day – and finishing just as spring comes into its own (supposedly), on April Fool’s Day. And that feels right. In the Christian way of doing things, the fasting stops and the feasting starts when nature’s burgeoning, there’s new life everywhere, hens are laying and the spring lamb is really good, if you like the milk-fed sort. We give up abstinence, in other words, at a psychologically apt moment, when the days are longer and brighter. You can only really appreciate Easter – the culmination of the Christian calendar, the feast of the Resurrection – if you have been foregoing things you like for 40 days.
Compare and contrast, folks, with the contemporary cycle of the year. In the modern way of doing things, fasting happens in the month of January, often beginning on January 2 (which, incidentally, is bang in the middle of the 12 Days of Christmas). That’s when we start either dry January or Veganuary – or, worse still, a diet premised on giving up carbs. Going vegan is what medieval Christians did when they fasted – they also replaced meat with fish – and they had no illusions it was anything but privation. They ate beans because they were fasting or because they couldn’t afford meat or game.
In other words, precisely at the time when the weather is rubbish and all you want to do is to curl up round the equivalent of a fire, you’re expected to give up all the comforts of the season and go in for showy abstinence.
January is precisely when you need your carbs, your puddings, your hot punch, your saturated fats. It’s cold out there. The social historian Nick Groom, in his book, The Seasons, observes that the reason January and February now seem so long is that we’ve changed what used to be a time for eating and drinking into a period of privation. It doesn’t really make much sense.
It’s good for us to fast some of the time – psychologically and, as we now know, physically (mice who fast intermittently live longer, so the Church’s restrictions make physiological as well as spiritual sense).
But it’s even better to do it at the right time, and Lent happens to be the best possible season for it. So, Happy Easter. Time, tomorrow, to get stuck into the chocolate bunnies. We’ve earned it.