It's that time of the year again when you hear people all around you start giving up things and it all makes me giggle to myself. The whole reasoning behind it is absurd but I will never knock anyone down for doing something that they believe. This post may seem a bit harsh. It may seem that I don't understand what I'm talking about but I was a forced practicing Catholic for the first eighteen years of my life. I am very aware of their teachings and this thing called Lent. Wikipedia's definition is as follows:
Lent (Latin: Quadragesima - English: Fortieth) is a solemn religious observance in the liturgical calendar of many Christian denominations that begins on Ash Wednesday and covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter Day.
The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer through prayer, penance, repentance of sins, almsgiving, atonement and self-denial. Its institutional purpose is heightened in the annual commemoration of Holy Week, marking the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the tradition and events of the New Testament beginning on Friday of Sorrows, further climaxing on Jesus' crucifixion on Good Friday, which ultimately culminates in the joyful celebration on Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Basically for this period of time people give up something that they love or enjoy. They give up some vice in honor of Jesus to prove something. I remember being a kid, listening to my parents tell me that I needed to give up something for Lent, for Jesus, and not understanding a thing they said. Why would Jesus care if I didn't eat candy for forty days? And at 34 years old that question still remains. Now I don't practice anymore. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten all the way through high school (with the exception of a two year hiatous when we moved to a small town that was heavily Baptist and my parents were forced to send me to public school because there was not a Catholic school option). I went to a Religion class every day in school. I went to church every Sunday followed by two hours of Sunday School where I learned even more about being a good person. And you know what I took from all of that? That at five I was already doomed to hell. At five years old, just a tiny little girl with the whole world in front of me, I was already too dirty and damned to hell because of an apple that some woman gave to some guy from some tree. The lessons just got more convaluted and more confusing as I grew. Love everyone but don't love homosexuals. Everyone is equal in God's eyes but women can't be priests. It just didn't add up so at eighteen when I was out from underneath my parents' thumb, I decided the church was not for me.
I do firmly believe that we all have the right to believe whatever we want. There are a million different religions out there that practice amazing faith. There are a million people out there who need that sort of community and I applaud them all for it. I am also a believer that not everyone needs a church to be a good person. I did go through a time in my life where I didn't think that a god existed. It was a rough patch. How could a God who loved me let me go through the tragedies that I faced? For years I struggled with whether or not there was anything out there at all. Then one day I had a baby. I looked at this beautiful, perfect little baby snuggled up to my chest and knew that there was something wonderful out there in the world bigger than me, bigger than any of us... but I knew religion was still not for me. So I started thinking back, remembering all the basics of what I learned as a child. I took away all the negatives, all the double standards, all confusing lingo. I understood that all those stories in the book that I was made to memorize were just stories. I understood what God was finally. He or She or It was not a person at all. It's love. It's love that pushes us forward, that challenges who we are, that forces us to make hard choices. The very foundation of most religion is love so why not just go with love? Why complicate it? I love my neighbor not because someone told me to but because I want to. I will help this man on the street who is hungry not because it will guarantee me a seat in heaven but because it's the right thing to do. He is need and I have the means to help him and that's all there is to it. We shouldn't need 40 days to remind us to be good people. We shouldn't need someone us telling us to stop eating candy in anyone's honor. Just love every day. That's it. It's that simple.
