Your Lenten Penance
I was inspired by a meeting with an old friend last evening to supply you, free of charge, a suitable, church-approved Lenten penance that could replace any other sacrifice during those 40 days. Ideally, you should read a little of this every day during Lent, but, if I were you, I would read it all now and then reflect on it later on a daily basis until the glories of Easter (at least). This friend takes my annual holiday/end of the year letter and reads it over Lent as his own penance, and he recommended I send that letter out at the beginning of Lent so others might do the same. This is my idea, which is way better than his, as are most of my ideas (the rest are only better).
Your first penance: you will read a brief account, as I understand it, of the life of the friend I met as well as one of my many humorous stories recounting a few of his numerous eccentricities .
Vincent Seiwert graduated from Notre Dame University with a degree in English and a plan to be a teacher. He moved to northern Maine (Aroostook County) for his first job but quickly became disillusioned with teaching and his fellow teachers and instead became a lumberjack. He eventually bought land of his own and worked it as an independent lumberman until, in one of those uniquely American life twists, he went to medical school and did a year of internship before being stationed at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia where he worked in the Emergency Room of the small hospital and met me for the first time in August of 1993.
Sometime during my first year there, some of the doctors and a few of the P.A.s decided to rent a motor home and go to the Florida gulf coast to deep sea fish. Vince got the motor home and did all the driving, obeying the speed limits at all times. Space was tight for sleeping; I spent the first night in the area above the driver’s seat not sleeping right next to a flight surgeon with our heads adjacent to each other’s feet. Vince planned to pitch a tent on the roof of the motor home and spend the night up there in a sleeping bag. During the night there was a ferocious thunderstorm with high winds; turns out the roof of a motor home is not the ideal spot in such weather, and Vince relocated to the deep grass underneath the motor home for the rest of the night.
If you are even remotely human, that is not enough penance. Many of you are familiar with the Catholic tradition of giving up meat on Fridays in Lent. I give up “meat,” meaning chicken/beef/lamb/pork almost every day because it is unquestionably the best way to live. I read recently there are no legal standards at all for contamination in chicken parts, and chicken breasts are allowed to be contaminated with Salmonella up to 50% of the time and still considered safe for sale. The USDA essentially assumes chicken will be contaminated with potentially deadly infections and the buyer must be the one responsible for avoiding any illness by preparing it properly, or purchasing it after it has been properly prepared.
More penitential thoughts on meat eating: From “Meatonomics” – “As a nation, American consume more meat per person than anywhere else on the planet.” “compared to plant protein, raising animal protein takes up to one hundred times more water, eleven times more fossil fuels, and five times more land.” “For every dollar in retail sales of meat, fish, eggs and dairy, the animal food industry imposes $1.70 of external costs on society (external costs are pollution, waste, energy consumption, food poisonings, etc. Ed.) . You may know that livestock/future meat produces about 9% of the greenhouse gases in the US and 14% worldwide.
In addition to meat avoidance, Lent is also traditionally a time when Christians contemplate the suffering of Jesus, from His life of humble poverty to His crucifixion, which may have fulfilled the will of God but by all accounts was a miscarriage of justice.
Penitential quotes on suffering and injustice
Oscar Wilde, all from the brilliant must read, De Profundis:
“(Wordsworth said – ) suffering is permanent, obscure and dark and has the nature of infinity.”
“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share.”
“Society takes upon itself the right to inflict punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins. It is really ashamed of ifs own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted an irreparable, an irredeemable wrong.”
“Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.”
Ta Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic Monthly: “(We need to have) a broader understanding of black poverty as the product of public policy and private theft facilitated by racism. The belief that blacks have been given too much is made possible by the refusal to countenance how much was actually taken away in the first place.”
From the New Yorker: “Why have we become a nation that’s just obsessed with punishment? The reason is that we’ve become a fearful nation. The people that were once free and brave are so afraid of something bad happening to them. They’re attracted to politicians who say, ‘I will be tough on crime.’ And if a politician promises to be tough on crime he’s got to have something to show for it.”
To truly understand the world, we need to see how people live, get by on a daily basis, and how different the experience of life is for the poor in contrast with even the modestly wealthy. That is a better and more useful challenge than giving up chocolate for 40 days.