Lenten fasting brings its challenges

“I think this Lent we’ll give up meat,” I mused.

My husband, the super-traditionalist formerly Episcopalian convert, looked unhappy. Scotland is a meat-and-potatoes society, its diet consisting chiefly of meat, potatoes and distilled essence of grain.

“We can have fish, though, right?” he enquired.

“Sure,” I said. “We can have anything my grandparents would have had before 1963.”

Since every week we attend the beautiful Sunday Mass widespread before 1963, it seems only fair that we should observe the less marvellous pre-conciliar traditions, too. And this means fasting and abstinence from meat, not just on Fridays, but on the other days of the Lenten week.

“Except Sundays,” said my husband. “Every Sunday is a celebration of the Resurrection.”

On Shrove Tuesday we had pancakes.  

“Since we are going to be eating oil, butter and eggs all through Lent, it seems stupid to eat pancakes for Shrove Tuesday,” I said. “The Eastern Orthodox people give up those things, but we never do. So why pancakes? We should have Brazilian barbecue. It would be more meaningful.”

“There is no Brazilian barbecue in Edinburgh,” said my husband, getting out the frying pan.

But Scottish pancakes are not like Canadian pancakes. They are more like French crepes, so we wrapped them around leftover chicken and the last of the bacon in the fridge and munched meaningfully. As many other couples did that night, we pondered the rules for Ash Wednesday.

“Two collations and a meal not bigger than the two collations put together,” recited Mark.

“But how big is a collation?”

“It’s in the back of my ethics book,” said Mark. “It has the dry weight. You can weigh it on the scales.”

In Britain every kitchen has scales. It is impossible to follow a British recipe without scales. You could weigh a baby in mine.

“I’m not weighing my collations on the scales,” I said. “I’ll be accused of extreme asceticism. Rory the Organist has already warned me against extreme asceticism over the fish thing. I’ll have toast.”

“The problem is that we’ve been invited out to dinner,” said Mark, “so we don’t know how big it will be and therefore how small the collations should be.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s Ash Wednesday, so surely dinner won’t be very big.”

Dinner was rather big. It was vegetarian, but there were four courses. Nobody would accuse the host of extreme asceticism.

“It is hard to observe Lenten fasting when you’re invited out to dinner all the time,” I observed. “But on the other hand, who wants to serve monastic rations at a dinner party? There must be a golden mean. What shall we give the choir on Saturday?”

“Trout,” said Mark.

“With crevettes for starters,” I decided.

We walked to the fishmonger’s shop and pondered the fish. Our fishmonger’s shop is right beside the sea, so it gives the impression, at least, that fresh fish is boring, everyday food that locals eat out of necessity. Fish of many descriptions met the eye: trout, squid, salmon, haddock, scallops, mussels, clams, herring and a host of other catches. St. Peter and St. Andrew would have taken a keen professional interest. The crevettes, big shrimps, sat rosily in a cooked heap, their little beady eyes staring at us as if to say, “This is your idea of Lenten fasting? Huh!”

We bought eight crevettes and four fillets of trout.

“Maybe the new Lenten sacrifice in not eating meat is the expense of the fish,” I said.  

The guests stared down into the tiny judgmental eyes of the crevettes.

“This is like the description of the worldly cardinal in that book,” said Rory the Organist. “His Lenten table.”

“Let’s not be extreme ascetics here,” I said.

The Lenten prayers of the traditional Latin Mass rather stress that we are all giving up food for Lent. When I was a child in the 1970s, there was a sense that “giving up something for Lent” was determined by your own personal lifestyle choices. There was no communal agreement to give up something together; it was up to the individual, a solitary discipline of no candy or less television.

But in the old prayers, there is quite a lot of talk of “we.” For example, in the “Secret” of the First Sunday of Lent, the priest prays, “We solemnly offer the sacrifice at the beginning of Lent, beseeching Thee, O Lord, that, while we restrict ourselves in the use of bodily food, we may also refrain from indulgence in harmful pleasures.”

So whereas contemporary Catholics (apparently unlike our pre-conciliar ancestors, so often presented to us as monsters of hypocrisy) want to make our Lenten sacrifice personally meaningful, I think something is lost when it is entirely divorced from the communal spirit at the heart of Lenten traditions. Finding the balance, of course, is difficult.

(Cummings McLean is a Canadian writer living in Scotland and author of Seraphic Singles.)