After Pancake pig out Tuesday comes Ash Wednesday.
The children attend a Catholic school. This means there was mass, and ash, and mash.
It was also a giant, sooty signal that Lent has begun.
Oscar, according to his teacher, is rather struggling with the concept of Lent.
This does not surprise me one iota. Children, I have found, tend to struggle with anything that means their normal egotistical, monomaniacal world view might get upset, and that they might have to relinquish something they like. Lent or no Lent.
As far as they are concerned, Lent is a thinly veiled synonym for misery.
I cannot disagree.
Apparently, when Oscar was asked about Lent he proffered up his profound ignorance.
When he was filled in on how Lent works his response was along the lines of:
‘But that’s rubbish!’
followed by:
‘What would I want to do that for?’
and then:
‘No. I’m just not doing that.’
I’m afraid I wasn’t very supportive of the teacher here. It’s not that I harbour anti Catholic sentiment, but I do harbour anti Lent sentiment and I am very much with the small, snotty boy on this one.
I really am not sure what not eating chocolate does for a person’s soul and their general state of grace, frankly. Does their abstinence from spending every free hour glued to CBBC mean that they are a better person at the end of 40 days and nights?
No. I don’t think so.
As with New Year, my take on these things is that abstinence and any form of self imposed suffering is just plain weird. Christ suffered for our sins, so that we don’t have to. I’m sure that includes him not being bothered one way or the other if we eat forty seven peanut butter Kit Kats before St. Swithins day or whatever.
I am a believer in adding to the world, not taking things away. I am much more comfortable with Oscar donating his pocket money for the duration of Lent to say, the NSPCC, or a promise that he will pick up any stray litter he sees on the street and bin it, or that he will help someone who needs it.
This, I believe, is what makes souls good and gooderer.
I did explain this to Oscar’s teacher, that this is the way we roll in the Boo household.
I’m not sure it has helped her any, given that regardless of what she may or may not feel about Lent, and abstinence and the Boo family and their strange, unorthodox ways, she still has to spend the next forty days trying to din something reasonably on message into his head.
Maybe I should suggest that he gives up giving his teacher worry lines for Lent?
When my children were small, my take on Lent was pretty much like yours, and I focused more on doing something that reminded us to try and follow Jesus’ example, and less on the whole concept of ‘suffering’. (Of course, we are Methodists, so maybe there’s a doctrinal difference there.) Our church also provided kids with a little piggybank type thing that was called something like ‘my Lent box’ and the idea was that you would put money in it during Lent and then bring it with you to church on Easter as your Easter offering. Our deal was that the boys could do extra work for me around the house/garden and then have the money to put into the box, which was very attractive to them when they are small. This year, DS14′s “sacrifice” is staying after school on Thursdays (this *is* a sacrifice, because it is the only day of the week that he doesn’t have stay after for another activity) to work with a group that is making ceramic ‘blessing bowls’ that will be auctioned off for a silent auction – proceeds to go to a TB clinic south of Seoul. This type of thing makes much more sense to me than giving up sugar or whatever. Kids are pretty concrete thinkers, and I think that doing something -rather than not doing something – is always going to make more sense to them. Oh well, it’s only 40 days, right?
I’m counting every one!
Despite my strict RC upbringing and education I was a sceptic before I even left Primary School and can remember in my early teens giving up going to the cinema for Lent every year. It was no great loss as I seldom went there anyway during term time. By the age of 16 I had formally given up being a Catholic and didn’t have to think of new and clever ways of not actually giving up anything ever again. Donating pocket money can be re-construed as giving it (or part of it) up and sending it to the less fortunate whatever. Would that help the teacher to accept the Boo way of life?
Sharon
That’s a good way of framing it.