What are you going to give up for Lent?
What better occasion to prove to yourself that you're not powerless over your addictions?
Dear Friends,
This year, Valentine’s Day falls on Ash Wednesday.
As crazy as this is to me, I’m guessing that not everyone even knows the significance of Ash Wednesday anymore, so let me give a quick Christianity 101.
Ash Wednesday is the day after Mardi Gras and is the beginning of Lent, the 40 days of spiritual austerity which precede Easter, the most holy days of the year for Christians.
What people don’t seem to realize is that Easter represents the triumph of good over evil.
The Passion of the Christ and the Resurrection can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, but ultimately Easter is about the triumph of good over evil, and the 40 days which precede it is a big part of the whole shebang.
For Christians, the holiest time of year begins on Wednesday, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day this year.
I guess not a lot of people love Lent, but I do. My father was a Christian alcoholic. You figure it out.
I always looked forward to Lent, because he would often try to give up drinking for Lent, and would sometimes succeed. Lent was a happier-than-normal time of year in our home.
I'm a big believer that “to the dead, you owe only truth”, and I shouldn’t make things sound worse than they were. My dad was sober for long stretches of time. I believe he made it over two years once. But in the end it got the better of him. We weren’t on speaking terms when he died.
Whenever someone tells me that they hate their parents, I always encourage them to try to do their part to fix things, because for me it’s too late.
I picked some songs that were played at his funeral. These are two of them.
Like most people with a pulse, I have alcoholic friends, some of whom are parents. I never know how to bring this up with them, but alcoholism is a horrible thing for children.
I don’t know if I can explain, and I don’t want to preach, so all I can do is ask people to search their hearts and ask themselves whether their drinking is likely to fuck their kids up. My dad’s alcoholism is definitely a big part of what fucked me up, that is for sure. But thanks to the Sun Dance I eventually forgave both him and myself, which was one of the most liberating experiences of my life. But I had the support of two separate spiritual communities - the church I grew up in and my Sun Dance tiyospaye. If it wasn’t for all the support I had, I could have easily wound up dying in an alley on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
I know that not all alcoholics are the same, so I’ll leave it up to you to decide what to take from this. All I’ll say is that I wouldn’t wish it on any child to grow up with one alcoholic parent, let alone two. People tend not to know what to do in such situations, and so they end up doing nothing.
The most moving thing that I have read this year was written by Rozali Telbis, and it was about her alcoholic father, who abandoned her and her sister when they were still very young.
It makes me appreciate the fact that my dad was always completely devoted to our family. As difficult as he could be sometimes, I’d never deny that. Now that I’m older, and time has passed, I’m able to have more compassion. You don’t realize all the things that your parents do for you when you’re a kid.
My father drank because he suffered from severe depression throughout his whole life, as well as some kind of undiagnosed psychotic illness. Schizophrenia runs in my family, and at least four of his first cousins are voice hearers. I assume that he drank to self-medicate, though I definitely didn’t see it that way at the time. I saw his alcoholism as a form of weakness, and I very much constructed my personality around my ideas of strength for this reason. I hated him while he was alive, but after he died, I hated myself because I blamed myself for his death. Thankfully, no one else did.
I still feel somewhat responsible for his death, because I’m sure the fact that he was estranged from me played a role in him taking his own life. I’m a thick-skinned person, and I can be cruel, but I know that that is a defence mechanism. I am normally an empathetic person, but I can reach a point which a shut-off valve is activated in my brain, and I just stop caring. It’s a learned response from childhood compassion fatigue. It’s served me well in some ways. I didn’t choose it, but it’s part of who I am.
I really am kind of an asshole, but for some reason people like me anyway. It’s kinda mysterious, but my best guess is that because unlike most people, I’m not full of shit.
Anyway, it just so happens that Lent falls on Valentine’s Day this year, and I know that for some of you out there, the best gift you could give your partner is to quit drinking, smoking crack, shooting up, whoring, gambling, or whatever else it is that you’re doing that you know that you really shouldn’t be doing.
In any case, I’m a big believer in Lent, so I thought that I’d repost something that I wrote about Lent last year.
I hope you like it, and as always, your comments are appreciated.
Love and Solidarity,
Crow Qu’appelle
p.s. Yes, you can do it. Maybe you’ll need help, but you can do it. And if you haven’t admitted to yourself that you have a problem and that you need help, Lent can help clear things up for you.
If you lack the willpower to stop drinking for 40 days, you have an addiction, pure and simple. The good news is that there is a recovery community out there, and there are tons of people that you have never even met who will be there to help you when and if you decide you want to quit.
LENT: A TRADITION WORTH PRESERVING
I`ve written a lot about religion this year, including quite a bit about Christianity. My regular readers will know that I was raised Christian, and the role that religion played in my childhood was definitely positive. My feelings about religion are very complicated, but all the Christian-bashing just got so extreme over COVID that I felt that I needed to speak up. A lot of churches have been burned down in Canada in recent years, and ministers were being jailed for holding church services when we were all supposed to be hiding from the Big Bad Virus.
It turns out that I feel more strongly about religious freedom than I had previously realized, because I was sickened to the core by the fact that many of my former friends supported these hate crimes.
To me, a church burning is no different than a mosque burning or a synagogue burning. There are some things that a decent person doesn`t do. Torching a place of worship is one of them. Or at least that`s the way I see it.
So, yeah, I guess I`m showing my contrarian-ness, because basically as soon as religion became illegal, it became way cooler in my mind. It also drove me kind of nuts how deeply ignorant many people are about Christianity. They don`t know enough about Christianity to have an informed opinion about it, yet they cheered on as dozens of places of worship were put to the torch. What in the hell is the matter with these people? Is nothing sacred? There`s really no denying it at this point. Anti-Christian bigotry is a real phenomenon in Canada.
Anyway, my basic argument is that every world religion contains hegemonic and counter-hegemonic tendencies within itself. In other words, in some ways religion reinforces state power. In other ways it limits it.
I guess a lot of what I have to say could be summarized as ¨let`s not throw the baby out with the bathwater¨. Whereas I fully acknowledge the complicity of many Christians with all manner of atrocities over its long history, I think that Christianity is part of our shared collective heritage, and contains many valuable ideas that we can draw inspiration from. As we look for solutions to the problems of the world, we would do well to look with an open mind to the traditions of the past. I think Lent is an example of a Christian tradition that I think is worth preserving.
Maybe I should explain what Lent is. Basically, Lent is an annual 40-day period of austerity beginning on Ash Wednesday and ending with Easter, which marks the resurrection of the sacrificed God-king, which represents the triumph of good over evil. How this usually works is that someone will pick something to abstain from (alcohol, chocolate, TV, etc), and then refraining from consuming that thing or engaging in that behaviour. This self-imposed deprivation is meant to show penitence, but it also serves as an exercise in willpower. And if you think about it, morality has everything to do with willpower.
Anyway, I want to present the tradition of Lent as an example of our cultural heritage that is worth preserving. At its best, religion should instill good values and provide lessons about what constitutes right behaviour. And the truth is that right behaviour is often about constraining one´s immediate, short-term desires in the aim of preserving social harmony. Self-discipline is all about placing limitations upon oneself. There is a good reason why it is a good thing to train oneself to be disciplined. If one is a slave to one`s addictions or compulsions, one is less likely to achieve one`s goals. There is no freedom without responsibility, and there is no responsibility without discipline.
In mythology, this is represented by Saturn, and the many cultural manifestation of the Old Man Time archetype. If a married man chooses not to have an affair in order to preserve his marriage, it is due to the Saturnian principle of wisdom-as-restraint. The husband has weighed the pros and cons of deceiving his wife, and decided to restrain himself in order to spare his family the pain that discovering his infidelity would cause her. This is an example of the moral imperative represented by the stern, harsh archetype of Saturn, also represented by the Emperor card in the tarot. Yet Saturn is also the planet of tyranny. As always, the key is these things is balance.
Anyway, I just the main purpose of this post is just to announce that I`m quitting drinking for Lent. Before I moved to Mexico, I hadn`t drank alcohol in almost ten years, and since I moved here, it`s become a part of my life. Now, most people enjoy my company when I`m drinking, and I don`t turn into an asshole when I`m drunk, but I won`t deny that my drinking has been excessive over the past year.
I also thought that it would be interesting to reflect on Lent. Whether or not you believe in God, and however you feel about Christianity, most of us would probably agree that the world would be a better place if less people were addicts driven about by compulsion instead of by conscious choice.
I think there is great readiness amongst many people for some sort of spiritual renaissance, but most people would rather pay a bunch of money to go on an ayahuasca retreat than to spend a few days fasting in the woods. You hear a lot more about feminine spiritual virtues than you do about masculine ones. But both are important. Balance is key.
So far as I am concerned, wisdom is gained through suffering. If one chooses to voluntarily undergo suffering, one is showing a sincere desire to give up comfort, pleasure, and convenience in order to receive some kind of vision or valuable insight.
In shamanic cultures, one is expected to give of oneself if one wishes to receive. This is the idea of the Ofrenda, or offering, which is ubiquitous in all indigenous cultures I know of. An Ofrenda could be an animal sacrifice, or it could be through various types of auto-sacrifice. Traditionally, the Maya practiced bloodletting as a form of autosacrifice. But the hardship that one endures by going on a pilgrimmage is also an Ofrenda. If this case, rather than giving blood, they are giving their life-energy. If one chooses to endure some form of privation voluntarily, one is making a sort of energetic offering to the unseen spiritual force (or forces) that one is praying to.
You could talk this too far, of course, and many Christians have. There are many examples of ascetic spiritual practices that go too far, and become some kind of pathological, maladapative masochism.
Lest I be mistaken - there are things common Christianity that I very strongly disagree with. Chief amongst them would be patriarchy and sex-negativity. Unfortunately, it seems that teaching people that they are sinners in need of redemption produces neuroses in people who take these things too seriously. The generally negative attitude towards sexuality held by many adherents to Abrahamic religions is probably their worst feature. We are sexual beings, and we didn`t choose to be born as such. It`s absurd to think that a loving God would give us the incredible gift of sexual pleasure and then forbid us from using it. Yet innumerable people throughout the history of Christendom have tormented themselves in horrible ways because they believed that they were wretched sinners, whereas in reality they were normal mammals with the normal mammalian instinct to fuck. It really is tragic. Sex-negativity isn`t simply an affliction affecting women. Men are its victims too.
That said, the difference between a poison and the cure is the dose. Too much self-discipline and you`re a humourless, dour prick missing the point of life. Too little and you`re like a rowboat without oars, waiting around for life to happen to you.
Balance is key. It`s good to be able to force oneself to do something out of some sense of duty, it`s also good to be able to relax and go with the flow. There´s a reason that the pillars behind the High Priestess on tarot are called Justice and Mercy.
Whether you are male or female, psychological health consists of striking a balance between these two principles, which are represented archetypically by the Father and Mother, respectively.
Wisdom is a synthesis of both of these two principles, which are also represented by the left and right hemispheres of our brains. The key is balance. In Buddhism, this is called the Middle Way. Buddhists are encouraged neither to deny themselves pleasure nor to over-indulge. Moderation is a virtue, but cruelty towards oneself is a vice. One is to cultivate compassion for all beings, including oneself.
For much of the past year, I have been predicting the rise of new spiritual and religious movements in light of the decadence and degeneration of Western political institutions such as academia and the media. People need to believe in something, and mainstream propaganda has just gotten so unbelievable that some kind of cultural reckoning is inevitable. I personally suspect that people will gravitate naturally towards non-creedal, universalist traditions which emphasize universal brotherhood and the feminine values represented by the Mother archetype. Therefore I agree with Terrence McKenna that the Archaic Revival is upon us, and that humanity is likely to rediscover some new version of a universalist philosophy which will restore the Goddess to Her rightful place, so to speak.
We should not forget, however, that the Goddess alone is no better qualified to rule the universe than the God is. We have two eyes for a reason, and our brains are comprised of two hemispheres for the same reason. The key is balance. We need to ditch the idea that masculine values are inherently toxic, and that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Both God and Goddess are essential. And toxic feminity is just as real as toxic masculinity is.
Now, maybe I should quit making so many predictions about the future, but I suspect that as more and more people realize this, there will be a rise in the popularity of the ancient tradition of stoicism. This is because stoicism is a philosophy which is geared towards teaching people to endure hard times. It offers solid moral principles and good life advice. It`s also more appealing to people who like logic and dislike fuzzy feel-good woo-woo type spirituality. The reality is that life is often full of trials and tribulations, and our job is sometimes simply to suffer gracefully, to learn from our suffering, to preserve one`s spirit throughout it all, and to ultimately do something to alleviate the suffering of others. Sometimes this is the message that the world needs - straighten your back, hold your head high, and do what you need to do. Stoicism is meant to reach people how to achieve a degree of self-mastery over one`s emotions, compulsions, etc.
Now, I don`t really like being a doomsayer, but I`ve thought about things for years and also end up back to the same conclusion: Something`s gotta give. The current social order cannot last. The centre cannot hold.
If I`m right, humanity is in for some dark days, and we would do well to learn what we can from the ancients about how to endure hardship without losing sight of what is truly important. Lent is an example of exactly such a tradition, and I think it`s interesting to think about asceticism, which has been very important to many spiritual traditions but which the modern world seems to have no use for.
Anyway, it wasn`t until Ash Wednesday that I realized that Lent was upon us. I drank yesterday, meaning that I`m starting a bit late, but as of today I won`t drink until Easter. I guess announcing that the world was the main purpose of this blog post. In any case, I hope that some of you out there found these thoughts interesting, and as always, I look forward to hearing from you in the comments.
I’ll be 11 yrs off the spirit sauce myself come March 4th. My 8yr old kid ain’t never seen me drunk. I’m still an asshole. But I’m sane and I’m sober and most days these days I do a pretty darn good job of being an adult human.
Other things I’m willing to give up:
Golfing
Voting for communists
Watching soccer (other than maybe the World Cup Final)
Watching NASCAR
I never do those things anyway, but still.