Lying my way through Lent

Growing up, we Catholics were too Lent-oriented.  (Not me, but you know, the real ones.)  Lent was like a test that you simply had to pass.  If you failed, you were dissing the trials and tribulations of Jesus, and no one would go to Heaven if that happened. The point of Lent then was to Give Up Something. The nuns suggested all kinds of things: candy, soda, TV, sex, drugs.  (Hmm, maybe not the last two, at least not in 6th grade, but maybe.....)  So we had to pick what we were Giving Up and the humiliating part of it (because Catholics were 100% into humiliating each other) was that you had to stand up in class and tell everyone what you were Giving Up. Shit. The options for a 6th grader were so limited and yet one wanted to be creative, original and saintly!  What should it be?  Candy seemed too easy.  Our house never had soda, so I could easily go with that one and suffer zero, but that wasn't the Jesus way, so nix on that. TV?  Not in our house, see above.  (We didn't really have a lot of TV.) Chocolate?  The Sunday Comics?  Long stem roses?  Almonds?  Clean underwear? The library?  Alcohol?  (Oh, yes, standing up in class and announcing that you were Giving Up beer would be so, so fun but so, so unfortunate. So no on that one.)

So, obviously you lied. You thought and thought and came up with something to Give Up even though that thing might have never crossed your doorstep.  The problem with this scenario is that the lie had to last 6 friggin weeks!  (In our family we took Sunday's off from Lent. I don't know if other families did that, but ours did and that's when my Dad was happy, coming back from Sunday Mass, eating a jolly big breakfast, reading the entertaining Sunday newspaper, drinking several beers. We were all relieved.)  But I digress.

Keeping a lie alive for 6 weeks is very difficult when you are 10 or 11 or 12 years old. (As we all know, it gets a lot easier the older you get. Keeping a lie alive for years is now possible. If only we had that talent back then.)  You have to create a kind of infrastructure of the lie, a back story, a reason why you would Give Up that thing. It couldn't be something like ..... hot dogs because you sometimes had those for dinner. It would never be Fried Chicken because that was the only thing my mother cooked that was edible. What could it be?

I don't remember all of my wise 11 year old choices but I remember one: I Gave Up listening to music on the radio.  Of course, I rarely listened to music on radio, not having one in my room but I told Jesus that it was the thought that counted. I did have a small record player and a very small collection of very small 45's, which I would never give up no matter how much Jesus had to suffer through Chubby Checker and the Righteous Brothers.  But not listening to music on the radio was perfect!  Everyone loved the radio!  Everyone, especially the Nun, would think I was a total saint and that I really, really loved Jesus!  Foolproof.

In our house the radio was pretty much used for listening to Dodger Games. Since I didn't give up baseball on the radio, I was home safe.  In school we had to stand up once a week, usually on Monday, and tell if we had let our sacrifice lapse. (Why is it that Catholics use the word "lapse" more than any other organized group?)  I could always say "no" to that regime, I was alway 100% NOT listening to music on the radio.  It worked!  For the six weeks of Lent, I lied every week and no one ever knew.

And honestly, even at the age of 10 or 11 or 12, I had no guilt about it all.  Give something up?  My family was poor. We had so little to get, there was simply not much to actually Give Up.  I knew Jesus wouldn't care.  I also knew that Jesus was paying no attention to my 6th grade class.  I sort of intuited that Jesus was paying no attention to much on earth.  So lying my way through Lent wasn't a big risk, redemption-wise.

And hey, it earned me points with the Nuns!  That translated into good grades. It was an early lesson in "agree with me and you will be saved."

I think about all this now because it is now Lent Time.  I know that there is a new paradigm about Lent, it's now What You Will Do instead of What You Will Give Up.  But I bet there are still kids trying to figure out what to do to satisfy a requirement that should no longer exist.  What I say to those 11 year old kids is this:  Give Up Smoking!  Give Up Hardboiled Eggs!  Volunteer at a Maximum Security Prison!  Teach an Alien to read!  Pick something so out there that no one can call you on it.

And eat all the chocolate you want. I am sure Jesus, who I am pretty sure is the guy who bags my groceries, would approve.

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