MOST American Catholics were well acquainted with poverty even before the stock market crash of 1929. My mother quit school after eighth grade to add a wage to the family income. Later, she supported my father as he went to night school. Like millions of Catholics, their faith was a source of meaning and dignity at a time when both were in short supply.
The Depression stamped them for life. Born into the aftermath, I was shaped by those years as well. During these past weeks, I’ve worried that we might be facing an unexpected replay of our parents’ and grandparents’ economic distress. But I’ve also been remembering more vividly the Lenten seasons of my midcentury childhood, when I most sharply felt the pull of Catholicism.
By requiring fasting and abstinence, the observance of Lent somehow helped us cope with the multitude of other deprivations we could not choose or escape. My brothers and I gave up candy, but what really impressed us was Mom forgoing Chesterfields and Dad going “on the wagon,” which meant, he laughed, drinking from only the water cart.
From February on, I counted the turning pages of the calendar. The main point was to get through those 40 days. It was the same number of days a famished Jesus spent in the desert and the number of years the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. “God’s will” was the name we gave to suffering, and God’s grace was the promise that it would end ... eventually.
There was always doom in the air of the penitential season, and Lenten fervor was fueled by dread, as the oft-recited Act of Contrition put it, “of the loss of heaven and the fires of hell.” A damning God demanded penance, sacrifice and constant vigilance. My first wallet, a gift when I received the sacrament of confirmation, came with a card that defined my initiation: “I am a Catholic. In case of an accident, please call a priest.”
The Catholic theology of damnation was mitigated, if not eliminated, by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The dread of Hell evaporated as Catholics embraced a far more positive, all-merciful God. Those wallet cards disappeared overnight, and we started eating meat on Fridays. The sadomasochist in the sky, divine zapper, was gone, along with the gatekeeping role of the clergy.
Lent remains an important part of the Catholic calendar, but self-denial now, more suggested than required, aims less at penitence than at compassionate identification with, as Pope Benedict wrote at the beginning of this year’s Lent, the impoverished “situation in which so many of our brothers and sisters live.” Like Lent, today’s economic crisis can help stir that overdue empathy.
Still, as for self-denial, one could be forgiven this year, perhaps, for wanting to give it up. There are plenty of difficulties in everyday life without choosing to increase them. Job loss is hell enough. In affluent America, seemingly out of nowhere, material insecurity has undermined assurance, and familiar structures of order have tumbled with the indexes.
Lent offers one answer to today’s new reality. The season begins with the word “Remember,” uttered as a blot of ashes is smudged on the forehead. Remembering the transience of life — ashes to ashes, dust to dust — remains the essence of the observance. This year, I received my ashes at the Catholic church across the street from Harvard University, where the basilica was surprisingly overflowing with hundreds of undergraduates — a privileged elite attending to what every person has in common, and wants ordinarily to deny.
All things are passing; this is the unsettling fact from which, during normal times, we’ve tried to escape by acquiring money and spending it. A consciousness of our own mortality — made more acute by material worries — reminds us of what matters most in life, including intimations, however they come, of what lies beyond, whatever it is.
Lent concludes today, but this probably isn’t the end of our troubles. There is nothing wrong with job security, and there is nothing right with suffering, but insecurity is normal again. Lent tells us we may as well get used to it — and remember that it always was.
James Carroll, a columnist on leave from the Boston Globe and a scholar in residence at Suffolk University, is the author, most recently, of “Practicing Catholic.”
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