I haven't had a very successful Lent in 2019, I'd intended to write more appropriate posts and had intentions to do more in the way of personal practice than I have managed. This has not been a very successful period leading up to the most significant day in the Christian religious year. Maybe I should make amends during the Easter Time, from the great Easter Vigil to Pentecost, which is ten days longer than Lent.
Being old enough so I remember the dreadful, pseudo-medieval 1950s Catholicism of my youth, Latin masses that more than 99% of those attending didn't understand most of, the Index, banned movies (in itself maybe not really a bad idea, they're only movies), pseudo-medieval clap-trap, a whole host of awful stuff that neo-Integralist fascists funded by non-Christian-Catholic billionaires the Catholic right are trying to revive under the leadership of thugs like Cardinal Raymond Burke and Georg Ganswein, I remember how really pathological the end of Lent could be.
You can see vestiges of that in those putrid reenactments of crucifixion in places like the Philippines,* reenactments which, here, motivated by an obvious Republican-fascist political intent, things which show that that form of anti-Christianity is a sick death cult that has everything more to do with remnants of non-Christian paganism and, worse, Mammonism, than it does the Gospels and Letters, which are the only authentic accounts of the death and Resurrection of Jesus.
Yes, the Resurrection, something that cannot be separated from any aspect of the Crucifixion of Jesus without turning his death into a morbid fixation, a long, disgusting, simulated snuff, S&M flick as filmed by Mel Gibson, the rising from the dead pinned on as an afterthought.
Yes, I think this year I'll concentrate on having a more successful Easter Time. I might love Lent but it's only the preparation, Easter is the reason for it.
* I should point out that nailing people to crosses is something that the Catholic Church officially discourages, though I don't know why they don't go to the bother of issuing a ban on it. It is a sick spectacle that has nothing to do with healthy religious practice and isn't useful for understanding the kind of pathological conditions that produces it.
Scourging, etc, too. I see it as a form of idolatry, where the idol is the person punishing themselves. Shows how much harder it is to clothe the naked, feed the poor, have compassion for the prisoner.
ReplyDeleteOne we are called to do; one has nothing to do with the gospels. So which should we choose?1