thoughts" "
The countries of Eastern Europe were forced for decades, under totalitarian regimes, to do without even essential things: what sense has it for them to subject themselves to ‘privation and renunciation’ during Lent? With EU membership imminent, with the shops bursting with goods, with a hitherto undreamt-of prosperity, does such self-deprivation still have any value or is it something obsolete? Martina Grochálová , member of ERKO, Slovak association for Christian education, tries to answer this question. Why restrict oneself?” says a well-known advertising slogan on the air in Slovakia at the present time, in a commercial that proposes a male beauty product capable so it is claimed of turning a man into a handsome and fascinating person. A question of this sort is also posed at the beginning of Lent, which for many people today could assume the nuance of something alien and obsolete. “Don’t believe in old recipes”, declares another slogan, which advertises a brand of ready-made meals, and which, in the melting-pot of offers, invites consumers to abandon once and for all the old recipes of our grandmothers. And also their good habits. One of these habits was, at the beginning of Lent, to clean all the pots and pans in the kitchen until they were spic and span, because in those forty days of fasting and abstinence meat could not even be touched. With this little household ritual our grandmothers expressed their willingness to give up meat and everything that, now and again, came to enrich their daily and already humble diet. The recipes, like the advice, of our grandmothers were simple and wise, those being proposed today are confused and contradictory, with the only purpose of severing our links with the past and enslaving us to a consumerism that imprisons and suffocates. A demanding renunciation, even if only for a limited period, arouses fear. Just as gold is tested in the fire, so the greatness of the human person is tested by his capacity to overcome himself. In modern parlance, renunciation belongs to the lifestyle of people of success: sportsmen renounce many things, so too do successful businessmen and models. They are forms of renunciation dictated by a distorted vision of happiness that is equated with fame and riches. Possessing more, ever more: that is the current temptation. The seduction of the “ever more”: more money, more minutes to telephone gratis, more consumer goods. Even in affections we want ever more: no longer just one wife or one husband… The advertising programme of the “more and more” lives in our midst, almost as if to compensate for those dark years of the dictatorship in which we were forced to renounce many things, even against our will. The “more and more” has entered our lives to promise us a brilliant future in which we will no longer be forced to renounce: shopping bags bursting with food, shops full of merchandise, wallets bulging with cash… But all this offers no real satisfaction. It does not eliminate the inner sense of emptiness. Some those who don’t believe in the old recipes have already embraced it. Others wish to do so, but don’t have the means to permit it. But there are also those who remain faithful to the old recipes and try to teach them to the young. A Slovak fairy story tells of a subject who is called to explain to his king how to live well on only three coins: with one he paid his taxes, with the second he fed his family and with the third he maintained his elderly father. A lifestyle that did not restrict him, on the contrary it fulfilled him. His father had taught him to renounce and now he was teaching it, with the example of life, to his children. In the days of Lent Jesus invites us to enter the wilderness. In its silence we will hear both the whisper of the tempter who will offer us “more and more” and the silent murmur of God who offers us “only” what we truly need to be able to live and share our life with others. In the wilderness of Lent we are offered two recipes: the one to satiate our bodies, the other to fulfil the whole of our existence. Once again we are faced by a choice. Martina Grochálová
