Lent 2007

Agnes deLanvallei

 

(I found this half-written in a notebook and completed it. A deL, July 14, 2007)

 

It's Lent again. My original goal was to see what it was like to keep a Medieval Lent. The secondary goal was to see if it was something to dread, in inevitable discomfort, like, for me, tax time. (See published essay ).

 

The first year met the original goal, but as the Lent approached the next year, I found I could not just quit and say "not this year" because my persona did not have that option. She would have observed Lent, with 12^th century restrictions, all her life, not for a year or two. I generally found the prospect of Lent a cloud on the horizon, but not a serious one. I developed a couple of Lenten favorites: fish sticks, which I rarely get the rest of the year, and pea soup with leeks, for example.

This year, I went forward as usual.

I was glad that Estrella was before Lent, because although I have kept Lent successfully at Estrella, it's more fun not to have to. On Fat Tuesday I consciously ate eggs, meat and dairy.

The loss of milk in my coffee was a hardship, although I can drink it black if necessary. I was glad that the first week of Lent was short. In 12^th C. England, Sunday was never a fast day (except maybe for the very devout), so I had milk in my coffee and pork chops for dinner, but then it was back to "no meat (fish, shellfish and seabirds ok) or dairy".

And by the end of the week I had given up. A vegan diet was not what I wanted and there was going to be a battle in a two-person household over eating peas, lentils and fish six days a week. So I have kept Medieval Lent most years since 1995, but there were two years I did not. One was 2007.

Lent will come around in 2008. I'll try to figure out what went wrong and do it again, because it puts me in touch with the experience of my persona. She would only have broken Lent if she were very ill, perhaps for the reverse problem from mine: no opportunity to eat non-Lenten food.