One day at a mall, I saw this ad featuring the latest offering for the Lenten season in this particular restaurant's menu. It was something like pink salmon steamed to perfection served with some cosmopolitan organic vegetables perhaps religiously following South Beach diet guidelines. It was a Friday and I am a foodie so I was so tempted. But later after trying to justify why i should have that meal, I was appalled at how that ad actually screwed the very essence of Lenten fasting and abstinence, which is simplicity.
fasting and abstinence is not just eliminating meat from our meals; it is cleansing our selves of our darkest human desires, of hedonistic excess, of selfishness. feasting on a juicy slab of meat, a decadent pastry or choice liquor is an excess baggage that impedes us from flying off to our spiritual journey of discovering the divinity in ourselves. it may not be meat or cake or rose', but there is definitely no simplicity in the price of salmon and the special attention given to an organic head of watercress. it even is scandalous to 75% of the world, those who live on one austere meal in a day.
it's enough that only valentine's day be commercialised, and it's tolerable for christmas to be quite commercialised, too, but please not at Lent. Spare the Lenten season from being forced to a level that's all too worldly. The whole year round, people have been conceding to the chains of upping net worth, updating wardrobes and cellphones, pimping cars; the whole year round, I have been eating too much chocolate, while the helpless look on.
Starting today, I will be kinder to my soul and allow the Divine in me to make wonders in my life, before I put it off again t the next day, and the next, and yet another, and i would have amassed more chocolate and violence in my system.
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