Lent and the modern Catholic

What is Sin?

Growing up as a Catholic boy I was told a lot of things about the period leading up to Easter and why it was the holiest time of the Christian calendar. I'm sure most of it at the time even stuck, but just to be sure I checked the apparent arbiter of simple unvarnished truth that is wikipedia 

"The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer through prayer, penance, repentance of sins, almsgiving, atonement and self-denial. Its institutional purpose is heightened in the annual commemoration of Holy Week, marking the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the tradition and events of the New Testament beginning on Friday of Sorrows, further climaxing on Jesus' crucifixion on Good Friday, which ultimately culminates in the joyful celebration on Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ."

 Yeah, that's about right. What has of course percolated through to the less knowledgeable or devout layer of people is that we have to give something up for 40 days, something we like, we need to suffer. That's all fine and good on the surface, but doesn't actually tell us why. Why do we need to give up a luxury? What's the point? How does my giving up chocolate or expensive entertainments help me get ready for Easter?

Self denial in conjunction with fasting, and self examination allows us the intellectual space to review ourselves and our life and habits. It allows us to see what it is we can do to be better persons in the long run. Jews and Muslims have not unsimilar traditions with precisely the same goals. Lets examine the principal actions asked of every Christian during this period.

Penance: Or the confession of sin, is the act of  realization that maybe some of our actions have been bad, harmful or selfish. Jesus and pretty much every other prophet who ever came along has told us not to be shmucks, putzes and self centred egomaniacs to the detriment of everybody else and everything around us. We are individual parts of a whole and our harmonious participation is predicated on the notion that we accept that we are not always the centre of the universe. To do this, we need  a time to consider the year that was, the actions we did, good bad or indifferent. If the giving up of ostentatious displays and a few luxuries brings us back to the level of the humblest among us, then we are all the more open to the exercise of self examination. Here is a short  and hardly axhaustive list of  simple questions to ask yourself.

1- Have I been a help or a hindrance to those around me?
2- Have I made the most of my opportunities, especially those that came out of the blue and those that came after much struggle? 
3- How aware am I of the impact of my actions on those closest to me and to my general surroundings?
4- Have I maximized my talents, education and time, life has thus far offered me?
5- Have I made myself, my talents and resources available to those who needed them.

Repentance: Having had a good long look at one's self, we have established a number of things we may have been guilty of. And by guilty I don't necessarily mean things like lying and cheating, tho that does count, I mean the subtler sins of waste, egocentrism, self indulgent pity and other assorted reasons why you can't do what you know is good for you and for others. This step is particularly important as you're going to do that thing you failed utterly to do at New Year's.... resolve to avoid said bad behaviour and find a different and better path to follow. AND MEAN IT.  By the way, did you make a list of people you wronged? Yup, that's the next step,

Atonement: In plain English it means saying you're sorry, you won't do it again and you need to find a way to the best of your ability to tell people this. If this sounds like something out of AA, you're not wrong. And saying you're sorry sometimes isn't enough, you need to do an act of contrition or reparation. A recent example of this is Csanad Szegedi a former right wing nationalist Hungarian politician  who upon discovering he was Jewish, went into a deep period of  reflection and is now still sitting  but as an independent  that stands for human rights and social equality. He will spend the rest of his life atoning for his previous life, but for him that is the price he has to pay for having been such a terrible person before.

Szegedi

Now here is the tricky bit for some. Forgiveness:  Forgiveness for sins against ourselves and dealing with those who are too bitter and angry at us for the sins we committed against them. You cannot allow those who won't forgive you to be the reason you don't follow through, sometimes what you did to them was just too damaging, you will make new friends and  a new life, even if you have to bear the consequences of some of your actions for the rest of your life. And if somebody has wronged you and made the effort to apologize and really mean it; you have a responsibility to try, to dig down in yourself and forgive them, never forget, but forgive and wipe the slate clean. As I said, it's not easy, if it were, everybody would be doing it.

Alms giving and good deeds: Mitzvah the Jews call it. The art of sharing yourself, your talent and your wealth with those who need it most for nothing but the knowledge that you made their life better. A true mitzvah does not ask for a receipt or testimonial dinner. All good deeds  be they large or small, eventually as the saying goes, get repaid ten fold. Some of us will get a box of chocolates or the occasional tray of biscuits, others will get a medal or knighthood in the fullness of time, but most of us will be rewarded at most by a smile and a polite thank you, sometimes not even that. And yet, that is not a reason to not do it. Each example of such a good deed that makes you a  mensch ( really good person) without leading you necessarily to sainthood either, makes you a living embodiment of what every prophet and holy man and woman ever asked of humanity.....Don't be A SHMUCK. At the very least, if somebody has to choose how to be and they have you and some putz as an example, they will have the wisdom to be you, because you were nice to them, because somebody was nice to you.

What exactly is defined as a good deed then you ask? It could be the simple act of charity, the act of taking your time and spending it with somebody who is lonely, perhaps seeing a friend who is themselves encumbered with problems not of their own making and just not dealing with them  due to lack of resources or strength and saying , " Today I'll be here to help you, and if can, I'll do it next week too." Charity can sometimes be a balm on the conscience of the comfortable and the well off  that excuses them from thinking about the connections of actions and results. Perhaps if you give to a charity, ask yourself why the people or things are in such dire need. What can you do to reverse the situation permanently. In so doing you may find that the simple act of giving money or spare food becomes just the opening gambit. Here is a site that provides a wonderful way to Do Lent Generously.

Volunteering  is part of charity, it is the self sacrifice of your leisure time away from x factor and other such things designed to numb you from the reality around you. The volunteer sector is more and more pressurized to provide services that governments have abdicated, add this on top of the usual sports, scouts, guides, gardening, OAP activities etc... that depend on an ever shrinking pool of people, and you can see how even a few hours you previously spent playing World of Warcraft or voting in bread and circuses talent shows on telly can alleviate a bit of the pressure. I would like to mention and praise here  a group of particularly devoted Star Trek fans of the NE of England who take any opportunity to make a noise in Klingon or even Dalek if it means a good local charity gets a bit of help. Quark's Tyne bar, always ready to serve the Klingon Empire, The Federation and any cause that doesn't mind people eating Rokeg Blood Pie or accusing them of being a P'Tok.

While Lent is all of the things you've just read, it is first and foremost a time of reflection about yourself and your place in the world. How you can best contribute to and share it's bounty with others. Being a better person is the reason why you give up chocolate for 40 days. It's about giving your soul and your body a chance to heal and maybe change for the better. There is no perfect way of doing this, but if you follow even a part of the observance, even if it's just talking to your G-d, reading from the texts that you claim to inspire your more altruistic self, or just reaching out to those around you and trying to understand them and the person you could be if you just tried, you have made a road map for yourself to follow until next year, when it starts all over again.

Muslims and Jews reading this will find much familiar to them and I would hope it goes a long way in letting them know that where it matters most, we are all praying to the same G-d. For my humanist and atheist friends,  I hope you take from this an understanding of what it truly means to us to be what we are and to respect us for that. This period of reflection we travel is something every person can do regardless of faith, regardless if they even believe in a higher power. Make the effort in your own way and you'll be the better for it, in fact we all will.

While I wait for the Timeline Borg to assimilate me

You will be assimilated

While I wait for the facebook Borg to assimilate me into the Timeline upgrade, I can hear the muffled cries from the corridor as mates of mine are taken over one by one or in waves. For the few days from the 31st of March I checked every hour or two, half expecting the FB police to have broken in and dragged my profile away. But still nothing.  Well past caring at this point, I'm just waiting for them to come and get me. It's not so bad once you know what to do, it's even frustrating waiting for them to come. The fact is that once it happens, I'll be hiding most of posts from the first day to about a month of posts before the top of the month. I've got the software that allows me to not see Timeline on my or anybody else's wall, and Facebook won't be able to have fun with my facts. ( see below)

It's bad enough as a writer that no one wants to pay us to produce content, I'm not going to allow some corporate Nestene Conciousness make money off my whimsy, pics, personal life or serious threads. Unlike some, while I'm not enthused by the lay out and find the look confusing, I'm not objecting to the imposition of Timeline on those grounds, no I have more serious reasons. Reasons that if you think about them, are perfectly rational. First of all, the old wall was a huge mass of difficult to search information of everything we'd ever done or said in Facebook, and that was fine.... but now you get a handy search tool that allows any of your old or new friends to find out what was happening on the 17th of March 2004. I don't remember what happened on March 17th 2004, so why should Reg from Luton know? Am I the subject of some in depth academic study for a graduate student trying to tie in my musings to  political events? Is The Sun doing a fluff piece about me on my choice of toast spread over the last 5 years? If I was, they'd have to ask me first and it would be ME telling them , not some bit of intrusive software.

There are things that happened 3 months ago that want forgetting, let alone what petty or serious trouble I might have got into trouble over in 2006. Today I'm happy, my cat is happy, my wife is happy and my father is happy. None of us need to be reminded about some insanity that occurred so long ago our brains have blotted them out. I don't want to be reminded or let all my mates know about my mother dying last year or how dear departed cat Buzu was run over by a car 6 years ago. Yet Facebook has already started doing the "Keith said: I could kill a cupa about now" or Louise said: "That was the best Doctor Who ever!". Where when???? Doctor Who isn't on now? Oh ... in Dec 2009 they said these things. Do I care? I don't want to know, will I comment all over again???. Wait till my mates get a load of 6 years of my match day highlights.

Here is a sampling
Fuckity Fuck Fuck...... damn
Shoooooollaaaaa Yesssssssssssss
Nooooooooooooo
Who hates Howard Webb
1-0 Get in!
Typical Toon
Halftime, off for a slash and some food.

Are you addressing your comments to me?

And as these things are randomly posted, the original posts taken utterly out of context, will seem all the more bizarre and inexplicable. I'm not 12 years old, I'm a mature male with a family, bills to pay and a varied set of interests. Even if I wrote a diary of the events in my life, I wouldn't let  most of my closest friends read it, and Facebook want us to share with all and sundry? I am not a product nor am I source of entertainment to others when they have run out of other things to do. Facebook seems to think that all people want to share their lives and photos and utterances from time immemorial as if we will always be teenagers. Most people and that includes most teens don't want that much info about them that easily found. Why else not friend your parents and your in-laws. What we do and say in Facebook is what we used to do and say in MSN Chat or private e-mails. But Timeline is designed to make it so easy for others to pry,  we've been admonished by Facebook to make sure there's nothing we don't want others to see before OUR Timeline profile goes public.

How badly do you want this job?

Speaking of who's asking.... prospective employers are asking for passwords and looking at Timelines even now. For this there is now a lawsuit in California pending.  Surely Facebook lawyers aren't so stupid as to not have anticipated this? As well, all you need is one false friend to read your deep personal history and you can kiss your identity goodbye. Forget about getting hacked, you can do plenty with less than Timeline offers, get into most credit card accounts and e-mails. Why make it even easier??? Simply saying greed is not an answer, it can't be.

Why are we being forced in the first place? What, other than being more fodder for advertisers, is in it for us? Why are we being treated like naughty children who should appreciate what's being done for us? Why when they are clearly covering their arse , they still adopt a paternalistic tone that makes any person over the age of  15 feel like Nana is forcing you to wear a scarf as it's cold and you're too stupid to figure it yourself? Well I never asked for it. In fact most people asked for the right NOT to have it. Where do these people get off forcing such things on us? They own the site and it's free to use? Not an excuse. It's an abuse of power and at worse an abuse of the information they themselves profess not to own and that we can allegedly control. It's gotten so that to enjoy Facebook, I've had to resort to no fewer than three separate bits of software in Firefox to hide the unwanted, but forced on, news feed that circumvented several privacy settings and caused us to spend a day resetting them. ( while I'm on about this, just how often have we had to reset our privacy settings?),I've yet to make any sense of the private messages I used to have that are now just a jumbled collection of long conversations with people about everything we ever IM'd each other about AND chatted about in chat. I must have  accumulated, at least a week of constant clicking blocking every poxy game and app I've ever been invited to use. And now a  new bit of kit is already installed ready to hide Timeline as and when they assimilate me.

All this work and effort to make it look like it did BEFORE they fixed it. Surely there must be a message in there somewhere. Perhaps it's "Leave it alone already, it works fine" or "NO we won't let you use our information that way", alternatively "If I wanted to have a news feed that twitched and wobbled like that, I would have asked my 12 year old cousin  to design a web page for me.". Any way you slice it, Facebook has taken the piss so often in the name of monetization that they have gone out their way to make sure we know they don't give a flying fuck what we think. I want my friends, they hang out at the park, if want to see them , I have to go to the park. One day when the police have beaten them, intimidated them and abused them enough, they will move on to a new place. But for now the search parties have come up empty and unhappy. With luck, the European Union will pass laws that protect users from such abuse and identity infringements and actions that are illegal and punishable by the courts.

I doubt the Hive mind that runs Facebook will take any notice of this, but if they are  reading, the law will catch up to you and apply to you. We wish you were as concerned about racism, bullying and organization of looting parties or riots as you are concerned with the imposition of a feature very clearly many millions of people don't want. If we accept that Facebook is a business, than we can assume reasonably that like any business that exceeds it's authority with users, it will face the double consequence of investigation and regulation. What will follow will be no more pleasant to Facebook bosses than the current and continued user abuse wherein Facebook rams down throats, change after change, most designed to make money off our information regardless of how complicated what should otherwise be a pleasant experience becomes.

And let's talk about business. Hundreds of thousands of businesses, political parties and media outlets  have invested money and time to use Facebook as a marketing tool. They have paid Facebook for special apps that work and are appreciated even by most users. But with Timeline as with every other improvement, Facebook have yet again thrown the baby out with the bath water. Companies have seen  potential clients  stop using facebook pages that have gone Timeline in droves, with an immediate and tangible drop off in business for the companies so affected.  Some might call this "loss of revenue", some might call it "breach of contract". In fact some could sue. Facebook, just how much more of this before we all leave or you figure out being a pushy orang-utan with no respect for others is bad for business?

The last time a social media got this out of hand, it went from giant killer money making phenom of the century, to beggar bowl web site wondering what went wrong. In case you're wondering...I mean you Myspace. The only reason Facebook hasn't yet collapsed, is because a viable alternative that respects people's privacy and normal social patterns hasn't turned up.

When I was boy, there was lovely Jewish bakery I used to go to. The nice old man behind the counter could ask me in at least 10 languages "if I wanted anything else and btw , how was my Mother doing?  Here's an extra bagel for her." He knew that being nice to his clients and making them want to come back even if it was a little cheaper somewhere else, was what was going to keep his daughter's child in braces and food. He knew that by being like this to his best clients, even the least of them would come back, even yet, they would tell others about him. That's called goodwill in retail, something Facebook clearly has no concept of. If he'd have chased off his best clients in favour of selling wata ( vata: wonderbread ) so he could live off the trade of toothless morons, he would  have fast gone out of business. Like I said before, soon as we find a friendly place that sells a nice rye or kimmel or maybe those nice kaiser buns or a knish, we'll be gone so fast you won't know to tell a tell the diffrence between a Newcastle Street on a Saturday at 3pm and a deli where the cheesecake has run out. 

I'm going to go back to waiting with deep suspicion for the Timeline storm troopers to take me down, till then remember the wise words of my grandmother, "Always wear clean underwear; if you get hurt and go to the hospital, I don't want the doctors thinking I raised a szwinia" .... So maybe not appropriate for this situation, but still words to live by.

PS: Quick primer on how to prepare for Timeline if God forbid they get you.

1- when you are assimilated, you will be offered the chance to "clean up" or edit your information. DO IT. Start by hiding from Timeline any information older than the last three months.

2- Delete all superfluous posts about games you have played, one line oddness that made no sense even a half hour after it was posted.

3- Insure that if you have a blog or other such public url you are promoting, to keep it open to see.

4- Insure that deeply personal or intimate events that occurred a long time ago stay in the past. Even new friends can read these .

5- Lastly, install the following software. I works on all browsers but IE. (If you're on IE , really still?, get off it, you won't miss it ) It's called TimeLineRemove . What it does is like Feed Filter,  it's got one job only, it hides Timeline. You're still on it, but you can't see it. Your wall and every other wall will be like it was pre Timeline. There will be an icon that allows you enter or exit Timeline block.

SO NOW YOU'RE READY TO GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE. What now?

Don't forget to purge your  wall of stories to keep up with the blocking of stories you don't want seen. Every person who hasn't bothered to do the above will see your Timeline, you need to be sure only what you want seen remains.  I will be keeping a 30 day buffer that I'll clear out on the last weekend of every month. Yet more work I know, but it's only way to beat them.

Clear as mud? Tell me what isn't.  Happy Easter to my Christian family & mates and Good Passover to my Jewish family and friends. As for the rest of you, you know who you are, eat the chocolate and be nice.