Around the middle of the sixteenth century, Pieter Breugel, the Flemish painter renowned for his portrayal of medieval life, painted The Fight between Carnival and Lent. Like many of his works, the painting captures everyday life in medieval Northern Europe, but also symbolism and commentary on events occurring in this world. This painting portrays tension between Protestants and Catholics over how best to reflect a meaningful spiritual life. The center of the town is filled with all kinds of people engaged in work and play, and around the edges two groups compete in a jousting contest. On one side is a group of people eating, drinking, gambling, and generally engaging in licentious activity. They are led by a jolly man astride a beer barrel. The opposing side is emerging from a church, led by a thin, witchlike nun holding a bread shovel upon which are two dried fish. She is followed by a host of penitents—nuns, monks, and townsfolk of all social levels, as well as civic leaders. They all appear mournful and downcast.
The painting highlights a particular theological battle of Breugel’s time. It was in the early days of the Reformation and the battle lines between Protestants and Catholics were being harshly drawn. The conventional wisdom was that Protestants cared little for penitence and so celebrated Carnival and all its permitted excess, while Catholics opted for the ascetic avenue of Lent to express their devotion and loyalty. To this, Breugel offers a visual response. In the very center of the painting, we see a couple walking away. The man has a hunchback, which is said to symbolize egotism. It was often used as a symbol or representation of the way people cause intolerance toward dissenters for lack of thinking objectively. While he stands for man’s own faults and weaknesses, the woman with him has an unlit lantern hanging from her belt. The pair are led by a fool, who carries an unlit torch, which symbolizes dispute and destruction. Close to the trio is a rooting pig, which often represents destruction and damage. All this division, Breugel says, is folly. Everyone in this battle is a fool.
In contemporary Christianity, Carnival doesn’t get much consideration; in fact, it is largely regarded as a secular opportunity to dress wild and go crazy in the streets. But Carnival in Rio de Janeiro or Mardi Gras in New Orleans have little connection to religious life for most people, particularly those in the Protestant Church.
If there were a fight between Carnival and Lent today, Lent would win, hands down. Looking at the religious landscape, Lent is on the radar everywhere you turn. Lenten practices such as Ashes to Go and all kinds of alternative study groups are commonplace. And few religious people speak about Carnival. Sure, there is an occasional Shrove Tuesday nod to pancakes and celebration before the solemnity of Lent in some church circles and a few public pancake races, but no broader embrace of that liminal space where all bets are off and decadence and license run free. The Lenten dynamic is penitential, reflective, and internal—worthy aims, perhaps. But if they are not tempered by an embrace of life’s wilder and external elements, I think we lose something.
Perhaps it’s that Lent requires less effort. It’s easily adapted to forms of faith that have become increasingly personalized over the past centuries, and many people look for rituals around which to order their lives. We also talk a lot about what we are giving up for Lent, something never meant to be an act of purely personal self-sacrifice. It has become a religious version of a New Year’s resolution.
I’m not saying Lent shouldn’t be observed; many people use it as an opportunity to intensely focus on or study something they haven’t found time for. But something is being lost along the way, and living a bit more wildly might not be a bad idea. Lent has developed into a form of piety characterized by penance, by an interest in the cult of the martyrs, and by holding on to the vestiges of a past that has all but passed away. Back then, the church reacted to the problems of the age by advocating an ascetic approach to life, but in this modern age, a life of withdrawal is no longer what our culture necessarily needs.
Buddhist writer Pema Chödrön said the difference between theism and nontheism doesn’t center on whether one believes in God but rather on how one views life. The theist believes they have a hand to hold, provided they live the right kind of life. Nontheists “relax with the ambiguity and uncertainty” of life without reaching for external protection. It might be more complex than that, but I like the way she changes the subject from a pointless debate on believing in God. The God thing is a set of ideas that is more complexly connected to our understanding of ourselves and how we confront our humanity.
I remain convinced that religion functions largely as a coping mechanism. The church’s liturgy, be it traditional or otherwise, is filled with language that places God over humanity’s affairs—guiding, loving, nurturing, caring. There is nothing wrong with that; we all need places to find peace or comfort. But when those notions break down, which they do, those conceptions become dead weight.
A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen said we must learn to live with what we can’t rise above. This might run counter to most conventional wisdom, which is riddled with the language of overcoming and triumph, but some things are not overcome and must be lived with. In our culture driven by self-help, we have swallowed an untruth that we can all succeed and live our best lives. Much religion mimics those sentiments, but that is not the truth of life.
For me, Christianity is a religion of uncertainty and ambiguity. It liberates us from certainty and transforms the difficulties of daily existence into the very substance of a journey into the depth of human life. Christian faith has little to do with the debates between theists and nontheists or even atheists. Instead, it helps us confront our brokenness, joyfully embrace the unknown, and courageously face life’s difficulties. This transformation creates communities of vulnerability that abandon the false promise of supernatural comfort. Here we can become vulnerable to our own helplessness and face what ails us, not with the intention of finding a remedy, but of better accepting and understanding ourselves. We free ourselves from the chase that often leads us to make choices that in the end cannot and will not deliver on their promises.
I have spent years thinking about a story from the Hebrew Bible (Ezekiel 47) about the prophet Ezekiel, who was led into deep waters by a mysterious figure holding a rope. The movement is oppositional to most theistic positioning—the deeper he went, the less foundation he had. He finally reached a point at which he could no longer touch the bottom of the river, nor could he move against the current. He was drowning.
I often read this story in conjunction with ideas about stages of faith, but lately I have been reading it as a personal story about coming to terms with, as Chödrön says, the ambiguity and the uncertainty of not being able to find footing. Ezekiel has to surrender to his loss of control, and once he is led back to shore, he discovers that the landscape has been dramatically transformed. What was desert is now alive with lush plant life—echoes of Eden. Perhaps a willingness to relax into ambiguity and uncertainty changes how we see both God and the world.