There’s a line in the Bible that reads there is a season for all things under the sun. The current season, descending quickly upon the Christian masses, is Lent, one that people often remember only when they pass someone with ashes smeared across their forehead for Ash Wednesday. Lent is meant to be a season of fasting—withholding from personal vices, like social media or candy, and not eating meat on Friday, although I’m pretty sure Jesus ate meat. (If the church really wants to get biblical, ask people to give up bread, which was very clearly one of Jesus’s vices.) But for some 40 days, all of the Catholics who did not give up social media will log on to the internet to bemoan the difficulty of not eating chocolate, or binging Netflix, or smoking. Fasting, they’ll say repeatedly, is hard.
In the humble opinion of a fellow faster, perhaps there is a way Catholics could make the season suck just a tiny bit less. What if after 300 years of whining about abstaining, the season of fasting could be rebranded? Instead of seeing Lent as a period in which something is taken away, might it be simply a moment with some extra free time: Just use the 40 days to fill all that newfound spare time with fucking. Sounds a little sacrilegious, perhaps, but when you consider the amount of time wasted on complaining about fasting, it makes sense to redirect that amount of time to a more productive activity. Did not the good Lord herself tell everyone to go forth and multiply? Why can’t fasting season also be a season of reconnecting with your loins, and the loins of a few other people, should you be so inclined?
Even though the church hates sex, having more sex means that people’s brains are freer to focus on their bible readings. The endorphins from sex make abstaining from chocolate and Netflix seem like no suffering at all which will inspire all the good Catholics of the world to fast bigger and better the following year. Sex binging could be the thing that brings religious fasting back into fashion. Pope Francis who suggested this year that Catholics should fast from trolling, could solidify his legacy as the fun pope if he just gave this branding a chance. Imagine how much happier people could be during mass, after a sexy night of Lent.
