You Can't Spell Relentless Without "Lent".

When you are, as the saying goes, a Christian, people sometimes seem to think you have signed up for an excessively harsh life. They worry about all the talk of sinning, and all the strictures you have to live by. But the truth is, being devout is a lot like dancing or performing complex brain surgery: at first it seems like there are all these rules you have to follow, you make a few embarrassing missteps, and someone ends up dying of intense internal haemorrhaging. But eventually you get into the groove and make it part of your life, and spiritual well-being and a lack of malpractice suits will follow.

Oh yes, it seems like there’s a lot of church to get through, with only the assurance of a strange man in a dress that it’ll all work out, but it’s not so bad. Christmas is a doddle, you get presents for your confirmation, and the deep-seated sexual repression eventually sublimates itself out in a variety of interesting ways. But there’s one season of the liturgical (that means “churchy”) calendar that strikes fear into the hearts of every Christian, the one that has even the most faithful reaching for their hip flask for a fortifying belt of holy water. It’s called Lent.

Lent is where the guys who go to church just to watch girls kneeling down slink away and leave the cast-iron believers to it. It’s what separates the men from the boys (which in the modern church is probably a good idea right from the start). For those of you who have never stared down the cold barrel of Lent, it is the 40-day period of fasting and self-denial in preparation for Easter, starting on Ash Wednesday (where, each year, we traditionally start the most devastating bushfires South Australia’s ever had) and ending with Holy Week, which is like Lent on bad crack. When Easter Day finally comes, we either celebrate with a lamb roast dinner, or just huddle in the corner waiting for the sweet release of death, depending on how we’ve taken the time in between.

So why do we do this each year? It’s all in remembrance of our Lord and (on one occasion, anyway) Saviour, Jesus “The Redeeminator” Christ, organised religion’s original hard man. This guy was one tough Messiah. He’d turn water into bleach and drink it, arm-wrestle demons right out of people’s bodies and give himself leprosy just so he could heal himself. And to prove exactly how tough he was, he went out into the desert for forty days and forty nights of the harshest, most brutal, hard-arse prayer and purification imaginable. He had to struggle, not only with the cruelty of the elements, but also the temptations of the Devil, who came to torment him. But Jesus did resist. Sure, things did get a bit Stockholm syndrome-y for a while, and the two of them did end up releasing an album together called Cryin’ in the Wilderness, but after their second studio release was called pale and derivative by the press and the Devil tried to get Jesus to worship him, Jesus renounced him with the famous line, “Get thee hence, Satan. You used to be cool.”

(This is all in the Bible, by the way, if you know where to look. It’s in Paul’s third Angry Letter to the Corinthians, right after the bit where Paul complains that the government is stealing his dreams and right before the bit where he tells the Corinthians, at length, about how they can go fuck themselves.)

Eventually, of course, Jesus pissed off the wrong people, namely the Israelites and the Romans, who are even today the wrong people to piss off. They tried him and executed him, but even as he was being crucified, Jesus maintained his hard-arse attitude, notably saying, “You call this nailing me to a cross? Man, I was nailing your mama harder last night.” And then, just to show them, he came back to life, killed the Demon Bunny of Antioch and ate its eggs so that no more of its demon-spawn would grow – a practice we commemorate to this day – and invited everyone to a big party at his place after the Rapture. So Lent is our way of honouring this Chuck Norris of the church. On Shrove Tuesday (known to you soft heathens as Pancake Day) we shovel in as much rich food as we can to make the experience that much harder before getting into Lent properly by giving up something we love, repenting our sins, fasting completely through parts of Holy Week, and finally ritually crucifying ourselves (although the Church finally banned that in the Pope’s famous 1972 “Let’s not go nuts here” proclamation). And then, when Easter comes and passes, we can spend the remainder of the year fulfilling the other main part of being a Christian: counting down the days with dread before the next Lent.