lent – Houghton STAR

by Ethan McCarthy

Do you know what Dean Jordan means when he talks about Lent? While the ancient practice may not be present in all denominations, there are some, namely Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Orthodox, along with some former members of these denominations and many other students who desire to follow this traditional Christian season of penance, abstinence, and fasting.

When I first came to Houghton, I expected that it would be easy to maintain this practice of my faith, namely the exclusion of all meat on Fridays throughout Lent, with the exception of fish and other seafoods, such as shrimp. However, the dining hall did not make this easy, with the poor selection of products that do not include meat being restricted to salads, cheese pizza, and the miniscule vegan section. Often this results in students not receiving enough protein. Think of the athlete that only has those options on game day. Does anyone really think that would go well? “It’s really hard as an athlete to not have any protein on what are typically game days when I’m in-season. Even if fish or seafood of some sort was offered at lunch and not necessarily dinner on Fridays, it would allow those who observe Lent to get some much-needed protein in their systems prior to competing in the afternoons…it is offered enough in the dining hall already that simply aligning those days with Fridays seems reasonable,” says Jackson Medeiros, a sophomore pitcher on the Houghton baseball team.

The realization of this fact was very disappointing to a number of students who observe Lent, including myself. I thought that a Christian university which claims to be open to students of a variety of different traditions, which claims on the What We Believe page that this diversity has led to “wonderful and sometimes heated discussions across campus, in classrooms, and in the coffee shop!” would not make it difficult for members of the Christian family to observe their traditions. But sadly, with the current meal setup, they have made it a challenge nonetheless.

Thinking about it, Houghton does serve fish, shrimp, and other hearty meal options that would be perfect for those observing Lent, but despite years of asking, Metz has refused to make a change to help these students in their faith journeys. Even McDonald’s, a secular company, created the Filet-O-Fish to provide food to those observing Lent. It does not sound all that radical to me: take the fish or shrimp that are served throughout the week and serve them on Fridays instead. Even something like pierogies and those mini pretzels would work (something I would certainly enjoy). Of course, there was shrimp served on a recent Friday for supper, but this has not been a common occurrence, since lunch that day did not have a Lenten meal as well, even though there was fish served on Monday and Thursday that could have been served on Friday instead. A Metz employee told me that there is a five-week schedule of meals, and considering Lent lasts for 6 weeks, it is certainly possible for this to be properly planned ahead of time.

When speaking with other students, there has been confusion towards the actions of Metz and the university and compassion shown towards those observing Lent. “It seems like a reasonable expectation that Metz would make the requested accommodation for students engaging in this spiritual practice,” says Gabe Huizenga, a Theology major.

Houghton certainly has a strong community (yes, I said the magic word) of students and staff that supports the different Christian traditions that are present at this university, so this is not a knock at them, but simply a request for Metz and the university to help students accommodate their religious traditions.

For years students have put up comments on the suggestion board and asked if Metz would provide accommodations for them over Lent. Though the Metz employee mentioned above has brought this up with Metz themself and claims that they seem open to the change, I also brought up the issue at the Student Council meeting on Monday, and they assured me that they will bring the situation up with Metz as well. However, I was also told not to expect a change from Metz. While I hope that is not the case, I would not be surprised if nothing were to change, though I am immensely thankful that the student council was willing to bring this up to support members of the student body.

If there is fish served today, then that will be a welcome surprise, even though this is a day of exemption from the season for Catholics because of the Feast of Saint Patrick. If that is the case, then I am very happy to have seen it occur two weeks in a row, but I hope that this can be applied throughout all of Lent in the future so that students can more easily live out their faith traditions on campus. ★

Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America” and promised that “we shall not rest until that war is won.” The news recently has been full of assessments evaluating the war on poverty’s success and asking to what extent we have achieved victory. Most of these assessments conclude that, though the war on poverty has had some specific and limited successes–especially in decreasing poverty among the elderly–on the whole it has fallen well short of the lofty ambitions that inspired it and the goals it set for itself.

Courtesy of http://media.npr.org/ — Courtesy of http://media.npr.org

What might an updated war on poverty look like in the 21st century? In recent decades we have learned quite a bit about the factors that lead to and keep people in poverty. In particular, it has become abundantly clear that stable marriages and families are among the best predictors for avoiding poverty. Nick Schulz, in a useful little volume entitled Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure, summarizes much of the evidence linking poverty to changes in family structure such as increases in divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock. Just a few of the findings that he reports:

Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, after reviewing Census Bureau data, found that “if young people finish high school, get a job, and get married before they have children, they have about a 2 percent chance of falling into poverty and nearly a 75 percent chance of joining the middle class by earning $50,000 or more per year.”
Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, in their book Growing Up with a Single Parent, report that “adolescents who have lived apart from one of their parents during some period of childhood are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age twenty, and one and a half times as likely to be ‘idle’–out of school and out of work–in their late teens and early twenties.”
A group of researchers from the Pew Research Center “compared the median household incomes of married adults with unmarried adults in 1960 and again in 2008. Half a century ago, the gap in household incomes was 12 percent. In 2008, the gap had grown to over 40 percent.”

This is just a small sampling from a large body of research confirming what is by now an indisputable fact: if you want to reduce poverty, you should want as many children as possible to grow up in stable families with their own two married parents.

This evidence could provide the fulcrum for a bipartisan coalition devoted to strengthening marriage and the family. Liberals, committed to the poorest and most vulnerable members of society and concerned with income inequality, should make common cause with conservatives, who emphasize the traditional family unit as a building-block of society. A coalition of this sort, seeking a common, pro-family reform agenda, could make new headway in the fight against poverty.

Although family issues are often politically divisive, some reform proposals could reach across the partisan divide. A waiting period between the filing of divorce papers and the actual finalization of a divorce, during which couples could be offered access to marriage counseling, might reduce the rate of divorce. Other reforms, such as increasing the child tax credit, might ease financial strains on families. More creatively, we might make the credit available only to married couples, or introduce an additional tax credit targeted specifically at married couples that choose to forego a second income so that one parent can stay at home full-time with their children.

Strengthening marriage and the family is a daunting task. Family decline has been a product of complex cultural factors, and public policy is a blunt instrument for effecting large cultural change. Fifty years ago, however, Lyndon Johnson told Americans, “Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.” If we today remain committed to giving our fellow citizens “a fair chance to develop their own capacities,” we will require creative ideas about revitalizing the American family.

A longer version of this column will appear as an essay in the Lent issue of The Cresset (http://thecresset.org).