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“Doing wrong is like sport to a fool, but wise conduct is pleasure to a person of understanding.” –– Proverbs 10:23
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the renowned Sixteenth Century Dutch painter was known for his landscapes and peasant scenes, thus departing from earlier schools of art which were primarily focused on portraiture and Biblical subjects. However, one of his most significant works highlights the intersection of community life and religious life: The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. The painting depicts a bustling city center on Shrove Tuesday, the end of Carnival and the eve of Lent. On the left side of the painting is an Inn spilling over with imbibing revelers squeezing all the remaining whoopee out of those last hours of Mardi Gras. On the right of the painting is the subdued traffic in the darkened shadow of a church’s arched entrance. Party on the left. Piety on the right.
In the center of the painting, a mock joust is taking place between characters representing the contrast between Carnival and Lent. On the left, a rotund and obviously inebriated reveler straddles a beer barrel on a wagon. A pie sits atop his head and his lance is actually a barbecue spit bearing a roasted pig, a sausage, and a couple of ribeyes. Did you know that carnival literally means remove meat, stemming from the ancient pre-Lenten practice of eating up your stores of meat before the abstinence of Lent. In the painting there is even a pork chop impaled with a butcher knife on the front of the beer barrel.
Going up against our portly partier is a noticeably gaunt woman, with drawn face and ashen countenance. Her wagon is being pulled by a monk and a Sixteenth Century “church lady,” and her lance is a baker’s paddle carrying two fish, representing the staples of the Lenten diet. One false move and it looks like her lance would take out a guy carrying what looks like a keg on his back.
Bruegel’s painting is packed with symbolism and the viewer could spend a whole day sifting through the underlying meanings conveyed in the well-populated work. However, what strikes me as I look at the busy goings on in the city square is that you don’t perceive a clear division between good and evil, holy and profane, or drunk and sober. What you see are people, people like us who are neither purely good nor purely evil, but a chaotic mixture of both. Maybe Lent is not so much a time of self-improvement as it is a time of self-understanding. We are flawed, our daily oughts and shoulds wrestling with our consistent laxity and inertia, our good intentions foiled by our sluggish efforts. Yet, in Christ, God declared that in spite of our imperfections, we were worth the effort and are the raw material the Spirit could shape into instruments of God’s peace. In Lent, our job is to perceive our dependence upon God’s mercy in order that we may pursue the good.
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