I've been told that there is no such thing as Cultural Christianity.  That it's so closely intertwined with 'Western' culture that one cannot be a cultural Christian the way that one can be a cultural jew or muslim without strictly holding to the teachings.  If this proves to be the case then there is very little in my heritage that I can cling to and would have to leave my entire Christian upbringing behind simply because I'm walking away from most of the doctrines of Christian Orthodoxy.  I've been told I would just become another evolutionary, rational secular humanist.  Christianity is about Christ after all, and if you don't believe in him the way that all of the confined minds of the previous world-view have you really ought to just leave.

This lenten season I've made a choice to reclaim my Christian heritage, adopting more traditional parts of its culture, without forcing myself to adopt the content of the tradition.  The rituals, after all, point to sublime experience in a far more open and metaphoric way than words can.  Words begin life as metaphors, become entombed as doctrines, and then are thrown away because they no longer point to the experience that was greater than language and needed a metaphor in the first place.  Rituals don't have that same problem.  Over-literalisers have at times tried to speak of sacraments as more than signposts, but they aren't as readily believed as the doctrinal literalisers.

It is with this in mind that I am going to take lent seriously this year.  The spiritual discipline of deprivation is not very popular, and for myself I prefer the life of the libertine over the monk.  And so I will be blogging about my experience with full fasting of the traditional fats.  As I understand it, fasting from beef and pork during lent has a longstanding tradition that has a lot to do with the denial of flavour and nourishment.  I love good food.  Part and parcel with hedonism is a love of flavour.  Since I don't see myself as a dualistic being offering this fast to an external diety, the deprivation will be an interesting project.  

Bascially, beginning on Ash Wednesday I will be refraining from beef and pork fat as a form of deprivation.  I will go from 2% milk to skim.  Full fat yogurt to 0%.  I will use only vegetable fats for cooking and stick to chicken or fish dishes for my protein.  Skim milk cheeses (I'm really not happy about this one) and other non-fat dairy products only.  I will try to blog about what I eat, why I made the choices that I did, and what I'm learning from this.