Uh oh! It's Lent!

Don't worry, I won't ask you what you're giving up

Christians’ least favorite time of the year is here: Lent. The time for fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. All at the same time? All at the same time.

I’m a cradle Catholic, so I’m used to Lent. Used to the ashes marking my forehead, to the conversations about “what are you giving up?” to the two, apparently only two, Lenten hymns: Were you there and 40 days and 40 nights.

 Throughout the years I’ve approached Lent in a number of ways. I’ve had years where I thought What can I give up or take on yet still maximize my daily enjoyment? I’ve had years where I’ve picked one person a day and prayed for them. One year, my mother probably doesn’t remember, I resolved to clean the kitchen without complaining, stalling, or, sometimes, being asked. Heroic virtue, truly. 

It’s no surprise that every major religion incorporates periods of fasting and abstinence into religious life. What is surprising is that Christians today have very mild obligations. For Catholics, fasting is a requirement for only two days, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. And the “rules” of fasting—two snacks and one meal—make us look gluttonous compared to Jews during Yom Kippur or Muslims during Ramadan. 

There are plenty of secular benefits of observing Lent too. Any psychologist or philosopher would tell us that intentional abstinence from the pleasures of life benefits us. We appreciate things more after a period of deprivation, we grow in self discipline, in productivity. Fasting is also currently trendy—take a look at the Monk Mode challenge. But, for Christians during Lent, appreciating pleasure more and self discipline are not, by themselves, the point. 

So what is the point? To answer this, I turn to the Atlantic writer Elizabeth Bruenig. Bruenig converted to Catholicism from Protestantism and had never observed Lent before. Her first go at it she couldn’t figure out what to give up. 

She writes: 

“I began to suspect that I couldn’t find a reason to give up one thing over another because I didn’t especially want anything more than anything else. Not because I lead a particularly bacchanalian life, either: I am a creature of plain and reliable comforts, of good bread and salty butter, milk chocolate and Coke Zero, fluid pens and blank paper, music in the morning and TV at night, books, balms, candles. I scroll judiciously through one app or another and feel remotely entertained by all of them but preoccupied by none of them. It occurred to me that I could give up any one of those things and experience almost no significant shift in quality of life, because all the others are that good, and would remain. But first I would have to elect one above the others for self-denial, and I couldn’t, because all of them were that good, and only just.”

Me too, Elizabeth. I could give up alcohol and abstain at the handful of happy hours I go to. I could give up meat, which would make meals slightly less enjoyable. I could give up dessert and not make banana bread or eat chocolate covered espresso beans for forty days. All of these would be mildly inconvenient, but giving up one would be compensated for by any other of my 21st century hedonistic habits. No dessert? Better make sure dinner is extra sumptuous. No alcohol? I’ll get a fancy mocktail instead.

You can, of course, ask God what to give up. I’ve heard this advice before—to pray before you decide to give something up or take something on during Lent. Some people should do this. Maybe God does want you to give up something in particular, especially if it’s directly impeding your virtue or character. But for many of us, I suspect, with a great deal of presumption, that God doesn’t care if we give up meat over alcohol. Because they’re both harmless and both impediments. Bruenig writes that we fast to “relinquish what brings pleasure in favor of what brings peace.”

But how could my pleasures oppose my peace? My pleasures are innocuous: lattes, lunch dessert, podcasts, watching Seinfeld and the Great British Baking Show. It’s not like I sink my wages at the local pub. My pleasures are perfectly fine, thank you very much. 

That’s the thing, they are fine. There is nothing immoral about enjoying alcohol, shopping, sugar, (most) pop music, TV, lazy afternoons on the couch. The poison is in the dose, but the sin, or rather the wasted opportunity, is in the perpetuity of pleasure. 

Ecclesiastes tells us there is a time for everything: “There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.” There is a time for everything, including a time for doing without. A time for blasting Bad Bunny on the way to work and a time for walking in silence, a time for milk chocolate after dinner and a time for abstaining, a time for TV on the couch and a time for reading instead. 

The point of fasting is not to appreciate the pleasures we abstain from more. A Ghirardelli brownie will always taste good to me. The point, Bruenig writes, is “to help distinguish luxuries—even God-given pleasures—from necessities, sources of enjoyment from sources of nourishment. It’s an inward journey in a superficial era, a season for plainness and restraint in a time of overwhelming pleasure and excess.”

I learned this my junior year of college when I gave up music for Lent. I can’t remember why I did it or where I got the idea from. I probably wanted to try something new. At first, I regretted it. It was so boring—my mornings in my single dorm room felt empty and dull. At the end, I learned to appreciate the silence, to be content walking to class without music blasting in my ears. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled when the 40 days were over, but I had learned to distinguish music as a pleasure, not a necessity, as a delight, but also a distraction, something that could add, and also detract from my life. 

At my Ash Wednesday service this year, an older woman in the parish gave a reflection after the reading. She spoke about our incompleteness as humans. To be human is to sin is to be incomplete. The pleasures of life, although good, do not make us complete, though sometimes they give us a temporary illusion that we are. To be Christian is to recognize our incompleteness and to look for wholeness in God. 

She quoted Thomas Merton in her reflection, and when I was trying to find the exact quote, I found this of his instead: “Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.”

I won’t pretend that I know the difference and I won’t pretend that I want to live a life without my trite pleasures, but this Lent I will, reluctantly, try.

Here’s to silence and simplicity and stillness, even blandness. Here’s to a Lent with less pleasure and more peace. 

As always, thank you for reading. Feel free to share this reflection with someone you know observing Lent this year. Or someone not observing Lent, if you’re feeling particularly subtle.