Giving Up (and Taking On) for Lent

I may be over-prepared in general, but I tend to crash into the beginning of Lent without giving it much thought. “What are you giving up?” someone inevitably asks me during the first week or so of the season. (Or some variation: “What are you taking on?” “What new spiritual practice are you trying?”) And I suddenly realize that, yet again, despite my best intentions, I haven’t figured it out yet. So, just in case you’ve ever found yourself in the same predicament, I thought I’d take the opportunity to say a few words about our Lenten fasts, a couple weeks before they begin.

First, a note on “giving things up” and “taking things on” for Lent: Recently, many people have found it helpful to frame Lent as an opportunity to take on something new and good, to cultivate a new habit or spiritual practice, rather than to give something up. And this is fine! Traditionally, fasting and almsgiving are two core focuses of Lent. One would take the money saved by fasting from certain items (wine, meat, chocolate) and give it instead to those in need, so “giving up” and “taking on” were linked. While many people prefer the positive connotations of taking on something new rather than giving something up, note that most of what I say below still applies!

With that said, three observations about Lent:

1. Lenten fasting is not about giving up something bad. You can (and probably should!) do this any time of the year! Although Lent’s mood does tend to encourage us to avoid our various bad habits, this is isn’t a fast; it’s repentance. Lenten fasting is about giving up something good, something which we can joyfully receive again at Easter. (Hence the common practice of a reception after the Easter Vigil featuring chocolates and champagne!)
2. Lenten fasting is not a project of self-improvement; it is a process of self-knowledge. It’s an exploration of the human will. Temporarily giving up something that’s otherwise good (or at least neutral) gives us an opportunity to observe how our minds and wills work. Say I decide to fast from social media during Lent. If I fail a few times, it’s not a very big deal. But it is a learning experience, an opportunity to observe the conditions under which my willpower grows weak. Is it when I’m bored? Tired? Lonely? What are the triggers that lead me to rationalize away my resolution and indulge in the thing I’ve promised to avoid? It turns out that for most of us, the same patterns apply to our more serious sins and bad habits; so by struggling against a minor foe, I’ve learned how to care for myself in the larger struggle against my more-deeply-engrained issues. In this sense, you can almost think of Lent as a workout for the soul: it’s an opportunity to strengthen your ability to resist true evil by practicing on things that just aren’t that important.
3. God does not love you any more for keeping a perfect Lenten fast, nor does God love you any less for an imperfect one; and in fact, God may well be pleased to see the humility that comes with occasional failure! While to a certain extent our Lenten practices can strengthen our willpower, what they really do well is show us how weak the will can be. And the humility that comes with this realization opens us up to be grateful for God’s grace, for the promise of unconditional love we receive, no matter how imperfect we are.

Good Friday’s going to come, whether you give up everything you can all Lent and never fail, or rationalize and justify your way through every cheat. Your perfect control of every situation won’t be enough to save Jesus’ life. Your failures aren’t the reason that it’s ending. But these forty days of struggle are a chance to practice a more perfect imperfection; to risk looking into your own soul and observing its workings when dealing with the most trivial things, knowing that—however great your success or profound your failure to keep a holy Lent—Christ will rise again at the end of it.

This Tuesday was the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, celebrating the famous day on which the zealous man known as Saul, a ferocious persecutor of the earliest churches, was struck blind by a light blazing brighter than the sun on the road to Damascus, cast down to the ground by a voice crying out: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:14) Saul’s whole identity is transformed, down to his very name: Saul the persecutor becomes Paul the apostle, fostering the growth of the new Christian churches around the Mediterranean as zealously as he’d once tried to destroy them.

As a paradigm for spiritual life it’s a bit imposing. While there are many examples of profound change in the lives of Christians all around the world, few of our stories are nowhere near as dramatic as Paul’s. Our paths have fewer sudden swerves and many more gentle turns, and when they do begin to meander in another direction, it rarely comes with such clear signs, with blazing lights and booming voices and traveling companions, fallen to the ground.

We don’t all have Paul’s kind of conversion. But we do all need to be converted.

Not “converted” in the sense of “converting” from one religion to another, but in the sense of what the Christian monastic traditional calls “conversion of life.” “Conversion,” writes Brother Curtis Almquist, SSJE, “is about our life-long turning and returning to Christ.” It is not a matter of self-denial, of giving up the things that are best about ourselves, but of pruning, of trimming away the things that are preventing us from living fully in God’s love, of “co-operating with how Jesus wants to set us free.”

Blinded by the light, Paul is unable to see until he meets Ananias, one of the very Christian disciples whom Paul had been headed to Damascus to persecute. God urges Ananias, despite his (reasonable) skepticism, to go to Paul, and when he does, he lays his hands on him and greets him, this persecuting enemy, as “Brother.” “Brother Saul,” he says, “the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” And immediately, famously, “something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored.” (Acts 9:17-18)

“What needs to be changed in us?” asks the nun and spiritual writer Joan Chittister, OSB. “Anything that deludes us into thinking that we are not simply a work in progress, all of whose degrees, status, achievements, and power are no substitute for the wisdom that a world full of God everywhere, in everyone has to teach us.”

These things are like so many scales, obscuring our vision. They prevent us from seeing God face to face. They prevent us from seeing our neighbors, near and far, as the beloved children of God. They prevent us from seeing ourselves, in fact, as the beloved children of God. And in proclaiming his unconditional love for us—in declaring that we are beloved, whatever our achievements or failures, weaknesses or strengths—Jesus invites us to yield to God’s grace, to the Holy Spirit’s slow work of converting us as we all walk roads that stretch beyond Damascus to the very ends of our days.

O God, who by the preaching of your apostle Paul has caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The heavens declare the glory of God, *
and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another, *
and one night imparts knowledge to another.
– Psalm 19:1-2

For a few brief weeks each year, I get to see the sunrise.

The daily schedules of work and school don’t shift with the seasons, so I tend to sit on the couch drinking coffee at around the same time every day. In late December, it’s already dark. By June, it’s already been light for hours. But for a few precious weeks in January, sunrise falls somewhere around coffee o’clock, when I’m the only one awake and can sit and look at the sky.

This morning was a good one.

I’ve always loved these opening words of Psalm 19 because of the way they imagine the clouds and the stars and the planets in the sky glorifying God: not by singing or by praying or by sacrificial rites, but by being themselves, exactly as they are, exactly as God intends them to be. They don’t have free will, of course; with a few exceptions subject to the intricacies of relativity and quantum mechanics, they are bound to follow the simple rules of Newtonian physics. But their doing exactly that—their following their natures so precisely—is what causes God’s great delight. Light refracted through the early-morning sky cannot but skew toward orange, and yet “the heavens declare the glory of God” nevertheless.

I find it a useful image because we human beings so rarely do the same. Unlike the planets set in their courses, we do have free will. We can and do wander out of our paths. We can and do acts in ways that don’t accord with our true selves. God set the planets to orbit around the sun, and they do it, to the glory of God. God created us to love God and one another, and we don’t do it so well, but when we do—the glory’s even greater!

Most of us, by the grace of God, have a pretty good sense of who we are. You can call it conscience, or self-knowledge, or the Holy Spirit, but for the most part, we have a pretty good sense of who we are in our most authentic selves. It’s harder to express it, to live it, to give ourselves permission fully to be ourselves, as we are.

But you are a creature of God! You were formed and molded from before time to be who you are, and God is glorified when you are, no less than by the cycles of the stars, for—as the second-century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons once wrote—“the glory of God is a human being, fully alive.”

I hate winter.

Yes, I’m a New Englander. No, I’ve never lived further than 10 miles from Boston except for the three years I moved down south for seminary. (…In New Haven, Connecticut.) Yes, I grew up building snow forts in the big snow banks in the driveway and drinking hot chocolate at the skating rink after a hard hour pushing two stacked Hood milk crates all around the ice.

I still hate winter.

I mean, come on… Who wants to shiver through a 12° day? Winter starts with the darkest and gloomiest month of the year, followed by a month or two of bitter cold, followed by eight to ten weeks of false springs that lift your spirits and are immediately followed by dreary cold and damp.

I hate winter. But even I will admit that nothing lifts the spirits of your average four-year-old more than a good 11” of snow. Nothing breaks up the tedium of a long winter of cold, dry days than three hours playing “Sugar-Land” in a landscape iced with confectionery snow. No temperature change is more satisfying than coming in from a cold walk to a warm apartment—it’s even better, I’ll admit, than air conditioning on a hot day.

I’m reminded, on cold winter days like these, of the words of the canticle we call the Benedicite, short for its opening words in Latin: Benedicite, omnia opera Domini — “Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.”

The poem invokes the whole order of creation, from the stars to the seas, from the beasts to priests, calling on every slice of creation to “Glorify the Lord…praise him and highly exalt him for ever.” Even the wind and weather are called upon to praise God:

Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
    all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
    praise him and highly exalt him for ever.

BCP p. 88

The same God, after all, who made the snow day made the bitter cold. The same God who made the fiery summer sun made the wintry arctic blast. And like members of a cosmic choir, they are different but not (one hopes) dissonant. They sing in a polyphonic harmony in which each’s existence enriches the other. The heat of summer makes us appreciate, in other words, the cold of winter. Supposedly.

The same is true for all the seasons of our lives. “Silver linings” are a cliché in difficult times, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. There are consolations tucked within every season; not only in the reminder that it will not last forever, but hidden within that very time itself.

Every dark winter’s night contains within it the promise of a warm fire. Every hot summer day holds the possibility of jumping into the sea. Every drop of dew and flake of snow glorifies the Lord; every blizzard in our lives, however literal or metaphorical, invites us to see God’s glory revealed in and through and behind it, even if only by contrast.

Or at least it gives us a chance to play Sugar-Land.