A Return to "Running": Giving Up "Stuff" For Lent

Looks like a bit of dust has collected on this blog since the last post.  A lot has happened in the last year and a half: I started a new job, got married, produced a play from a script I had to adapt completely, and became a father.  

With my new wife.

Proud dad moment.

Quite a bit to take my mind off "Running the Human Race."  But I hope it has been as much a time of running the human race for you as it has been for me and my new little family.

There have been many, many changes that we have had to get used to in this time--many new dynamics, many new situations, lots of new responsibilities--and among them, the question of how we as a family participate in the life of the Church.  Today being Ash Wednesday, we have had to decide as a family what we will be doing for Lent.

There are a number of ways of going about Lent, that season where the Church calls us to prepare for Easter, and the Church herself is rich with advice and examples for us to participate most fruitfully; nevertheless, there is one aspect of Lent that has been particularly intriguing to me over the last two or three years.

Traditionally, the Church recommends the threefold practice of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  That is, she asks the faithful to reinvigorate their application to their prayers, make more time for conversing with Our Lord, while applying certain disciplines to ourselves such as going without food (or going with less food than usual), and sacrificing of our possessions what another may have a greater need for.

As a child, of course, the practice that was most emphasized was that of fasting.  Not that we actually fasted--we all had full servings at every meal--our fasting took the form of giving things up.  Most years it was sweets: candy, desserts, or soda.  Some years, when we were feeling more inspired around Ash Wednesday, it was something we held more dear to our hearts, like movies or computer games.  And, of course, there was a bit of the gamesmanship that you might expect to find in a household of six boys: nobody wanted to be one-upped by the ambitious brother who made a significantly greater sacrifice for Lent.  Whatever "stuff" a brother was giving up, I had to give it up too.

Although "giving stuff up" seemed as normal as breathing to us, a more outside view would likely have seen it as strange.  A normal 8-year-old would much more likely play with his favorite toy than put it up on a shelf for forty days.  But we gave stuff up in those days not because it made particularly logical sense to us--nothing really makes particularly logical sense to an 8-year-old, even if they think it does--we did it because our parents told us it was a good thing to do.  And we trusted our parents in this case, as we did with pretty much every case.

But as we grew older, and underwent that awkward process of discovering a greater and greater ability to be the master of our own mind and actions, we began to realize (at least implicitly) that our "giving stuff up" mentality was incomplete.  

For my part, I began to realize that when I was fasting from things that I really enjoyed, I developed a greater ability to take control over many of my actions.  I recognized that the discipline of Lent had made me a stronger person.  So I began to take on the sacrifices of Lent as challenges--tests of my personal strength.  The better the challenge and the better I fulfilled it, the better person I thought myself to be.

And, as I approached Lent in the first years of my adulthood wanting to have as complete an understanding and as full a participation as possible, I realized that even my teenage understanding of Lent was insufficient.  Fasting had become sort of a "personality weightlifting," making my personality stronger, but not more complete.  And it made Lent all about me and my needs, not really about Christ and growing in a friendship with him.

And so, over the last couple of years, I have tried to discover some of the many ways in which Lent is intended to be a time where we grow our relationship with Christ.  Of course, it is important that we give up things that we truly enjoy, but we don't give them up simply to "give stuff up"; rather, by abandoning our attachment to good things, we give ourselves the ability to abandon our attachment to things that are not good.  Furthermore, when we put good things to the side, we make space in our lives for a greater attachment to Christ.  Such a practice does in fact make us stronger, and, over time, it makes us more completely human.  But in becoming more completely human, we become more capable of loving Christ completely.

But there's more.  2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ died in terrible agony, perhaps the most excruciating suffering a person has ever endured.  He died for every single person, that they might rise above their sins and even death itself to be perfectly united with God.  And in that moment, although he was abandoned by all except a few of his earthly friends, he could see every single moment in history: every moment when his friendship was rejected and abandoned--and his agony was worsened--every moment when his friendship was accepted and reciprocated--and his agony was as nothing.  So as we take up the Lenten discipline and when we accept our sufferings, we can unite our pains with his pains, we can show him the compassion he was so cruelly denied, we can learn from him the true cost of sin, and we can thereby forge an even stronger friendship with him.

Lent isn't about giving stuff up.  Giving up stuff in Lent is about Christ.