Lent is always an interesting time for me. I’m a conscientious objector to the annual 40-day fasting-and-flagellation routine. When God crafted a religious calendar, He devoted exactly one day a year to that (Yom Kippur) — and all the other high holy days are big, mandatory parties. It can’t be that after the great victory on Golgotha, we now should be less interested in joy and forty times more devoted to self-affliction. One day is good — Good Friday seems a reasonable choice for those of us who don’t still celebrate Yom Kippur — but forty? No.
Also, frankly, the relationship between traditional Lenten practice and anything Jesus actually said or did is at best very diagonal. Two particular points here; first, Jesus did the 40-day fast once, when He was 30, and He didn’t just give up chocolate and swearing, either. Wanna be like Jesus? Celebrate your 30th with a 40-day fast. If you live to 60, maybe you can do it again. Second, Ash Wednesday directly and solemnly violates Jesus’ instructions on fasting in Matthew 6:16-18. So directly, in fact, that it’s kind of funny.
On the other hand, at a particular time in my life, God called me into a community that observed Lent. There’s no real value in being difficult and cross-grained about it, so I didn’t. Instead, I just skipped the Ash Wednesday service and took on a couple of positive projects (a stack of reading and a fairly sizable apologetics writing project). The projects were big enough that there was no way I’d get through them without giving up something. The goal was to find out in hindsight what I had given up, and then make a determination during Eastertide about whether to resume whatever it was.
That practice did three things for me: it got those projects done, it gave me an opportunity to reassess some of my less useful pastimes, and it gave me something to talk about when people asked — as they often did — “What are you giving up for Lent?” In other words, it allowed me to participate in my community and not be a grief and a trouble over something that wasn’t going to change in any case. The result was a number of great conversations about Lenten practice — mine and theirs — and how it was affecting our daily walk with God.
The communities I’m now part of align more closely with my convictions, and the question doesn’t arise as frequently. But for those of you who find yourself in similar situations, this is a practice I commend to you.
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