Making Lent difficult: The case for rigorous disciplines
Every year I find myself wondering what to do for Lent. What should I give up? Or should I take something on? These questions have been with me for a long time. When I was six or seven, I learned in Sunday school that I should give up sweets for Lent. I also learned how to put tabs into slots to assemble a box to hold the extra offering I would give to One Great Hour of Sharing. And I learned to be extra sure to say my prayers at night. It was a Midwestern mainline Christian’s version of the venerable Lenten triad of fasting, almsgiving and prayer.
After a summer or two at a camp run by Texans, who taught me a prayer they said would keep me out of a hell I had not known to fear—the camp was more fun, and more serious about sports, than anything my denomination offered—I came to Lent with a new intensity. Jesus suffered and died for me on the cross, and in recognition of that great sacrifice, I was—giving up candy? I resolved to take on more rigorous regimes of prayer and fasting. If I was not quite sure why I did these things, I took comfort in their difficulty. And if I failed every year to live up to my intentions, I enjoyed the satisfactions that came with failing at something grand.
Even as a teenager I had some sense that there was more narcissism than discipleship in these Lenten dramas. It felt like they involved a privileged and privatized piety that was all about my personal righteousness. Reading Walter Rauschenbusch, Mary Daly and Gustavo Gutiérrez in college helped me make sense of these instincts. And I heard Isaiah 58 with new ears:
