I’ve been a Christian for 20 years but have only just discovered the church season of Lent, the six weeks or so in the lead-up to Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday. Now, with the annoying zeal of a new convert, I’m convinced whether believer or agnostic, we’d all be better off leaning into the season.
As a society, we are already halfway converted. Familiar events in the annual calendar, like Movember, are Lent-like in their emphasis on giving up something, or focusing our collective efforts, in pursuit of a greater good. Feb Fast is a prompt to reset after the excess of Christmas, Dry July a mid-year pause to abstain from alcohol. Each event is time-bound and concentrated on a positive goal. When deployed like this, the argument goes, peer pressure is actually very good.
Then there are other Lenten adaptations that ditch the communal aspect, treating it more like a competitive sport. Think the biohackers and self-optimisers of Silicon Valley, who turn to self-deprivation for productivity hacks. Fasting is good for clear thinking, apparently. Sometimes this kind of thing produces a public good, like this snap of Bradley Cooper doing a cold plunge in a frozen wilderness. But these guys (and they’re mostly guys) seem more into crushing their to-do lists.
The Lenten logic behind all of these is that discipline matters – and there are benefits of adopting a regime or schedule you wouldn’t necessarily choose for yourself. We creatures of comfort and convenience don’t willingly submit to hardship. We all need a nudge because “you do you” is fine until it gets hijacked by an all-too-human trait: we don’t reliably choose what’s good – for ourselves or each other.
When believers observe Lent, what they add on top of the discipline is discipleship, the commitment to bring their everyday life in line with their convictions. It’s hard. According to Jesus, the greatest commandment, or what helps life go best, is loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself.
Sceptics may doubt the existence of God, but plenty will understand the difficulty of loving their neighbours – for example, amidst the present housing crisis, the negatively geared ones, or those reluctant to junk the tax break. Which isn’t to put the onus on loving others just on those who are struggling. Neighbourly love, for the negatively geared, might look like forgoing the tax break so others can break into the market. Taking a hit for someone else’s good may seem preposterous, but this is what Jesus was on about: stretching our loves beyond our own interests.
This is what Lent is: a chance to willingly embrace discomfort for a greater outcome. And it’s not as though Jesus asks something of his followers he doesn’t do himself. The season takes its cues from the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness while the devil dangled earthly power and riches before him. But Jesus resists temptation – not because of how hardcore he was, but because he relied on God through prayer.
The idea is that believers do the same during Lent. In the weeks preceding Easter, believers give up something as a small reflection of Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for the world. He gave up his life on Good Friday; I’m giving up sugar. Piddly in comparison, but resisting my nightly beeline for the pantry is a tiny attempt to not put myself first – but to willingly enter a kind of desert.
The experience helps me face myself: someone who’d prefer to eat feelings rather than feel them, whose interests are curved in on themselves rather than oriented around other people. Without distraction from a sugar rush, I try to seek comfort in prayer and show up for others. It’s not going brilliantly, but there’s more time to keep trying.
The aim isn’t to give up the sweet stuff forever: Sundays throughout Lent are feast days when the fasting is broken. Channelling Tom and Donna from Parks and Recreation, the spirit is more “treat yo self” than you might think. Six days of fasting, followed by one of feasting, inducts me into the rhythms of the Christian story. Becoming a Christian is only the first conversion, it turns out. The second involves being habituated into a different order of time.
The mini-desert of Lent is a way into that. But the wisdom Lent has for all of us is the surprising potential for growth to be found in apparently barren places. It’s why the desert mystic Carlo Carretto insists: “If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life.”
Justine Toh is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity
