Last year for Lent, I thought The Hubs and I were being wildly clever when we gave up the news. It got oohs of approval from people at church when everyone yelled out what they were fasting from during a service. There’s a lot of ‘yelling out’ during services at our church, which is probably one of the main reasons I’m still attending. Giving up the news was so life-giving for me that I turned away from it almost entirely. So this year, it didn’t seem like quite enough to do wholeheartedly what I was already doing with most of my heart anyway.
I started thinking about my behavior and things that would pinch a little. Not hurt too much – not like giving up sugar, or dessert, or ice cream, or cookies – and then I began to realize that I had become that mother who sneaks away from her children in the backyard to go down to the deep freezer in the basement and take a bite of the frozen brownies that were supposedly being saved for unexpected company, as if we were a pioneer family living on a remote homestead waiting for the circuit riding preacher, except that they wouldn’t have deep freezers. Or brownie ingredients. Anyway, I decided it was the dark chocolate bar, the cocoa powder, the cacao nibs, those little chocolate and nonpareil dipped shortbread cookies from Trader Joe’s for which I would sneak off to have a tiny hit to get me through the day, just a tiny hit mid day, and then I added one in the morning with some coffee, and then another nibble late at night…anyway, you get the point. So now I’m a walking cliche: I gave up chocolate for Lent.
Sure enough, a little structure is freeing. I got a massive craving which, let’s be honest, has nothing to do with food and everything to do with the two to four hour rotation in which my brain tires of my children and wants to know, “So, is this all we’re going to do today?” and then demands a dopamine hit because the answer, with a sigh, is “Yes, brain, this is the height of intellectual stimulation you will experience today.” Anyway, I craved the chocolate and then I couldn’t have any so I moved on. It was simple It was nice.
And this is about as spiritual as this post gets, this lesson I learn each Lent when I give something up: there was a thing that I thought I desperately needed and it turns out, no, I don’t really need it, not that much. I need, instead of chocolate: hope. Direction. Companionship. Resurrection.
It makes me curious, which is also what’s supposed to happen. I start asking of my life “where else?” Where else do I have crutches I can cast aside? Where else am I entirely dependent on something that is just a fiction, a lie?
My mother-in-law is giving away one household item each day for Lent. Forty things will leave her premises by the time Easter arrives. That’s several boxes of stuff, and I like the imagery. Here are some lumpy old things I don’t want anymore. I will stack them in the trunk of the car and not let myself peek into the boxes. I will remember what it is like to have courage, to be determined about a thing, solely for the exercise of courageous determination. Because when we ask for change, and we act toward change, some cosmic mechanism beyond scientific cause and effect begins to move. It is the spirit of holiness that calls to us during Lent: you can. You can. You can.
When Easter arrives, may you find your cravings diminished and your spirit several junk boxes lighter.
