I liked Joseph Shaw’s piece the other day about the point of Lenten disciplines: how they’re not ends in themselves but are supposed to drive us toward prayer, penance, and almsgiving. But I also think we should be careful not to knock the mundane old practices of giving-up—even the clichéd and much-ridiculed fast from chocolate.
Maybe because at this point many of us are already frustrated by our Lenten failures, this seems to be around the time when Catholic social media is especially full of hip advice for alternative Lenten penances. This advice tends to take one of two forms, each helpfully summed up by a popular meme featuring bogus quotes from Pope Francis.
The first meme presents fabricated counsel from the Holy Father advising us to “fast” from things like anger, pessimism, and selfishness, and replace them with virtuous acts like kindness and compassion. The gist of this kind of advice is that we should be “giving up” some sin for Lent. Have you heard that one before?
Then there’s this one, putting into the Holy Father’s mouth a cavalier attitude toward the Church’s precepts of fasting and abstinence: “The sacrifice is not in the stomach, but in the heart . . . A meat stew won’t make you a bad person, nor a fish filet . . . a saint.” This is another popular bit of transgressive Lenten advice you might be noticing around now: that fasting and mortification are not important, but only our interior dispositions and charitable acts.
Both ideas represented in these memes, whatever bits of truth they may contain, seem to be rooted more in therapeutic clichés than in the gospel.
As for the first: avoiding sin is the end of Lenten disciplines, not the means. We don’t try to be less nasty or lustful or greedy during these forty days as a seasonal favor to Jesus. We practice sacrificing good things in order to create habits of self-control, so that later we may be better able to avoid the temptation to do bad things.
As for the second: the “heart” is connected to the “stomach.” We are body-soul composites, not schizo creatures who can do one thing with our flesh and another with our minds. There’s a creepy Gnosticism to that meme and others of its kind, pitting the physical against the spiritual. In reality, the two always go together and affect each other.
So when someone asks, “Whaddya doing for Lent?” let’s not be ashamed to reply that we’re starting with denying ourselves the basics: sweets, alcohol, second helpings, small pleasures. In St. Thomas’s classic formula, we practice aversio ad creaturam, conversio ad Deo: we turn away from attachment to created things and, having first done that, turn toward God to strengthen our attachment to him. We never leap straight to the top levels of mystical prayer or heroic charity. We have to be able to put down the Snickers bar first.