Lent is not self-help
Why giving up chocolate or social media (might) miss the point.
If you’re anything like me and grew up in an evangelical-ish community, the church calendar might’ve been something you were more or less oblivious to, except of course celebrating Easter and Christmas, maybe lighting an Advent candle here and there. Yet in more recent, perhaps less sectarian years, celebrating parts of the church calendar has become increasingly common among low-church folk, especially the season of Lent.
Lent, for those unaware, is a period of 40 days, beginning with Ash Wednesday and (usually) ending on Maundy Thursday, in which the church remembers the 40 days in which Christ fasted and was tempted in the desert. Lent prepares the church for Holy Friday, the time in which Christ suffers and is crucified, and anticipates Easter Sunday, the time in which Christ conquers death.
And one common practice of Lent is a Lenten sacrifice, the voluntary giving up of a luxury or pleasure such as alcohol, sweet foods (chocolate is common), or social media. Again, imitating Jesus’ own period of fasting in the desert, a Lenten sacrifice places the body into a posture of dependence and weakness, seeking to draw the believer nearer to God, the one whom we truly rely on.
But as evangelical Protestants embrace Lent, something has felt off in the way the season and its practices are often taught and embodied. Until around the eighth century, for example, it was common for the majority of the church—clergy and laity—to participate in a ‘Black Fast,’ a practice not dissimilar from Muslim fasting during Ramadan. A Black Fast, still practised today during Lent by many South Asian Christians in India and Pakistan, involves fasting until sundown in which the church community gathers for a simple meal and for prayer. It’s a deeply committed, deeply communal practice which prepares the church for Holy Week.
By contrast, the types of Lenten practices I more often observe (and participate in!) within my own circles are less committal, and much less communal. One can’t help but feel as the church community prepares itself for the suffering and death of Christ that giving up chocolate for a few weeks begins to feel a little cheap.
When westerners such as myself, even ostensibly Christian ones, approach ancient spiritual practices, we tend to transform them into something that takes after our own distinct preoccupations. Similar to modern appropriations of the Jewish practice of Shabbat and social media use or the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and mental wellbeing, I’ve noticed a similar trend amidst this embrace of Lent: the transformation of spiritual practice into self-help.
To draw a long, historically dubious bow, the development of the disenchanted, secular, atomistic society we live in was accompanied by an image of the Enlightened Man™ who was able to study the world, master nature and himself, and thus improve society indefinitely through the mechanisms of rationality and self-control. Such a Man™ through sheer willpower can transform himself into the type of ‘master’ he seeks to become. This Man™, combined with the growth mindset of capitalism and, to use Weber’s famous thesis, its Protestant work ethic, gives rise to a way of being human precipitated by the ideals self-improvement, individualism, and materialism.
Fast forward to the digital age we currently live in, our culture is obsessed with self-help, with the process of conquering one’s self. Eating becomes a diet, exercise becomes a program, the workday a productivity runsheet, all of which can be tracked, data-ised, and compressed into the never-ending market gains of self-improvement. The self-help industry itself, worth something like $11 billion at the turn of the 2010s, has only accelerated in the 2020s with TikTok trends like #selfcaresunday or the effortless hustle of “that girl” videos.
(As an aside, what a strange formulation ‘self-help’ is: to serve or aid yourself through your own self, as opposed to one’s dependence on others.)
The pressure to create one’s best self, complete one’s own development consumes our world. Lent, at its worst, then becomes no more than a religious mechanism in which we inhabit our cultural obsession for self-help.
But there is good news (along with some “bad-but-ultimately-good-news”): Lent is not self-help.
The good news is that Lent frees us from the late-capitalistic pressure to self-actualise on our own. In contrast to the self-generated nature of self-help culture, Lent instead might be better understood as a practice of dependence, a season in which we place our bodies and our minds into a state of intentional vulnerability. Bodily life is of course vulnerable for all of us, some profoundly more than others, especially at the intersections of gender and disability. Lenten sacrifice and fasting acknowledges and names this vulnerability, imitating the vulnerable humanity of Jesus.
The bad-but-ultimately-good-news is that this requires a reorientation to the ways in which we often think about Lent. As anyone who regularly fasts can attest, spiritual discipline is very rarely an immediately rewarding or even enjoyable experience. The very opposite: as many great spiritual writers across the church history witness to, it is often the mundane, arid, and even painful frailty of prayer, abstinence, or contemplation that reminds us of our humility and inability to save ourselves from sin and suffering.
Even more simply we need to move away from seeing the spiritual disciplines as practices of utility. As the wonderful, late Eugene Peterson wrote on prayer: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting but for being and becoming.” Spiritual practices don’t primarily do something; they are something. They are less about the ‘self’ generating its own actualisation and more about stepping into a collective practice that seeks to attend to the transcendent presence of God.
Peace and grace,
Andrew
More links/books/thoughts
Kelsey Osgood’s Wired piece—“Why Your ‘Digital Shabbat’ Will Fail”—was a real help in thinking through this post. She examines how, desperate for a technique to pry ourselves from the grip of Silicon Valley, modern people (mis)appropriate the Jewish Sabbath. Importantly, they miss the fact that Shabbat is deeply communal, and cannot be properly understood (nor sustained) on your own. But more importantly, Shabbat is not self-help (like Lent). It’s worth quoting her a little more extensively:
Orthodox Jews do not observe Shabbat as a way to spend more time with their families or to prevent burnout induced by living under the tyranny of modern capitalism or to stick it to Zuckerberg once a week. Shabbat does allow us to do those things, and it’s an extremely effective tool for all the above. But no, we do it for a very unfashionable, very simple, supremely awesome reason: because God told us to …
Figuring out how to escape the tentacles of Meta and its ilk is also a necessary endeavor. But these two things are not the same. Ultimately, unplugging your phone for an hour while you enjoy a bath bomb and labeling that me-time “Shabbat” won’t remake society’s deeply unhealthy relationship with technology, and it won’t give you a true break from the obsession with self-improvement endemic to our culture, one that loops directly back to burnout.
Osgood also references a great piece from Linda Heuman about the secularisation of Buddhist mindfulness. Again, desperate for reprieve from modern alienation, westerners turn to mindfulness a therapy divorced from religious meaning, instead emphasising its psychological benefits. Heuman perceptively writes: “[T]o suggest today in some Buddhist circles that the purpose of Buddhism is exactly what the traditional texts tell us it is—which is to say, that it is concerned with the transcendent—can be to come across sounding like a rube or to meet with condescension.” Such an insight runs close to home amidst much Mainline spirituality…
In preparing this post, I thoroughly enjoyed Kathryn Schulz’s 2013 article in New York Magazine. With enviable wit and breadth, Schulz explores the paradox of the contemporary self-help industry in that it repeats old dichotomies between the will and the body without providing any coherent way to overcome or understand them.
Alice Cappelle’s YouTube channel also continues to be a great source of inspiration. Her video on the rise of “that girl” content is really good as her more recent analysis of an interesting development in the “that girl” content-sphere: “slow living.”