Why Academics Need Lent

I could make apologies for simply re-posting, verbatim, my Lenten meditation from last year.  However, the liturgy doesn't make apologies for repeating itself, verbatim, every Ash Wednesday, does it?  (Oh great—I just compared my blog to the Book of Common Prayer.  So much for Lenten humility.)  And these thoughts are as relevant as ever to my experience of studying theology in constant dependence on God's grace.  Each week, it seems, I am more aware of how little my studying, writing and theologizing is something I do, and how much it is something I receive—as I study, I feel less and less like an adventurer forging my way through the thickets and more and more like a child following a winding little paper trail that my parents have left behind, luring me toward the prize.  Lent serves as an annual reminder of this dependence, and of the far more mundane dependence of the mind on the body and its earthy rhythms.  So enough of the prologue.  Here's the repost:

Many evangelical and Reformed folks today are wont to turn up their noses at the practice of Lenten fasting.  There seems to be something unhealthily ascetic about it, with the notion that somehow we draw nearer to God by mortifying our flesh and thereby becoming more spiritual.  There seems to be a trace of Gnosticism, a sense that the body is a bad thing and we must beat it down, cast off its desires and its needs, to be truly spiritual.  And there is also a sense that this practice must lead to pride, to the notion that because one has overcome one's bodily desires to become more spiritual, one may take pride in this superior spirituality and self-discipline.

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Reminded of our Mortality

Byron Smith has just linked to a post on Ash Wednesday and Lent which expresses, much more fully and eloquently, a lot of what I was groping towards in my post last week "Remembering that We are But Dust".  The author admits that Lent can be an occasion for dualistic asceticism, but rightly understood, it is a rebuke to everything of that sort, a call to live in the body, not to indulge in pretensions of being anything more than we are.  

It is the occasion for an affirmation of who we are, not, ultimately, a plea to transcend our mortal condition. We can live in our bodies, in this world, seeing ourselves more compassionately and thereby are moved to perform works of love, without conditions or demands, for our fellow-sufferers. The first day of Lent is an occasion not for a form of world-denial, but loving acceptance of flawed reality, of imperfection. It is a rebuke to all separatism, escapism, and self-hatred. And of course, as it points us to the Christ-event, Lent ends, as it beings, with an affirmation of our creaturely existence: as Christ rose from the dead, so will our bodies, to live in a New Jerusalem – not an ethereal “heaven.” 

Let the ashes of Ash Wednesday remind us of our mortality; let our repentance be the occasion for a reprieve from neurosis and anxiety; and let us patiently hope for the vindication of creation of which Christ’s resurrection was the first fruits. Let us live in the world. 

A fantastic and beautiful meditation, well worth reading as we enter the second week of Lent.

Remembering that We are But Dust (or, Why Academics Need Lent)

Many evangelical and Reformed folks today are wont to turn up their noses at the practice of Lenten fasting.  There seems to be something unhealthily ascetic about it, with the notion that somehow we draw nearer to God by mortifying our flesh and thereby becoming more spiritual.  There seems to be a trace of Gnosticism, a sense that the body is a bad thing and we must beat it down, cast off its desires and its needs, to be truly spiritual.  And there is also a sense that this practice must lead to pride, to the notion that because one has overcome one's bodily desires to become more spiritual, one may take pride in this superior spirituality and self-discipline.  

And so there has been a tendency to try to re-cast Lenten fasting--we are exhorted to choose something that we are too attached to, and to "give it up" for Lent so that we can become more cognizant of our warped desires, our idolatries of worldly things, and be more single-minded in our devotion to God.  If you care too much about chocolate, give up chocolate for Lent, acknowledging that God is more important than chocolate, etc.  Or it needn't even be food.  Perhaps you watch too many movies--why don't you give that up, so as to put God back at the center?  We're afraid that Lent not be construed as an unhealthy mortification of the body, so we recast it as an opportunity to refocus our desires and devotions on God alone.  

There's certainly nothing wrong with such a refocusing, and indeed that ought to be part of a healthy Lenten practice, but it seems that something crucial is left out in this approach.  And this, I think, is because the standard discomforts about Lent--it leads to Gnosticism and pride--have got it precisely backward.  Rightly understood, Lent is about purging us of spiritual pride by reminding us of our bodily condition, of snatching us away from lofty heavenly speculations and putting us firmly back in our tabernacles of skin, bones, and appetites.  "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return" the priest tells us as he administers the ashes.  Remember that you live in the body.  And being in the body means being a dependent being, a being that depends upon God's animate and inanimate creation, in its manifold forms, to continue living, functioning, thinking.  (My friend Byron has highlighted this nicely in a Lenten reflection he's just posted.)  How does Lenten fasting do this?  Well, it's really quite simple.

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