SHOULD WE KEEP LENTING DURING A PANDEMIC?
There is little doubt that COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted our lives and dramatically altered normal patterns of behavior. Those who have heeded public health officials’ pleas and engaged in physical distancing (and I hope you have) have almost certainly found yourselves dramatically more online—whether for work or just to maintain human connection. This has quite naturally led to a lot of online processing about the disarray we’re in. In the Christian corners of Facebook and Twitter, one thing I’ve seen not a few times is people express something along the lines of this sentiment: “Now that we’re socially distancing/quarantining/dealing with COVID-19, can I call off Lent/fasting/my Lenten discipline?”
In most instances this is a joke (although probably with a good deal of “kidding-not-kidding” energy). But even if it’s made in jest, what’s the underlying premise that’s supposed to make it resonate with people? It would seem that people are saying that Lent or Lenten disciplines require a certain amount of stress or anxiety or disruption or general “feeling-badness” and that COVID-19 has introduced further stress, anxiety, disruption, or general “feeling-badness.” Since we can control our Lenten disciplines, but can’t control COVID-19, and since we shouldn’t suffer beyond a certain level, we should be authorized to set aside the suffering we can set aside since there’s little we can do about much of excess discomfort and disruption in the world around us now.
So, we’re left still with the question: Is this right? Should people feel themselves free to cast off Lenten fasting or their personal Lenten disciplines? I think the answer is, as with many things in life, complicated, and to get to it we have to (or have the chance to!) dig a little deeper into what precisely Lent is.
The Ash Wednesday service in The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer offers a quite nice summary of the purpose of Lent. It began primarily as a time in which converts to the faith were educated and formed in the faith prior to their Baptism at the Easter vigil and secondarily as a time for notorious sinners to be reconciled and restored to the Church. It became a time in which people were especially mindful of God’s pardon, our need to follow that example in forgiving others, and our need for continual repentance. (1) In other words, Lent is a special time set apart in the Christian year in which we turn from the things that call us from faithfulness and seek to reorient our wills to be in line with God’s. The collects for the Sundays in Lent reinforce this perspective. They emphasize Lent as a time in which we seek God’s strength to withstand temptation, restore those who have gone astray, be defended from the evils that assault the body and soul, be united with Christ and have Christ dwell within us, and have our “unruly” wills and affections brought into alignment with the will of God. (2) These images have deep resonance with those of physical exercise or healing. They are about correction or reorientation for the sake of progressing in holiness, becoming Godlier, and imitating Christ more and more.
Alexander Schmemann, in his most excellent book Great Lent, offers a vision of Lent from an Orthodox perspective that nonetheless remains quite congruent with what we Anglicans learn from our Book of Common Prayer. Lent is, first and foremost, about orienting ourselves toward Easter—a reminder, participation in, and celebration of the New Life offered to us in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Like in our invitation to a Holy Lent, the preparation of those who are about to receive this new life for the first time in Baptism is front and center—Lent offers a time of turning from the deceptions and death of the world to the truth and life of the Resurrection. But it is also true that all those of us who continue to live on this side of the New Creation must struggle mightily to remain actively and fully connected to this new and true life. The gravitational pull of death and Sin continue to affect the baptized and almost all of us will drift away from our source of life and light. Easter becomes the opportunity to return every year to our own Baptism, meaning that “Lent is our preparation for that return—the slow and sustained effort to perform, at the end, our own ‘passage’ or ‘pascha’ into the new life in Christ.” (3)
This understanding of Lent, then, cannot but affect how we understand the ascetical practices, the fasts and disciplines, that we take on during the forty days leading to Easter. What we do during Lent should be oriented toward nothing more or less than aligning our wills to God’s more and more, reorienting our paths in those places we have strayed from our journey toward holiness, and ultimately focusing on doing those things that make us more and more Christlike. Lenten fasts and disciplines should be oriented toward these things and no other. We should take on practices in Lent oriented toward the specific ways that we need correction or growth in holiness. Taking on new practices should only happen because we realize that we need these practices to grow in holiness. We should only give up things that lead us to vice, either because they inherently do this or because, while good in themselves, we are inordinately attached to them. I think there is probably a strong Ignatian streak in my personal Wesleyan spirituality and if I’m being honest I really think Lenten discipline is a chance every year to focus on and get rid of a particular sin or defect. This should mean that every Lent should end with a new pattern behavior: You have taken on a new practice that you should continue to do, you have excised a vice (or are working toward excising it), or you have slightly less attachment to a good that you are inordinately attached to.
This understanding of Lent also has important ramifications for what our Lenten disciplines or fasts are not. Lent and Lenten disciplines are not first of all an exercise in suffering for its own sake. They are not practices by which we earn God’s grace by depriving ourselves for forty days every year. Nor are we simply following a divine fiat demanded of God purely because God can, something completely disconnected from our own good. Lent may be penitential, but penance is not punishment. Lent may involve discipline, but it is neither retribution nor is it a prison in which the main point is to just serve our time. Our disciplines should be intimately linked to rooting out the places where sin and death still reign within us and helping us grow in holiness. Our Lenten disciplines should be such that our patterns of thought and behavior are somehow different every year on the other side of Easter.
Ok—so this discussion is interesting, but the question still remains whether we should be handed a pass to give up our Lenten disciplines because of COVID-19. And to this I will say: it depends. If indeed you took on a Lenten discipline based purely on the thought that it was a matter of introducing greater suffering into your life and really had no connection to the specific patterns of sin that you needed to work on—give it up. But you should have given it up anyway. Lent is, again, not an exercise in suffering for its own sake, but rather really should be related to the inordinate attachments that we have and rooting out patterns of sin. So, let the extra unnecessary suffering you’ve taken on be a chance to re-reflect on what Lent really is and take on a discipline in these last few days of Lent that is actually related to your growth in holiness.
Things get a little more complicated if we’re talking about people who gave up certain things or took on certain other things out of a sound understanding of Lent. On the one hand, we recognize that these things are in the grand scheme of thing good to give up and are not a matter of suffering for its own sake. On the other hand, we can’t escape the fact that changing our patterns of behavior and thought is probably going to involve some pain and anxiety. This is just part of what it means to be embodied. So, my suggestion for sorting through these things would be the following:
If you gave up something like social media because it was, in normal times, harming your mental and spiritual health or you were spending too much time on it and not investing in IRL (in real life) relationships, you can probably relax this. We are not living in “normal circumstances” and human beings need contact with other human beings. This discipline was meant to deepen those real relationships because there was a better way of connecting beyond the internet. At this point the internet is the best way of connecting. Commit to lessening your social media time after COVID-19 is not the all-encompassing reality it is now.
Similarly, there are certain people for whom the stress and difficulty of dealing with trying to root out some sinful pattern of behavior that you committed to this Lent, when combined with the stress of COVID-19, has a net result of more despair or lowered quality of life (understood holistically) than if we gave up the Lenten discipline—in that case give it up. If one looks, for instance, to Pope Gregory the Great’s The Book of Pastoral Rule, one sees permission for spiritual directors to allow some vices to thrive and even grow if in doing so a more serious vice is rooted out. I think this applies to our current situation: if you would be overwhelmed by a tremendous despair or can only maintain your discipline with an attitude of unrelenting works righteousness, it is better to ease off your discipline at the current moment. (4) This resonates with advice I got from a health seminar in college: you should absolutely give up smoking at some point if you’re a smoker, but that some point shouldn’t be during finals. Wait until the inordinate or unusual stress in your life is gone and you have enough stability that you can take on some extra disruption.
On the other hand, if, all things being equal, the sin or vice you are trying to root out really was causing you more harm than even the combined suffering of COVID-19 and your Lenten discipline (and I would be inclined to honestly say this is most of our vices), then you should stick it out.
In the end, our ability to parse though which of these four options we land in is probably extremely compromised in these trying times. If you have a spiritual director, this would be a good time to reach out to this person (if you can do so safely) to try and work through where you fall on this continuum. If you don’t have a spiritual director, this may be a good opportunity to realize that we are not able to manage our spiritual lives in isolation and should seek such a person out. Really, this pandemic is the occasion not to try and get things right spiritually now, but to have a better understanding of where and how we should go about Lent in the future. And ultimately, this time of unsettling is a very good time for us to reflect on the fact that no God’s grace will catch us no matter how much we fail or how far short we fall.
The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 264-5.
The Book of Common Prayer, 218-19.
Alexander Schmemman, Great Lent (Crestwood, NT: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 13-14.
Pope Gregory the Great, The Book of Pastoral Rule, trans. George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007), §38.
