On Lent and Cravings

and finding healing

Photo by Ahna Ziegler

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I don't always give something up for Lent. But when I do, it is usually something completely unrealistic (like “negative thoughts” or “two hours of sleep a night”).

Even if it's something normal (like sugar) I become obsessed with the thing I gave up and have a complete fail halfway through.

Nevertheless, in spite of my failures, Lent always seems to find me. Somehow, on the cusp of spring, as I round the first quarter of the new year and my new efforts in it, there is a painful sense of privation that pervades my life. It parallels the early spring with its regressions to winter temperatures, its leafless trees, its ill-fated flowers that bloom too early and die before their time.

It is a slow, gradual ascent to Golgotha; I struggle to embrace the cross. The seeds have fallen into the ground and died; soon they will break open.

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One of the good (and hard) things about giving something up (even imperfectly) is the way it reveals our hangups and attachments.

Take a kind of food, for instance, or some kind of media: I observe that I am drawn to these things when I experience a negative emotion. Some sweet or carby food —or half a dozen YouTube videos—will take the edge off whatever it is I am struggling with.

Take away these crutches, and you are left with the emotion. Instead of coloring the background of your consciousness, the emotion—the discontent—the feeling of lack or emptiness—becomes front and center.

Lent has found me this year; it is testing me, revealing some of the stuff inside.

A perennial desire I find beneath everything is the desire to belong.

I assume this is universally human, and the pain that accompanies this desire grows more acute as our culture grows more and more antipathetic to community. (All the harping and preaching about community doesn't help, either; it's like preaching to a new mom, “you need sleep! It's good for your health!”)

But “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

Underneath the struggling, the attempts at self-denial, the privations, the perennial disquietude, the lack of perfect fulfillment we inevitably find in this life, is Christ Himself, who offers us healing, who offers us His own body and blood for our sustenance, who invites us to commune with Him.

If you do anything at all this Lent, spend time with Jesus. Let your failures, your desires, your frustrations, your temptations, your weakness drive you to Him.

I believe He wants to bring healing to all of His children, to remind us that, though things are imperfect—though we are imperfect—we belong to Him; we are fully beloved.