Lenten Paradox: What You Gain When You Give Something Up

For Lent this year, I gave up gluttony.

Not gluttony in the usual sense, involving the excessive consumption of food.  (Though that is by far my absolute most favorite of the 7 Deadly Sins.)  No, I decided to extend my definition of gluttony to include excesses of all kinds, from food to anger to fear and doubt and worry to complaining to sloppiness and laziness. I would give up wallowing in all forms. 

I'm not a religious person; I was raised Catholic but don't practice any organized form of worship.  When this idea popped into my head, I had no real vision re what form my Lenten sacrifice would take.  I just realized that piles of unfolded clothing were sprouting all over my apartment, that my midsection felt thicker, that I was spending too much time complaining in righteous indignation, that worry was keeping me up at night.  I was gorging on dissatisfaction, wallowing in inaction.  


Then I realized that I was no longer happy being unhappy.  And it became clearer:  beginning Ash Wednesday, for the following 6 weeks (40 days and 40 nights, not including Sundays), I decided to pay closer attention to my thoughts, choices and actions.  And I would make a sincere effort to live not in the extremes of too much, or too much of not enough. I would resist my usual temptation to react (usually badly and unmindfully) when things, due to lack of care and attention (usually my own, sometimes others), become awful and untenable.  I would try to live not in the drama of the moment - however seemingly unpredictable or unpleasant or unfair - reacting unconsciously, automatically to the world and situations I find myself in and the people I find myself around.

Rather than throw up my hands, powerless, in frustration at the injustice of it all, I would make the choice to put out fires well before they burn down the house, to clean up the piles before disappearing under a mountain of mess, to take a moment, breath and think before allowing myself to dissolve into a puddle of anger or angst.  To put the fork down between bites, and chew.

(Before we go on, for those of you unfamiliar with the tradition of “giving something up” for Lent:  After the excesses of Carnevale, ending with a bacchanalian bang on Mardi Gras, a.k.a. Fat Tuesday, or Shrove Tuesday, when Christians – Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, even Lutherans - all over the Americas, Europe and Africa eat, drink, shag and party like it’s 1999, Ash Wednesday ushers in a period of abstinence, of reflection, of penitence for past transgressions, of physical and spiritual cleansing.

I wasn’t aware that back in the day, Carnevale started right after January 6^th, the Epiphany, a.k.a. the 12^th Day of Christmas, or Three Kings Day, climaxing on Mardi Gras, then culminating on Ash Wednesday.  A sort of long coda to the Christmas season during which the eating of meats and rich foods and the drinking of spirits continued through the longest, darkest nights of winter.  Nor was I aware that back in the day, Ash Wednesday began a long period of actual fasting, inspired by Jesus’ 40 days and nights without food in the Judean Desert, praying to his father for strength while Satan tried to lure him from his divine mission with the promise of irresistible worldly pleasures.  The journey was meant to prepare Jesus for the ultimate sacrifice - his life - so that he may be borne anew on Easter Sunday.  

Early Christian followers fasted from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, a total 40 Days and 40 nights, minus 6 Sundays when one was permitted to break the fast.  Over the years, fasting was modified to abstinence from meat; modern times have further simplified the fast down to merely giving something up – sweets, spirits, cigarettes, sex - for nearly 6 weeks from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.  A total of 40 days and 40 nights, minus 6 Sundays when you can cheat.)

Mine is a rather unorthodox approach to the Lenten sacrifice, I know.  But about two weeks in, I’m actually finding I'm having far greater success than my usual attempts to give up chocolate, which last about 12 hours, or sugar and sweets, which last no longer than 24 hours.  (Forget about giving up wine, which I consume far less frequently in far smaller quantities.  I just won’t.)

Very Catholic, all this talk of giving up and sacrifice. Well, I confess:  I was raised a nice Catholic girl.  My siblings and I spent all (Juliana) or several (the rest of us) of our grade school years at Our Lady Of Good Counsel.  We made our First Communion in little white wedding-like dresses, dutifully studied our religious instruction, went to Mass, confessed made-up sins.  (You’ve undoubtedly already heard many horror stories from friends and family re their formative educational experiences in the classrooms of hostile nuns and/or alcoholic priests, so we’ll skip the gory details.)

In modern times in this part of the world, after the weeks of holiday reveling and ringing in the New Year, we challenge ourselves to also start anew:  we resolve to make a change, a big change, a difficult change, a necessary change that will improve our appearance, our health, our career, our relationships, our life.  Not so fun.  Yet despite our best intentions and resolve, many of us for many reasons, some legitimate sounding and some utterly nonsensical, abandon our resolutions. Even if we were off to a strong start, determined to lose that weight, follow that diet, start that project, we tend to revert back to our default, back to the comfort and familiarity of our established patterns and behaviors.  Which brings us back to our well-entrenched set point, right where we started.

Because real change is hard. 

Then - still in the first quarter of the New Year! - Christians (including lapsed Catholics like me, or anyone, really) get a second chance to make a change, to do something big and bold and beautiful.  By making a sacrifice, by giving something up for Lent.

But doctrine dictates that something you give up must be difficult for you to live without; it must feel like a real sacrifice.

In honor of Jesus’ weeks in the desert, testing his resolve, resisting temptations, punishing his body, cleansing his soul, we Catholics were raised to believe that sacrifice should be effortful, uncomfortable, painful, or worse.   It should make demands on our willpower; it should test our mettle and should push us out of our physical and/or mental comfort zone, beyond our boundaries.  And through our struggle or denial, we grow.   We expand.  We transcend. 

When you deconstruct it, the word “sacrifice” comes from the Latin sacrificium: sacr  (holy) + facere (to make).  Simply, sacrifice = to make holy.  The act of sacrifice transforms the mundane into the sublime.  (I’m not talking religious rituals of burning food or slaughtering animals or people in the name of God.  That’s not the true essence of sacrifice.  Why the ancients believed that destroying the best they had to offer servers anyone or anything is beyond me.)  

 I picked up The Road Less Traveled* by M. Scott Peck recently and began rereading it.  In it he defines love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”  By making an effort, acting in spite of one’s fears, doing things differently to create meaningful change in oneself or another – this is love.  This is sacrifice.  Sacrifice is love in action.

This also makes the idea of sacrifice, of giving up, of living without, of paying a price however dear, much less daunting.  It makes making something holy much more within the realm of human possibility.  It allows we mere mortals access to the divine, even if through baby steps.  It gives us far more than we give up.

Every time you volunteer for or donate to a cause, every time you listen patiently to the warblings of a child, every time you show up to help a friend, every time you decide not to have a 2nd (or 3rd, or 11th) cookie (or drink, or smoke), every time you resist giving into the impulse to get angry or even or nasty, every time you chose to put someone or something else's needs before your own - especially if, initially, you'd really, really rather not - you help create a little bit of heaven here on earth.

What appears to have happened re my sacrifice, my giving up of gluttony in all its forms this Lent:  I am less likely to play the victim, feel powerless; I am more likely to look for a positive action, do something.  For example, I’ve become more aware of my tendency to complain about things I can’t control; this awareness has made me aware of how annoying and useless my complaining is.  Which inspires me to stop it, and/or take some positive action to improve the situation.  My apartment feels noticeably neater; any mushrooming piles of clothes are dealt with before they become mountains.  If I wake up anxious in the middle of the night, I can fall back to sleep by letting it be and letting it go.  I think I even lost a pound or two.   Miraculous.  

This is the paradox of sacrifice:  You gain far more than you give up.


© 2015 Tess Quadrozzi, A-Muse-In-Manhattan


*  The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Addition, M. Scott Peck, M.D.