A Surrendered Lent

(Or: How to Pick Penances that Bear Fruit While the World Burns)

I used to love Lent. Twenty years ago, when I was newly returned to the Church and for many years afterwards, I would spend weeks contemplating what acts of penance I would perform and what devotions I would practice. It felt like a spiritual New Year, a chance to clean house for my soul, double down on discipline, and start anew.

And maybe it was that for a while. Maybe there were Lents where I successfully ran the spiritual marathon and dashed across the Easter finish line feeling all fresh, shiny, and strong. There likely were. God probably indulged me for a while, letting me have Lents where I thought I was doing a super amazing job at offering up all the things.

It’s hard to remember those Lents now, though. I remember the feeling of loving Lent, but not the details of succeeding at it. Those have all been crowded out by Lent after Lent after Lent that has gone the exact opposite of how I planned.

This will be my twenty-second Lent since I returned to the Church, and looking back on them, what I mostly see is me having a plan, then God taking over and permitting some cross or trial or challenge in my life that subsumed my Lent—that, in truth, became my Lent, as I struggled to accept it and offer it back up to Him.

I’m not complaining, though. Not really. It’s always been for the best. God always knows better what I need to grow closer to Him than I do. He also knows how good it is for me to make a plan, then see it turn upside down. Or to fail at it entirely. It reminds me that on my own, I can do nothing. All is grace. All is Jesus.

These days, as I think about my plans for Lent, I admit I feel a bit nervous. I can’t help but wonder what He has in store for me this year. What new challenge will rear its head in the coming weeks and upend my prayerfully made plan? Loss? Sickness? Nuclear Holocaust? I’m ruling nothing out at this point. Whatever it is, though, I expect my Lent will end up being defined not by the penance or practice I choose, but rather by simply surviving what life (or Putin) throws at me.

Nevertheless, I still have a plan. Not a plan like I would have had in the days of old, but a simple and flexible one, formed according to the principles I’ve hammered out for Lenten practices over the last two decades. I’m sharing them this month here with the hopes that, as you pray through these last strange days of ordinary time, they might help you plan your Lent, grow through Lent, and hold the whole of Lent, not so much loosely, but rather with the attitude of surrender, saying to Jesus, “Here’s what I think best, but Thy will, not mine.”

As always, take what is useful. Leave the rest.

1.     Remember, Lent is not the Spiritual Olympics.

It’s not. It’s not a contest, to see who is more virtuous, more disciplined, or more capable of sacrificing all the things. It’s not an opportunity to set a Personal Record in holiness and outdo Lents past. It’s not an endurance test to see who has what it takes to make it into the Kingdom of God.

Instead, Lent is about growing closer to Jesus. It’s about reflecting on what is holding us back from Him and letting go of those things. (Or, more realistically, one of those things.) It’s about growing in understanding of what Jesus did for us on Calvary and why He needed to do that in the first place. It’s about feeling sorrow for our sins and gratitude for His mercy. Lent is about our hearts, far more than it is about our actions. If the actions we’re doing during Lent aren’t softening our hearts and changing our hearts and making them more completely His, then something is wrong. Either we’re doing the wrong actions or we’re doing them with the wrong attitude.

2.     Keep it simple.

More and bigger sacrifices during Lent do not make for a better Lent. It’s better to do one thing, faithfully, thoughtfully, and with great love, than to do a host of things half-heartedly and occasionally. In the past, the more penances and practices I’ve taken on for Lent, the more penances and practices I’ve abandoned before Easter. When I try to do too much, I end up not doing anything at all. One penance after another falls by the wayside, either because I get overwhelmed by them or because none of them really have my heart and attention. The simple Lents, with simple penances and practices, always end better than the Lents when I try to do all the things.

3.     Don’t neglect prayer.

Prayer is one of the three pillars of Lent. Along with fasting and almsgiving, it’s what the Church asks us to do in a particularly focused way during this season. But that prayer isn’t just another Lenten practice. It’s not simply adding in a daily Rosary or getting to daily Mass. Prayer is what makes a fruitful Lent possible. It should be how we discern what to do during Lent, and it is how we find the grace to keep doing it. My biggest Lenten failures have always had one thing in common: a lack of prayer. I didn’t pray at the beginning and ask God to help me see what practices or penances He wanted me to take on. And I didn’t pray enough throughout Lent, asking God for the grace to endure, be faithful to my commitments, and allow me to draw closer to Him through them. Instead, I tried to power through Lent on my own, relying on my wisdom, my strength, my will, not His. And that never turns out well.

4.     Be realistic.

Come Lent, it can be tempting to tackle the biggest problems in our personality or life by taking on grand sweeping penances that we think will change us for good. So, we vow to give up losing our temper…or procrastinating…or complaining…or, as I did one Lent, expressing my opinions. Yes, opinions, all opinions—about the weather, about the liturgy, about clothing and food and classes, about everything. My heart was in the right place. I knew I had a bad habit of sharing my opinions too freely—often at the wrong time and more often in the wrong ways. I wanted to learn to be more thoughtful. That was good. But it wasn’t realistic.

Unless one takes a vow of silence, nobody can give up expressing opinions. It’s how we converse. It’s human nature. It was too much. Just like vowing to never lose our temper or never procrastinate or never complain, when those bad habits run deep in us, can be too much. It would have been better for me that Lent if I’d decided to give up expressing political opinions. Or opinions on liturgical music. Or (if social media had existed at the time) disagreeing with people in comment boxes. I should have picked something small and doable with which to practice holding my tongue. But I went big…and fell flat on my face. I could barely go 40 minutes without expressing an opinion, let alone 40 days. By the time Lent ended, I felt a whole lot worse about myself, but not one bit closer to Jesus.

Small, targeted, doable penances—like saying a prayer for people that cut us off in traffic instead of honking our horn at them to address anger issues, or picking one person whom we tend to complain about and, when temptation strikes, finding something for which to praise them instead—will, in the end, bear far more fruit…and leave us less discouraged come Easter Sunday.

5.     Don’t choose a penance that leads to sin.

This one seems self-evident…but it wasn’t always evident to me. Consider, for example, the Lent that I took on a graduated fast. Every week, I gave up something new—the first week sugar, the second week sugar and gluten, the third week sugar, gluten, and dairy. Or something like that. Whatever the order, by the end of Lent I was eating like a vegan Mormon Celiac on a diet, and I was a wench! I was so crabby and so short-tempered and so wrapped up in how miserable and hungry I was, that I’m surprised my roommates didn’t kick me out of the house. There also were numerous years where I attempted to give up coffee or putting sugar in my coffee or milk in my coffee. By the fourth time I attempted to mess with my coffee for Lent, my friends banded together and told me flat out I was no longer permitted to take on any Lenten penances that involved coffee. It wasn’t fair to them.

It’s funny now, but it wasn’t funny then. I really was unpleasant. And our Lenten penance should not make us unpleasant. It should be penance for us, but not anyone else. If we can give up coffee or eat only one meal a day or get to Mass every day during Lent and do it with a good spirit and balanced blood sugar and while still fulfilling our duties at home or work, we should do it. Those are all good things. But if we’re being a bear to everyone around us while we carry out our Lenten penance, we are missing the point. Charity comes first.

6.     Give. Don’t just give up.

Almsgiving is often the most neglected of Lenten practices. Most of us spend the days and weeks before Lent thinking about what things we’ll sacrifice and what devotions we’ll adopt, but we forget that along with penance and prayer, we’re also supposed to give alms. In the faces of those in need, we are supposed to see ourselves, who are always in need of Christ’s grace. And through giving to those in need, we’re supposed to learn both detachment from material goods and greater trust in God’s provision, both of which are prerequisites for growing in holiness.

Almsgiving does one more thing: It prevents our Lent from being all about us. It calls us out of ourselves and asks us to see the world with the eyes of Christ—the suffering, the pain, the hunger. It softens our hearts, helps us to grow in compassion, and binds us in solidarity with the Christ who gave all for a suffering world. So, as you plan for Lent, think about how you will give to others during this season—through checks written, Masses said, or time spent.

7.     It’s just a season.

We hang so very much on Lent, expecting great things to happen in our soul during those 40 or so days. We hope to kick bad habits, develop new and better habits, have deep spiritual insights, and be overwhelmed with joy when Easter finally arrives. When none of those things happen—when penances and practices fall by the wayside and the trials of life keep coming and we get to Easter feeling every bit as tired and weak as we did on Fat Tuesday—it’s tempting to say we had a “bad” Lent, that we failed at it, that the whole season was pointless for us.

But sometimes, our failure is the best fruit of Lent. It can be a solid annual reminder that we are not the saviors of our souls. That title belongs to Jesus alone. “Bad Lents” are, in fact, good Lents, if they help us learn just how weak and broken we are, how we can’t do anything by our own power, and how badly we need Jesus.

Holiness is the work of a lifetime, not a season, and it happens in fits and starts, through a constant succession of failures and victories, successes and setbacks, all experienced in the midst of new trials and crosses. These 40 odd days can be part of that, but they’re never the whole of it.

***

So, that’s the best advice I’ve got for now. Pray. Ask God what He wants you to do. Sacrifice something that will lead you to lean more heavily on Jesus. Pray some more. Give generously. And don’t despair if life happens and all your carefully laid plans go out the window. Because the way this Lent is starting off, they probably will.

What I’m Reading

In between diaper changes, I’ve been trying to make sense of what is happening in Ukraine, just like everyone else is. This essay on “Putin’s Spiritual Destiny” is fascinating and potentially perceptive. I say “potentially” because I am not an expert, and I have no idea to what extent these ideas really do shape his thinking. But I appreciate a deeper explanation for Putin’s actions than “He’s a mad man” or “He wants to bring the USSR back.” That’s how he’s acting and what he’s doing, but it doesn’t get at the more important question of “why.” Which this article does.

“Tradismatic Trentecostalism” is not only the cleverest description I’ve ever seen of the spirituality at Franciscan University (my alma mater for grad school), but it’s also an excellent First Things essay by Clement Harrold, which examines what makes Franciscan a healthy synthesis of the best of Catholic traditionalism and the Charismatic Movement. With so many wings of the Church snipping and snapping at each other online, Franciscan continues to show that you can be radically open to the Spirit, radically in love with Tradition, and radically committed to the poor, all while fruitfully engaging this culture (not the culture of 1872). How it models that is worth a look by the wider Church.  

America Magazine really needs to work on its headlines (among other things), but this essay by Father Christopher Smith S.J., “My white mom’s marriage to a black man outraged my Grandma. But she learned to love us,” was touching and refreshing and human.

What My Kids Are Reading

Becket is only 19 months, but he is fascinated with numbers. 90 percent of his interest in numbers seems to be connected to the delightful Sandra Boynton classic, Hippos Go Berserk, which he wants read to him a dozen times an hour (and which he also sleeps with). The balloons and the “Beastie” (as Becket describes the tag-along monster) round out its toddler appeal.

Toby’s interest in longer stories is growing (so much Brambley Hedge and Berenstein Bears right now), so I am always grateful when he wants me to read Diggersaurs, which combines his great loves of trucks and dinosaurs…and can be read aloud in less than 2 minutes.

What I’m Cooking

Favorite recipe discovery by far this month was Smitten Kitchen’s Spicy Roasted Cauliflower with Burrata.

As for my own recipes, based upon what is happening most regularly in my kitchen, you’d think I was working on a new cookbook entitled “101 Ways to Turn Aldi’s Specialty Ravioli and Tortellini into Fancy Company Food.” Which might not be a half bad idea. Either way, here is our favorite family friendly tortellini dish from this month.

Mushroom Tortellini with Bacon & Olives

Serves 5; Prep Time: 0, Cook Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

• 2 Packages Aldi Mushroom Tortellini

• .5 pound bacon

• 1 can black olives, pre-sliced

• 2-3 handfuls Fresh Baby Spinach

• 1 cup shredded Parmesan

• Extra Virgin Olive Oil

• Kosher Salt & Pepper

• Crushed Red Pepper (Optional)

Instructions

1. In a large, deep sided frying pan, fry bacon until just crisp; remove from pan and place on a towel covered with a paper plate; drain all but 2 Tablespoons grease from the pan;

2. While bacon cooks, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil; add tortellini and cook according to package instructions (about 3 minutes, a little longer if frozen); reserve 1 cup of the pasta water, then drain pasta;

3. While pasta drains, add 4 Tablespoons of Olive Oil to the pan with the bacon grease; heat until glistening; add pasta and toss; add spinach and toss until it just starts to wilt; add bacon and olives and toss; if the pasta feels dry, slowly add the reserved pasta water back in, until it reaches the desired level of coated; add half the cheese, along with salt and plenty of fresh ground pepper; toss;

4. Serve with remaining cheese and crushed red pepper if desired.

This is a free version of Emily Stimpson Chapman’s monthly newsletter “Through A Glass Darkly.” Feel free to share it with friends and family. Free issues are sent out 3-4 times a year. To receive every issue, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.