My Self-Care Is in Ashes

And The New York Times Thinks That Might Be a Good Thing

File: Fasting in Lent. Jeuner dans le Carême (BM 1873,0712.852).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Happy Ash Wednesday to all who celebrate. So sorry I didn’t post yesterday. Went to bed happily on Monday night in the usual way and woke up at who knows what hour (I suppose God knows) to find myself very ill. Spent the next twelve hours imploring God to keep all my insides in their proper place intermingled with strange dreams and Gloria, the cat, pressed up against my head. Perhaps she thought if I couldn’t move, I wouldn’t be so ill. So anyway, I’m beginning Lent in the usual way—in total weakness, my house a complete shambles, behind on all the projects I have going, and fully convinced of my own mortality. Couldn’t even make it to church this morning.

And that, I’m sorry to say, means that this Lent is already a success for me. It proves once, again, that God will arrange for me the various kinds of suffering and deprivations he thinks will make me holier. I had been thinking just to avoid Insta reels as best I can and not eat anything after lunch (I love a little snack in the evening) and sort of gently try to go in the direction of an increased sense of God’s presence in my life and in the world. By no means was I planning to do anything really, how shall I call it, sacrificial…especially not in the sense that Jesus might mean that word.

Anyway, the vibe shift is real because a few days ago, the New York Times had a thing about Lent and it starts out kind of nuts but it gets, well, sane if I’m perfectly honest, which of course I always am. It’s called “What We Give Up Makes Us Who We Are,” a title I imagine the author, Molly Worthen, didn’t pick because it doesn’t quite go with the piece itself. I would have called it, “Oops We Found A Couple Of Christians Out There.” It starts out this way:

Chanequa Walker-Barnes, a professor of practical theology and pastoral care at Columbia Theological Seminary in Georgia, has an unusual approach to Lent. Instead of giving up chocolate or fasting, “sometimes I’ll say I’m giving up self-neglect,” she told me. For Lent two years ago she began blogging through “40 Days of Self-Care.” She committed each day to healthier eating, more yoga, meditation and better time management — making do with what she had rather than buying new stuff, since “marketing experts are tapping into self-care,” she said. The reaction from others surprised her: “First friends and then strangers told me they were following the Lenten challenge. It floored me that people were taking it seriously. It connected to a hunger,” Dr. Walker-Barnes said. She published a book called “Sacred Self-Care” last year. Dr. Walker-Barnes is one of many Christians who are reclaiming Lent, the 40 days of reflection, repentance and self-denial before Easter. What looks to outsiders like the biggest buzzkill of the church calendar has become a season that some younger Christians look forward to. They see it as a chance to rethink false promises about personal freedom and purpose — promises offered by churches that have let them down and by a mainstream culture in which podcast gurus push juice cleanses and meditation in the name of self-optimization, a crooked image of the Lenten fast.

I like that, “sacred self-care.” Wouldn’t it be so great if personal holiness could be measured by the success or failure of one’s wellness routine and not the degree to which one fails to follow the law of God? Tragically, it is so much easier to think in terms of physical and emotional health, rather than that of the spirit. I know I’m unhealthy, right now, because I’m literally lying on the couch recovering from whatever awful virus struck me down. But in a couple of days, when I’m back to my usual routines of exercise and proper nutrition, it will be super easy for me to mistake that vague sense of malaise, that inescapable sensation that all is not right with the world, for the failure to have the perfect rhythms of eating, working, and hanging out with friends. Happiness and contentment are just within reach if I can but order my material and social circumstances. Whereas, that is all a lie. The reason I’m uncomfortable is that I am a sinner and subject to death.

Anyway, skipping a paragraph-long history of Lent and Ash Wednesday we come to the racism of it all:

Dr. Walker-Barnes wonders whether majority-white churches have leaned into a food-focused approach to self-denial that is more bounded by cultural context than they realize. “There are ways to reinterpret what we fast from. For me, grounded in my experience as a Black woman and the ways I have been taught to look at my body and myself as unworthy of care and love, fasting can teach me to suppress and repress my body even more,” she said. For Christians of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q. Christians, “what we need to work on is learning to see ourselves as made in God’s image,” she said.

Ah yes, of course, the very precious imago dei. If only you would just work harder to understand how very precious you are. You are so worthy of care and love. It’s just that you, like Jean Jacques Rousseau or whoever it was, have been taught to suppress yourself. Once you let go of the shackles of your sense of unworthiness, you will emerge into the golden sunlight of joy.

This, of course, is not the Christian view. Your problem isn’t your cultural context or your lack of self-care and self-love. Your problem is that you have broken the Law and that you didn’t even feel that bad when you were doing it. God designed you to worship him alone, to find all your satisfaction and worthiness by depending on him entirely for everything, and you didn’t want to do that. You loved yourself rather than him. You grasped and took what you believed to be yours instead of accepting it as a gift. You were working on learning to see yourself as made in God’s image when in reality, the image is so marred, so ruined, who can understand it? Only God, who came on purpose to heal and restore it.

All that to say, Lent is making a comeback among the young:

When I called up current students and recent graduates from Christian colleges, most of whom started taking Lent seriously only when they got to college, they described the surprising freedom they found in submitting to tradition. I asked about sin and the English Puritan John Owen’s command to “load your conscience; and leave it not until it be thoroughly affected with the guilt of your indwelling corruption, until it is sensible of its wound, and lie in the dust before the Lord.” They pointed out that the call to self-mortification is not an end in itself. Lent is a time to repent of worshiping false idols, yes — in order to reorient the impulse to worship. The aim of the hunger pangs is to drive home your dependence on God; the structure of tradition is a tool for that.

Wow wow wow. This, my dears, is right in the New York Times.

Tiffany Reed grew up in a biracial Pentecostal family that moved frequently and fasted off and on, according to the direction of her father. “He would read about church history, watch documentaries and then get excited and introduce a new family practice,” she told me. As an undergraduate at the King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, she watched some evangelical classmates become Anglicans or convert to Catholicism. She graduated in 2016; a few years later, she moved to Waco, Texas, to join Brazos Fellows, a program partnered with Baylor University that offers recent college graduates nine months of theological study. There she found herself drawn to the structure of the Anglican tradition and began investigating early Christians’ approaches to fasting. While some evangelicals join Anglican churches to escape tight links with the religious right, “For me, politics had nothing to do with it,” Ms. Reed said. “It was more sensing a bit of D.I.Y.-ness to the way Christianity is practiced in the evangelical church. That can be a good thing, giving people room to be more expressive, putting the emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus. But for me, the motivation was needing less of that, because I started to see too much emphasis on your preferences and what feels good.”

Seriously, did Jesus come back and I didn’t notice? Have I been left behind? This is amazing.

Modern secular culture tends to frame personal freedom in terms of negative liberty, in the phrase made famous by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: the absence of constraints, the ability to do what you like as long as you don’t impinge on the liberties of others. But Ms. Reed, who now works as a freelance writer in Waco, explained the paradox of feeling freer during the rule-bound Lenten season: The rules rescue you from the pressure to pretend you are a totally autonomous being. “We live in a culture where you can have every comfort and an extremely high level of self-determination relative to history. You can do what you want with your time and money,” she said. “In that context, taking on Lent is a powerful reminder that you’re a finite, weak creature who has to eat multiple times a day to stay alive. The true nature of our presence in this world is extreme dependence.” Fasting, she said, is one of the “patterns God has given us for human flourishing. If we trust the patterns, they work, wherever you come from, whatever your background. They might, on the surface, seem like too much or too oppressive or ‘that doesn’t fit my personal story.’ But trust that this pattern is a living thing and can work with you. It is not a rigid, dead burden.”

Skipping a few more paragraphs:

Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness, fasting and fending off the devil’s temptations before he began his ministry. The story is such a familiar part of the Gospels that it can be easy to overlook how strange and counterintuitive it is: Abstaining from food and the company of other humans does not weaken Jesus’ resolve but makes him stronger. This is not because he becomes tougher or more independent but because the experience sharpens his awareness that “man shall not live on bread alone.” Even Jesus depends entirely on God.

And also:

She came to see fasting as a type of prayer. Lent, then, is not about groveling in repentance for one’s sins but understanding sin in the context of “hope in the Resurrection and Christ’s mercy” — which Ms. Surdyke sees as a powerful response to the clichéd college quest for personal identity. “Identity is such a prominent theme in our culture. Everyone is so desperate to know who they are,” she said. “I believe you cannot know who you are unless it’s in relationship with Christ, because he made you, he defines you.”

The author quotes Soong-Chan Rah, who always manages to wreck the vibe, and then ends this way:

It’s always tempting for Christians, like humans in general, to leave these hard lessons aside and opt for pseudo-freedom. The world offers plenty of ways to pretend you are in control and paddling in the general direction of grander meaning. Whether we practice Lent or not, we all need a tool for confronting the frailty that makes us human and spotting a false promise when we see one.

And on that note, I’m going to take just one more nap before trying to sift through the rubble of my house. May God have mercy, as is his property always to do, on my soul.