A Lenten Fast

When you realize food might be the easiest thing to give up

A few housekeeping notes:

1. There are spots left in my Friday, March 1, 11am-3pm EST Rule of Life Workshop. Information and registration link here.

2. There’s a live registration link to my Rule of Life for Writers event on Wednesday, April 10th, in Grand Rapids. Information and registration link here.

3. Read my longform essay at TGC, Why ‘Lone’ Artists Need the Church.

4. Listen to a recent podcast interview where I talk more openly about caring for my mom who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

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Chris Smith, Editor of the Englewood Review of Books and author of the Substack, “A Conversational Life,” just recently posted about a new book. It’s called A Different Kind of Fast: Feeding Our True Hungers for Lent by Christine Valters Paintner. You’ll know I’ve been on a book-buying moratorium of sorts. It’s not a hard-and-fast ban, but a hard caution I’m trying to observe. Well, the truth is I ignored that due caution and loaded Paintner’s book on my Kindle when I read Chris’s post.

I was reminded why it’s rarely a good idea for me to purchase books on a whim. Because there are already so many books in the queue. For instance, I’m planning to reread Lucy Austen’s Elisabeth Elliot: A Life as well as the two-volume biography of Elliot by Ellen Vaughan for comparison. (I’ll be interviewing Austen in March and publishing the video of that interview for paid subscribers here.) Those biographies present a massive amount of pages to read in the next month—and just when did I think I would find time for a new Lenten book?

Thankfully, I got a little time for Paintner’s introduction at one of the many doctors’ appointments my mom had scheduled last week. (First cataract surgery was a success! Thanks to so many who asked.) I can’t say much for the book quite yet, although I was certainly interested to see that she quoted from the 4^th century monk John Cassian, whose writing on acedia has been insightful to me. (If you’re a paid subscriber and haven’t yet watched my interview with Uche Anizor on apathy/acedia, here’s the link again.)

Cassian, she explains, wrote about three primary renunciations to which Christians are called. This isn’t just fasting in Lent but a practice of repentance in every season of the church calendar. It’s a different kind of abandonment and a consent to the deeper work of God.

The first renunciation, Cassian said, is the move to renounce our former way of life. According to Paintner, Cassian “assumes his listeners have perhaps become too invested in pleasing others, in achievements, or other externally focused motivations.” The call is to tune our hearts to God and to receive our identity in him and our calling from him. This was exactly something I had named for myself this Lent—a fasting from people-pleasing which I talked about in my video to paid subscribers.

The second renunciation, according to Cassian, is “giving up our mindless thoughts. Our minds are full of chatter all the time: judgments about ourselves and others, fears and anxieties over the future, overwhelm at world issues, the stress of illness, stories we tell about our lives, regrets over the past, imagined conversations with others, and more. It can be exhausting to follow all these trails of anxiousness.” If you read last week’s letter, check, check, check. Again, in the video from Ash Wednesday, I’d named I wanted to repent from anxious spiritual practice, from the kind of frenetic energy I expend—for one—in prayer, giving God all the information I think he needs. “When you pray,” Jesus taught, “do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words,” (Matt. 6:7).

The third renunciation, according to Cassian, is what Paintner considers to be the most powerful. We renounce all images of God we construct that don’t accord with the reality of his self-revelation. We give up on thinking God to be harsh and hard-driving, anything less than full of steadfast love and mercy and forgiving in Christ all the wrongs we have done. We also give up on God being any less than holy and wholly other.

These three renunciations, as formulated by Cassian, have broadened my view of fasting this Lenten season. Am I just giving up on certain forms of eating—or am I giving up on the familiar and fallen patterns of my being? My anxious thoughts? My distorted motives? My wrong-headed view of God?

But here’s the bigger question: how do I really give any of this up, given how deeply-rooted and rutted these patterns of sin are? Here, then, is the good news of the gospel, that the only place to begin is at the point of need. Nothing is needed except empty hands and a humble heart, this broken and contrite spirit that God will not despise.

We begin by praying the Scripture that had resounded most for me at our Ash Wednesday service last week. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. No anxiety required, no heaping up of words. Just a simple trust that this is a prayer God longs to answer and a renunciation he will receive.