Lent is Not Self-Help

This reflection was first published on the author’s newsletter, Dispatches from Andrew Clark-Howard.

If you’re anything like me and grew up in an evangelical-ish community, the church calendar might’ve been something you’re more or less oblivious to, except of course celebrating Easter and Christmas, maybe lighting an Advent candle here and there. Yet in more recent, perhaps less sectarian years, celebrating parts of the church calendar has become increasingly common among low church folk—think Baptists, charismatics, non-denominational churches—and this has become especially true regarding the season of Lent.

Lent, for the uninitiated, is a period of 40 days, beginning (in the Latin Church) with Ash Wednesday and ending on Maundy Thursday, in which the church remembers the 40 days in which Christ fasted and was tempted in the desert. Lent prepares the church for Holy Friday, the time in which Christ suffers and is crucified, and anticipates Easter Sunday, the time in which Christ conquers death.

And one common practice of Lent is a Lenten sacrifice, the voluntary giving up of a luxury or pleasure such as alcohol, sweet foods (chocolate is common), or social media. Again, imitating Jesus’ own period of fasting in the desert, a Lenten sacrifice places the body into a posture of dependence and weakness, seeking to draw the believer nearer to God, the one whom we truly rely on.

But as evangelical Protestants embrace Lent, something has felt off in the way the season and its practices are often taught and embodied. Until around the eighth century, for example, it was common for the majority of the church—clergy and laity—to participate in a ‘Black Fast,’ a practice not dissimilar from Muslim fasting during Ramadan. A Black Fast, still practiced today during Lent by many South Asian Christians in India and Pakistan, involves fasting from food until sundown in which the church community gathers for a simple meal and for prayer. It’s a deeply committed, deeply communal practice which prepares the church for Holy Week.

By contrast, the types of Lenten practices I more often observe (and participate in!) within my own circles are less committal, and much less communal. One can’t help but feel as the church community prepares itself for the suffering and death of Christ that giving up chocolate for a few weeks begins to feel a little cheap.

Here, I think, is part of the problem: When westerners such as myself, even ostensibly Christian ones, approach ancient spiritual practices, we tend to transform them into individualistic tools for our own self-betterment. Similar to modern appropriations of the Jewish practice of Shabbat and social media use or the Buddhist practice of mindfulness and mental wellbeing, I’ve noticed a similar trend among this recent embrace of Lent: the transformation of spiritual practice into self-help. As Kelsey Osgood observes, it’s a process in which “ancient spiritual practice is drained of its religious substance and repackaged as a wellness mechanism.”

To draw a long, historically dubious bow, the development of the disenchanted, secular, atomistic society we live in in places like Aotearoa was accompanied by an image of the Enlightened Man™ who was able to study the world, master nature and himself, and thus improve society indefinitely through the mechanisms of rationality and self-control. Such a Man™ through sheer willpower can transform himself into the type of ‘master’ he seeks to become. This Man™,  combined with the growth mindset of capitalism and, to use Max Weber’s famous thesis, its Protestant work ethic, gives rise to a way of being human precipitated by the ideals self-improvement, individualism, and materialism. 

“Spiritual practices don’t primarily do something; they are something. They are less about the self generating its own actualisation and more about stepping into a collective practice that seeks to attend to the transcendent presence of God.”

Fast forward to the digital age we currently live in, our culture is obsessed with self-help, with the process of conquering one’s self. Eating becomes a diet, exercise becomes a program, the workday a productivity runsheet, all of which can be tracked, data-ised, and compressed into the never-ending market gains of self-improvement. The self-help industry itself, worth something like $11 billion at the turn of the 2010s, has only accelerated in the 2020s with TikTok trends like #selfcaresunday or the effortless hustle of ‘that girl’ videos. 

(As an aside, what a strange formulation ‘self-help’ is: to serve or aid yourself through your own self, as opposed to one’s dependence on others.)

The pressure to create one’s best self, complete one’s own development consumes our world. Lent, at its worst, then becomes no more than a religious mechanism in which we inhabit our cultural obsession for self-help. 

But there is good news (along with some “bad-but-ultimately-good-news”): Lent is not self-help. 

The good news is that Lent frees us from the late capitalistic pressure to self-actualise. In contrast to the self-generated nature of self-help culture, Lent instead might be better understood as a practice of dependence, a season in which we place our bodies and our minds into a state of intentional vulnerability. Bodily life is of course vulnerable for all of us, some profoundly more than others, especially at the intersections of gender and disability. Lenten sacrifice and fasting acknowledges and names this vulnerability, imitating the vulnerable humanity of Jesus.

The bad-but-ultimately-good-news is that this requires a reorientation to the ways in which we often think about Lent. As anyone who regularly fasts can attest, spiritual discipline is very rarely an immediately rewarding or even enjoyable experience. The very opposite: as the spiritual writers across the church history attest, it is often the mundane, arid, and even painful frailty of prayer, abstinence, or contemplation that reminds us of our humility and inability to save ourselves from sin and suffering.

Even more, we need to move away from seeing the spiritual disciplines as practices of utility. As the late Eugene Peterson wrote on prayer: “Prayers are tools, but with this clarification: prayers are not tools for doing or getting but for being and becoming.” Spiritual practices don’t primarily do something; they are something. They are less about the self generating its own actualisation and more about stepping into a collective practice that seeks to attend to the transcendent presence of God. 

Lent, like so many of the church’s practices, is a resistance against the modern project of the self rather than a tool for spiritual self-help. This year, what would it mean to take seriously the costly, vulnerable, communal nature of the Lenten season in a world orientated towards self-improvement?

~

Andrew Clark-Howard is editor at Metanoia.