Pruning Back

I was feeling pretty good about my decision to give up Facebook for Lent and to curtail my clicking around habit, and then the Pope announced he was going to resign, and the internet blew up. And I, like a big sucker, was sucked right back in. Ironic Catholic sums up my life with the headline Cyber Catholics Planning On Giving Up Facebook For Lent Thrown Into Existential Crisis:

New York, NY: Catholics worldwide planning on giving up social media this Lent--facebook, Twitter, and the like--are caught in an existential crisis now that Pope Benedict unexpectedly announced his resignation and the conclave to elect a new successor to St Peter will occur smack in the middle of Lent. 

"I announced it and everything," moaned Cynthia Madison, a 22 year old parishioner at St. Aloysius Church in downtown Manhattan.  "I mean, who am I supposed to get this news from now?  CNS?  EWTN?  C-freakin-NN?" 

"I have a headache," announced Gabriel Celano, another St Aloysius parishioner.  "I wanted to challenge myself and do something hard this Lent, but this is just impossible.  All my friends are vetting papabile on facebook.  I can't give that up, can I?  I mean...voice of the faithful and prayer and all that...I just...Oh man.  I really have a headache."   

"It's not technically Lent--so I'm thinking about fudging that resolve a bit," admitted Joshua Smith, a father of two from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in the Bronx.  "Maybe if I do facebook via dial up.  I think that's pretty penitential, actually."

Others, who wished not to be named, admitted that they were considering foregoing facebook but putting Whispers in the Loggia up and setting up an automatic refresh every 15 minutes. Or giving up chocolate instead.

This has been the least productive day in the history of unproductive days, though I did think, when I first heard the news, about saying a rosary -- right before I settled down to read the reax from everyone and his Vatican correspondent.

I don't want to give up the internet completely, and the good and valuable friendships that I maintain through that medium. And I know that one of the reasons I shake the mouse almost every time I walk past the computer is the desire to feel connected -- to know that my friends are out there, and that they're having good conversations, and that even if I'm not participating in those conversations I benefit from them. But Lent is the time to take even good desires and turn them toward their ultimate source, God. To be honest, though, even my good yearning for companionship grows numb and is deadened when it is degraded into an endless longing for novelty and distraction. I'm reminded of what C.S. Lewis says in The Screwtape Letters of pleasures becoming tired habits:

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." The Christians describe the Enemy as one "without whom Nothing is strong".  And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that eh does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

It's time to prune back drastically, before the pruning is done for me.

I suspect, actually, that this minor sacrifice may improve the quality of what time I do spend on the internet in Lent, as well as forcing me to concentrate my ever-wandering attention and to keep from even being tempted to be caught up in any drama du jour without first considering what I say. Maybe I'll actually turn out installments of Stillwater more than once ever three weeks without the option of clicking around the moment I feel stuck. What I really want, though, is for my longing for companionship to be subsumed into a longing for God, so that I may be more fully present in everything I do, whether in person or online (but not on Facebook, for Lent).

Still wondering what sacrifices you can make for Lent, especially if your life, like mine, is pretty easy? Bearing has an excellent and substantive post on taking up your cross.

Looking Back at Lent: Why Do Penance?

Thinking back over Lent, one of the things that hits me, as it has before, is that I am much better at not doing things for Lent than doing things. Even moderately big changes in my daily routine such as "fasting" by having only one meal a day on Wednesdays and Fridays, or abstaining from alcohol entirely, are fairly doable. However, my resolutions to start each day be reading Morning Prayer, or reading the Pope's second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, or blogging my way through all of Augustine's Confessions -- not so much.

That's the point at which I find myself wondering: Is putting so much focus into not doing something a mistake? There is, after all, nothing wrong with eating, or with having my nightly beer or glass of wine. Why should God have any interest in my not doing these perfectly acceptable things? It's not as if God gets satisfaction out of thinking, "Ah, it's Lent. I do so look forward to all those little human creatures going in for a little bit of voluntary discomfort. I thrive on discomfort."

So why give up a few pleasures for Lent -- especially while at the same time failing in doing some positive things which would arguably be better things to do?

Well, obviously, the reason for penance is not that God wants us to be miserable. (Come to that, Mom and Dad didn't make you eat your green beans because they wanted you to be miserable either, but that's a story for another day.) But I think it is a valuable activity, even if -- indeed perhaps especially because -- I often find myself failing in some of the "positive resolutions" I make during Lent. Penance is a sort of spiritual and moral training. When you pick some thing you enjoy and resolve to give it up for a time, you give your moral will practice in conforming itself to something other than its own desires.

I enjoy my nightly drink, and I enjoy eating (and somehow it seemed like my fast days were always the days when huge trays of deli sandwiches and brownies and such appeared in the break room) and there's nothing wrong with either of those activities. However, by giving them up for a time, you give yourself practice in not doing something which seems attractive, and not any harm to anyone, because you have a moral reason for doing so. And while we often imagine moral choices as being that one huge moral dilemma in which we know exactly what the right thing to do is but it so hard, far more often moral choices involve that little tiny thing which surely couldn't hurt anyone and really feels right this one time anyway.

And in the larger sense, when we try to form our wills in this life so that we can follow God's will even when we don't want to, we are trying to build the habits which will make it possible for us to turn our wills over totally to God when we see Him face to face beyond this mortal coil. We do well not to be too used to always doing what we want, even if the things we desire are basically good things.

Of course, those positive things do still need to happen. But after all, I actually want to read the second volume of Jesus of Nazareth, and finish Confessions, and such -- I just need to make the time. And now I can do it with a glass of beer next to me.

Fasting on (Liquid) Bread and Water

Many of the great ales of Europe originate in monastic breweries, and one of the purposes of those thick, malty brews was to help sustain the monks through periods of fasting. Odd as drinking beer while fasting may sound to modern American ears, when beer is seen mostly as a recreational drink, beer was drunk daily (often even at breakfast) in the pre-modern world as a nourishing and relatively disease-free quaff rather than an intoxicant. (Though goodness knows, a slight buzz doubtless brightened the day of many a peasant when the beer barrels were full. You need to find your job perks where they are.)

Homebrewer and beer-blogger J Wilson is tapping-into this tradition by setting out to fast on beer and water for the entirety of Lent this year, drinking a doppelbock modeled on German brews that originated in monasteries. (The most widely available of these is Pauliner's Salvator) You can follow his project at Diary of a Part-Time Monk.

The Comforts and Fears of Legalism

Quite some time ago, a good friend said something along these lines to me:

"I've been trying really hard to defeat spiritual legalism. When I think about sin legalistically, I'm constantly terrified that I've committed a mortal sin recently which I haven't confessed, and that if something were to happen to me I'd be damned instantly. I try to remember that if at the personal judgment I truly embrace God, He won't turn away from me."

I think this is certainly a valid way of thinking about things from a Catholic perspective, and I don't want to speak against it, but it did strike me as a very foreign viewpoint when I heard it. Foreign to my own experience, that is.

You see, my experience is pretty much the opposite: As someone who seldom feels a strong relationship with God, I find the idea that when I've gone to confession my sins really are forgiven, whether I feel like it or not, very comforting. On the other hand, relying entirely on the idea that when faced with the full experience of God I would unhesitatingly rush to him is, for me, a little terrifying. Unhesitating rushing is not something I'm known for. I'm not the rushing type. The idea of being face to face with God is more than a little terrifying for me -- as perhaps it should be.

As such, I find a more traditional (some would say: dour) approach to Lent intensely comforting, as opposed to the "this is a great time to work on your relationship with God" approach. Even in my married life, I'm not sure how you "work on your relationship" -- but I do know how to say "I love you", spend time talking together, go on a date, or buy a present. Similarly, I don't know how to "work on my relationship with God", but if fasting, prayer and alms-giving are what builds our relationship with Him, those I know how to do.

How Dry I Am

As I wrestle in my mind with whether St. Patrick's day is sufficient cause to take a day off my alcohol fast, it seems a reasonable enough time to put down a few thoughts on the project.

Last year, as I was trying to think of something improving to do for Lent, I told myself: "It would, of course, be completely impossible to give up coffee or alcohol. I need those."

As soon as I said it, however, I realized I didn't like the sound of that "need". So alcohol it was. (I'm willing to admit needing coffee, but having 1-2 drinks a day is something I'd rather "enjoy" than "need".)

Last year it was moderately hard. The point I get home from work tends to also be the point when the dinner prep/hungry child cacophony reaches fever pitch, and daddy Darwin likes his chance to pour a glass of beer or wine and try to slow down a little from 9-12 hours of coffee and multi-tasking. Giving it up required me to work harder to remain patient while listening to the cares of two or three high pitched voices talking rapidly and simultaneously. And yet it was, when I put my mind to it, eminently doable. And in a sense liberating to recall that one does not "need" these sorts of things.

I took the same discipline this year, but found quickly that although I went straight back to having 1-2 drinks most evening after last lent, the detachment had remained. It's been oddly easy to give up alcohol this year. Sure, I'd enjoy having a drink of an evening, but there's no longer any sense of "needing" just of "enjoying".

This is, perhaps, a terribly trivial example, but it seems to me that this detachment from material things is one of the disciplines we see encouraged again and again in the Bible. In the most extreme example: Job has a great many of the things which people consider to make life worth living: home, wealth, family, respect, social standing, etc. Yet he's called to remain faithful to God even when all these cans can be, and indeed are, taken away.

And this is, I think, why we're called as Christians to engage in fasting during certain times of the year. Going without food for most of the day is something we can sustain, though it takes concentration and is not enjoyable. And the discipline helps us recall our ownership over ourselves -- something which we must often achieve in subtler circumstances in order to obey God's laws. Finally, in this affluent place and time in which far more people are afflicted with obesity than hunger, fasting is a reminder that we came into this world with nothing, and with nothing we shall leave it. All that we have may vanish, yet we ourselves, not our possessions, are what have moral and human dignity are are loved by God.

Halftime Report

So Lent is just about at the halfway mark, and I was sitting back and congratulating myself. "I'm not doing too badly," I thought. "It actually hasn't been that hard to get up early and say morning prayer." And upon further reflection I realized: it's not been that hard because I haven't been doing it. Not consistently, that is, and not early enough to be a true sacrifice. I kind of roll over when Darwin's alarm goes off (which isn't at the same time every morning, and to which sound I have a strong immunity from years of ignoring it), and if I shake myself enough, I reach for the prayerbook and say Morning Prayer nestled under the covers snuggled up with baby. (Well, he's gotta eat, doesn't he?) And a few times, I've fallen back asleep altogether. All in all, a rather cushy Lenten gig.

But: Now is the acceptable time! Now is the day of salvation! I still have the second half of Lent to make things right. New Lenten practice: to get my own alarm clock, get up at the same (early) time every morning, and say Morning Prayer sitting up. Not in bed.