We Fast to Feast 🍋

Lent is only Lent because of Easter...

The Five Thousand, by Eularia Clarke (1962) // featured on the second Sunday in Bitter & Sweet

It’s funny, writing a book ages ago and then talking about it months later as though it’s all still fresh in your mind.

I wrote Bitter & Sweet, my latest book on Lent, during Advent 2020, and I basically trusted God to do the talking since I couldn’t really wrap my head around the whole season while we ourselves were both in the thick of Advent and celebrating the arrival of its sister book, Shadow & Light, to the rest of the world. I kept my head down and my fingers flying, deep-dived into some Aquinas and Chesterton and Augustine, sprinkled in some Tolkien and Lewis for good measure, and crossed my fingers with the hope that something was ultimately coherent.

I’m not kidding when I say I feel like I’m reading Bitter & Sweet for the first time. This morning I read my own words of the introduction out loud to my kids, swearing up and down to them that I wasn’t turning into a Gilderoy Lockhart. It’s been a bit of a relief to read that I still agree with everything I’ve written. Good thing, since it’s barely seen the light of 2022 and Lent has yet to begin.

There’s a question that occasionally repeats itself in all these interviews I’ve been doing. It’s a benign question, one the asker means in all good faith and shared humanity, but it makes me feel a little panicky because not only do I not have a rote answer to the question, I think I’ve given a different answer just about every time I’ve been asked it:

So, what are you fasting from for Lent this year?

I still don’t know. I’ve joked to Kyle more than a few times that this year I want to fast from Lent, since I already feel like I’ve walked through it, I’ve talked about it so much. At a minimum, I want to fast from talking about Lent to other people. I’m ready to just live it, to walk alongside you, my brothers and sisters, in the communal season of penitence and preparation. I want to participate in Lent’s invitation. I want to do the action part. Less talking, more doing.

But I still don’t know what I’m fasting from. And I very well may not until Ash Wednesday next week.

I’m grateful that my past self added this chart to Bitter & Sweet for my present self, because the medieval idea of seven cardinal vices — and their corresponding virtues — are the framework for the daily Lenten readings. I’ve been mulling over what it means to deal with pride or gluttony, and that our fasts are meant to let go of stuff so we make more room for the virtues, the humility and temperance. But I’d forgotten about their legalistic cousins, the pendulum swing when we forget grace and make Lent about being a better person or seeing if we can do hard stuff on our own willpower.

Of course I want to be more generous, loving, diligent, chaste. But in my desire for those good things, am I veering over into wastefulness, timidity, workaholism, and prudishness?

Um. Gulp. Kinda.