Skip to main content

Giving Up


There is a paradox about Lent which actually clings to the whole business of asceticism. We give stuff up for Lent, things which we enjoy or things we know are harmful to our spiritual well being -or both. We do this for a number of of reasons, such as to implant a reminder of God''s presence into each day; or to make a genuine start on that simpler lifestyle we have been putting off 'til tomorrow since 1997. Mostly though, the discipline of Lent is an aid to weakening the hold of our egos. Jesus said, If any want to be my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me (Mtt 16:24) In other words, to follow Jesus we must forsake the control our egos have over our lives and allow Jesus to have control of our daily actions and decisions. It's a big ask, but saying "no" to the chocolate biscuits for six weeks will be just the help we need to make a start on it, right?

Well, maybe. There is the small matter of that pesky paradox. The act of giving something up in order to diminish our ego is actually quite likely to strengthen it instead. Our noble tilt at tobacco or fat is a tiny version of the sad ego game played by anorexics. The deadly tyranny of the anorexic's ego has persuaded her that her "noble" "disciplined" dieting is something that makes her purer and stronger than the rest of us poor flabby weaklings. Even as she slowly starves herself to death, she feeds her damaged ego, and this is what makes the disease so difficult to fight. To give up the disorder requires massive inner work. Similarly, on a much smaller scale, we fight our temporary nemesis and win (woohoo!) and feel a surge of righteous achievement. Our ego emerges a little stronger than it was before.

Lent is a preparation time for our understanding of the one who loves us unconditionally. Unconditional love cannot be controlled - not by the lover, not by the loved. It pours out regardless of whatever meets it, good or bad. Our Lenten fast will fail in its intended purpose if it is in the slightest way an exercise in trying to control God's love for us. That is, if we are trying to make ourselves more acceptable to God (and thus more loveable) or to persuade God to open the taps of love a little wider our Lenten fast is well into tits on a bull territory.

When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die said Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me said Paul. What is required of us is not small sacrifices of pastry or TV programming but a complete surrender of anything that seeks control; even, or perhaps particularly, those things we are secretly quite proud of. The church has long recognised that some disciplines help us to achieve this. It is appropriate in Lent to remember the magnitude of what is required of us and perhaps strengthen our practice of some of those disciplines. But if our Lenten fasts don't move us towards the total giving of ourselves they are worse than useless. Give them up.
Labels:

Comments

Dan Gurney said…
If we give up giving up, aren't we back where we started?

It's paradoxical, just as you say.

I think inclining the mind towards renunciation can be conducive to happiness.

We live in a culture that constantly tries to persuade/cajole/hector us with consumerism and the idea that to be happy we must acquire whatever it is they have to sell: drugs, insurance, cars, perfumes, deodorant, jewelry, whatever.

In our world it can be difficult to see that happiness doesn't necessarily come from acquiring more stuff. On the contrary, happiness can result from renunciation.

I'm certainly no Christian theologian, but perhaps Lent is not solely an exercise in ego reduction.

Is it possible that Lent may also be a useful and practical exercise intended to teach us that to be happy we can give things up?
3 March 2009 at 16:50
Kelvin Wright said…
I think you have it exactly, Dan. Exactly. It is a time for spiritual practice. Like golf practice or choir practice - doing things that are training exercises for the real event. Which is living a real life, not one in which our wills are hijacked by those who clamour so loudly for our attention
3 March 2009 at 16:57
Paula said…
I really enjoyed your thoughts on ego, here. Lent is a time when we're called to give up our ways for God's ways.
4 March 2009 at 09:54
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more