Traditionally, the season of Lent is likened to a desert: the Church journeys out into the quiet emptiness of the dry, barren stretches of sand and rock as Christ did once for forty days. There, stripped of the noise, color, luxuries, and distractions of the world, we are tasked with savoring the simpler riches of contemplation and austerity.
Ironically for me, Lent is often the only spiritually opulent time of my year. The well-earned and good joys that come flooding back with Easter bring in their wake all the distractions, noises, and spiritual bad habits from which Lent had provided some relief. Outside of Lent, I often find my spiritual life depressingly dry. Lent had been an oasis.
At the beginning of this Lent, I picked up Beth Bubik’s new book, Delay and Pray: Permanent Weight Loss Through Spiritual Fasting. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for when I started the book, as my husband and I already practice a lot of the excellent weight loss methods Beth recommends, specifically following a low carb, low sugar diet during the week alongside intermittent fasting. But I was caught by the idea of spiritual fasting—something that only seems to get talked about on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, vaguely defined by portion sizes.
Unlike most lifestyle and weight loss influencers out there, Beth links the pursuit of a healthy physical life to achieving a healthy spiritual life. By re-ordering our disordered food habits, Beth suggests, we are turning from vices that affect our whole person, inside and out, and cultivating virtues that transform more than our pants size. Specifically, she argues, intermittent fasting allows us to use food as a tool for our health rather than as a crutch for our emotions. But, she wisely points out, since we are engaged in a spiritual quest to eschew our vices and form virtues, we need the mercy and grace of God. White knuckling our way to success on our own is both egotistical and doomed to failure; we must humbly accept the transformative power of The Good: God.
As I read Beth’s reflections on spiritual fasting as a lifestyle change over the course of Lent, I have to come to terms with the reality that while this season often seems spiritually enriching for me, I am doing it wrong. Funny enough, my mistake is the same mistake that Beth notes traditional diets make; namely, attempting to force march my way through a period of scarcity in pursuit of a specific goal by a concrete date.
Lent “works” for me because I am not changing any actual habits, or really abolishing vices. I simply put them on hold. The spiritual “fat” might look a bit trimmer during Lent, but it isn’t going to stay gone. After Easter, all my bad habits sneak back in and curl up comfortably in their old spots, and my spiritual life gets crowded out.
Whether it is one’s spiritual life or one’s healthy lifestyle, vices can never be rooted out for good by quick bursts of virtuous activity with a specific end date because the assumption is always that we can go back to business as usual at the conclusion–now that we are in “good shape.” But business as usual leads us quickly back into an unhealthy position. Using Lent simply as a reset—a “fad diet”—in the midst of our general state of spiritual unwellness and sloth pushes us into a frankly depressing cycle that does not do much to advance us on the path toward holiness.
As someone who has practiced the physical part of Beth’s spiritual fasting advice for a number of years (in between having kids!), I know first-hand that a healthy relationship with food is a radical commitment that only provides results as a way of life, rather than as an intensive program from which I can graduate. Beth urges us to connect the intermittent fasting that reorients our cravings to our prayer life, something I had never considered before, but which in reality is so natural. After all, denying ourselves a good for the sake of The Good is what spiritual sacrifice and fasting is all about. As Padre Pio is supposed to have said, “the life of a Christian is nothing but a perpetual struggle against self; there is no flowering of the soul to the beauty of its perfection except at the price of pain.”
It is not good to always live in Lent, as the Church has wisely noted throughout the centuries. We should feast as well, and in fact are commanded to feast on the various solemnities of the liturgical year. Beth feasts on Sundays, allowing herself some of God’s delightful culinary gifts. Sunday isn’t her “cheat day”: it is a little feast that foreshadows The Great Feast. A weekly time to feast instead of fast is a beautiful way to ensure that in all things and in all ways, we are orienting ourselves toward virtue, instead of giving ourselves a day to cater to our vices!
But the desert of Lent calls us to a time of deeper reflection in the austerity and stillness of the season so that we might emerge into the ordinary life of the rest of our year with a richer, healthier spiritual lifestyle. Spiritual intermittent fasting during the week, and abstaining from certain foods, even outside of Lent not only makes one physically healthy year round, but continues to develop our spiritual life. Uniting my health routine to my prayer life, as Beth suggests, stops them from becoming competing items vying for my attention during the day. My spiritual life isn’t crowded out if it governs and informs each daily obligation and activity.
Lent was never meant to be a spiritual fitness program or mad dash to Easter; it was always intended to help Christians start, re-start, or deepen the whole of our spiritual life, drawing us a little further from the disordered cravings of the world and closer to becoming a little bit more perfect like our Heavenly Father.
When Lent ends for the year, we should keep a “little Lent” in our hearts and souls throughout the week, just as we keep a little Easter every Sunday.
Editor’s Note: This article was inspired by Beth Bubik’s Delay and Pray: Permanent Weight Loss Through Spiritual Fasting, available from TheCatholicFastingCoach.com.
Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash
