What's the Point of Lent?

For some reason I seem to be posting all out of chronological sequence this spring.  I'll attribute it to impending retirement and the increased need to attend to mundane things before I leave my present workplace. There was, though, a moment during Lent that brought some insight, and I'm going to try to reach back for it before it escapes completely.

I grew up in a Catholic family in the Boston suburbs in the 1960s and 70s.  My mother was particular about church rules involving fasting and abstinence, on all Sunday mornings before receiving communion, and especially on the Fridays of Lent.  I can still hear her declare that "Fish on Friday" would be the rule of our household even if the Pope himself declared it no longer required. (He did, in 1966. I remember.)  The prohibition on eating red meat on the Fridays of Lent persists, although it was lifted during Covid in a nod to the many deprivations people were already suffering at the time.

The reason given for avoiding red meat was that we should not eat the flesh of an animal on a day set aside to commemorate the crucifixion of Christ.  He died on a Friday, therefore we should not be eating meat on Fridays.  Not very persuasive, to be honest.  Then there was the rationale that we should honor his sacrifice by willingly making sacrifices of our own.  OK, that's starting to make a bit of sense, although giving up M&Ms as a kid doesn't seem like a very meaningful sacrifice.  I'm amused by the number of adults who still "keep Lent" by "giving up" meat, sweets, or alcohol for 6 weeks.  Easter then becomes the celebration of the restoration of all the bad habits we tried to give up but secretly just suppressed until we could reclaim them.  Not all that spiritual after all!

Then there's the "alternative Lent" movement -- don't give anything up, take on something more, some new discipline like reading a spiritual book, or volunteering some time with a charitable organization.  That's a really nice idea at any time of the year, but what does it have to do with Lent?

So, what gives?  Why all this giving up, fasting, adding, subtracting, scrambling to do something for these six weeks because they are supposed to be holy somehow?  Well, here's where the new thought came in.

I was revisiting a meditation with Mooji, the Jamaican neo-Advaita teacher.  He was inviting his listeners to leave their thoughts "at the door," so to speak, to let go of the obsessive need to think about, critique, describe, predict, revise, revile, rearrange everything in our minds, just for a little while.  Leave all that "stuff" outside the door, like your shoes, and just experience the expansive peace-filled presence that underlies all that agitation.  He asked the group what they saw or felt or sensed once they had set their thoughts aside, and in that moment I saw great gusts of flame shooting up from a deep well.  

In that one moment I saw quite clearly that the point of giving up anything, for Lent or just because, was to experience that tremendous freedom of not needing to think or plan or review or regret anything.  Just to be present with the Holy was enough.  And the fire?  It was there to burn off all of the spiritual-emotional-intellectual crud that accumulates like psychic barnacles on our souls!

So yes, we fast. Yes, we give up the stuff we think we can't live without. Yes, we embrace a form of asceticism that requires a release of attachment to things that don't matter.  And we open ourselves to the purging flames that will burn off the crud and cleanse our deepest selves.  That seems to me to be a much more meaningful way to approach a season of letting go and burning off whatever isn't serving the soul's highest good.