Growing up, I had an uneasy relationship with the season of Lent. I’ve never been really comfortable getting a black smudge on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and the idea of giving up chocolate or something like that for six weeks just seemed kind of pointless to me. But I think that now I have a better understanding of it, or at least what it’s supposed to be. Pretty much every religion has some concept of self-denial — not because it’s something painful that religions make people do, but because some things in life have more value than others, and sometimes we don’t get to choose what we give up. There are things that we need, things we can do without, and things that we should do without. Taking an annual inventory of which category the things we indulge in fall under has value. Giving something up isn’t meaningful in and of itself, unless we emerge from the period of sacrifice better and spiritually healthier for it.
When Lent began, I was working on a piece for this blog about the cost of energy. The basic thesis of that piece, which I will eventually finish, is that creating a world where our energy is obtained without emitting greenhouse gases will come with a price, but that the price is not so big compared to the cost of doing nothing. The sacrifice, to the extent that there is one, will be temporary. We will emerge from it in a world where breathing is easier, people who live on the world’s coasts are not in danger of being displaced with no place to go, and fewer people will lose everything to a storm, or fire, or the kind of conflicts that arise when the things we need are hard to come by. To get there, we will need to reconsider what we really need, and re-evaluate the difference between what we can and what we should do without. It’s a tough sell. But giving something up to emerge better for it is a part of the faith of most religious people, and can serve a constructive purpose regardless of what you do or don’t believe.
Of course, while I was thinking about the climate and other things like my family, my job, and the upcoming elections, something else came up. We all wound up giving up far, far more this Lent than we intended. Nobody is enjoying this. And it won’t end with a big celebration on Easter, at least not for anybody with any sense of responsibility. But we’ve got this. It’s part of our history, our traditions, our culture. People have endured worse than this. We are realizing that there are more things we can do without than we thought. And we are gaining a greater appreciation of the things we do need, and the people who provide them for us. Plenty of us are facing or dealing with great loss right now, and that is sad and awful. But collectively we can emerge from this better, and healthier. And that doesn’t seem pointless to me at all.
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