It’s Not Too Late to Have a Life-Changing Lent (No, Really!)

First of all, happy (slightly belated) Easter! I hope it has been an amazing experience for you, as it has been for me. If it hasn’t been, that’s okay! Yesterday, we released an episode of The Catholic Podcast that I did with Chloe Langr on “the Easter that wasn’t.” In other words, if you feel like you didn’t really get an Easter this year, what can you do about that?

Over on YouTube, I had a great conversation about hospitality with the “Man Morning” men’s group at Nativity Parish in Leawood, KS. Well before any of us had ever heard of COVID-19, the virtue of hospitality was in sharp decline. And yet Jesus speaks of it as important, and even critical to salvation. At the Last Judgment, He tells us that He will say to the saved, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matt. 25:35), while rejecting the damned in part because of their failure to welcome Him in “the least of these” (Matt. 25:45). So how on earth do we live it out seriously amidst a lock-down and mandatory “social distancing”? There are some (hopefully) helpful practical tips there, and a look at some of those who live hospitality particularly well. So if any of that sounds interesting, check it out. I want to talk about something different today, though.

There’s a weird quirk that I’ve seen (and that I’ve been guilty of) in terms of Lent and Easter. Maybe you’ll recognize it: someone asks you how your Lent is going, or maybe how your Lent went, and you say, “Amazing. I gave up X, Y, and Z, and I thought it would be terrible, but it was just so rewarding.” And yet where are you, a week and a half after Lent? Right back to X, Y, and Z. Or maybe it’s not something that you gave up. Maybe you adopted some spiritual practice for Lent, benefited from it… and then set it aside immediately afterwards.

I’m reminded of a grim detail from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers: “a protective net was even installed during the initial construction of the [Golden Gate] bridge – at enormous cost – to prevent workers from falling to their deaths. The net saved nineteen lives. Then it was taken down. But for suicides? Nothing for more than eight years.” In those eighty years, approximately 1400 people killed themselves by jumping off of the bridge. The psychologist Richard Seiden followed up on 515 other people who attempted to kill themselves in this way but were restrained, and found that only 25 of them (about 5%) persisted in killing themselves in another way. In other words, nets would have probably saved around 1330 lives. And the nets were there, the solution was already in place, and then they were removed.

So it can be with us: we find something that works, we see how it works, and then we set aside because it’s inconvenient or it takes effort. It’s understandable, it’s relatable, but it’s a sort of spiritual suicide, a settling for mediocrity when we’re invited to true greatness. So here’s my challenge. The Church gives us an octave of Easter, eight straight days in which we are encouraged to feast instead of fast, to really enjoy the joy of the risen Christ. But feasting is a very different thing than coasting. We’ve just come off of forty days reminding us that we’re not in heaven yet, and how we live here below impacts how well we’re ready to face Him. So I’d encourage you to prayerfully consider the following:

1. Look at your Lent: How seriously did you take Lent at the outset? How faithful were you to what you’d intended to do? Many of us got distracted by the world shutting down around us. Did we abandon our Lenten disciplines?
2. Figure out what worked and what didn’t: Which Lenten sacrifices (or practices) did you find helpful in growing closer to God, and living in the way He wants you to live? Which sacrifices or practices did you find too difficult? Were there any that, looking back, you wish you’d done instead?
3. What can be preserved, and how? For instance, maybe you gave up social media for Lent, and your prayer life and family life got better. Now, Lent’s over, the Easter octave is over, and you’ve got a choice. Do you settle in to using it the way that you were before Lent (a manner that apparently struck you as problematic enough that you wanted to give it up for Lent)? Do you extricate yourself from it entirely? Or is there a way that you can bring it back in moderation, mindful of how the usage impacts your relationships with God and your family? In other words, this is the time to figure out how to incorporate “best practices” from Lent into your ordinary life.

Final thought: People go to ridiculous lengths travelling the world, spending outrageous sums of money, even hurting those closest to them in the meantime, in the pursuit of “life-changing experiences” (see Eat, Pray, Love if you want to see the kind of thing that I’m talking about). But here’s the amazing, simple reality… do you want to know what makes an experience life-changing? If you let it change your life.  Lent is over, and now it’s time for you and me to figure out if we want our Lents to be quickly-forgotten footnotes to the Great Shutdown of 2020, or whether we want them to be truly life-changing experiences.