Know thyself: a Lenten education

“What are you doing for Lent?”

It’s a good question. Parents often ask their children. Friends ask each other. If we haven’t been preparing ourselves during the “pre-Lent” period found in many Catholic rites, we may well be asking ourselves this right now as Ash Wednesday looms. Is it the right question, though?

It does not seem that it is the wrong question. After all, the Catholic Tradition is replete with encouragement to do things in Lent. During this season of preparation to celebrate the Redemption that was won on the Cross and made visible on the Third Day, the Church bids us to increase three essential tasks of Christian life: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. How specifically we will approach these tasks is indeed a good question.

There are many ways to increase our prayer, give up gifts to focus on the Giver, and support the work of the Church in nourishing bodies and souls. There are many different methods of prayer, not all of which fit everyone. St. John Henry Newman liked to say that dogma has to do with truth, but devotion has to do with taste. Some forms of prayer are better at keeping or drawing our attention than others. So, too, with fasting. Many of us could do with some strictures on our food intake, but it’s easy to take on too strict a fast when we aren’t ready, abandon it in discouragement, and stop fasting at all. We also might need to practice other kinds of fasts: from too much entertainment, social media, or perhaps even having the last word or defending ourselves. With regard to almsgiving, not only our treasure, but our time and talent can serve a multitude of good causes.

These reflections on the difficulty of deciding what to do suggest to us a different question we might ask ourselves and others about Lent. What do you want to learn about yourself?

Some pious people (this writer included) might blanch at such a suggestion. Is making this question central to Lent a diversion from its true goals? We modern people, especially Americans, are very good at turning everything we do into something about ourselves. Shouldn’t the question be about what we want to learn about God?

The answer to this objection is that the Christian tradition has long emphasized that knowledge of God and service of God are both dependent on self-knowledge. It is true that “Know thyself” was inscribed on a pagan temple in ancient Greece, but that did not mean that Christians rejected this advice. In fact, not only pagan priests but also philosophers such as Socrates advocated self-knowledge in order to attain wisdom.

Some of the greatest Christian thinkers have testified to this truth. They believed that self-knowledge is necessary not merely to get human wisdom but to know divine Wisdom himself. St. Athanasius of Alexandria said, “No one can know God without knowing himself.” St. John Henry Newman said almost 1,500 years later, “Self-knowledge is the key to the precepts and doctrines of Scripture.” As Abba Nau, a Desert Father of the time of Athanasius put it, “Unawareness [about the self] is the root of all evil.”

To ask what we want to learn about ourselves is thus not a bad goal. It is a necessity for the Christian life. For, it is only by becoming aware of ourselves—especially the weak parts of our wills—that we can truly serve the Lord properly. The askesis, or ascetical struggle, that we take on with our Lenten practices is ultimately a struggle against the self to become more fully obedient to the Lord’s will.

We will often set out to conquer our will in a matter such as foregoing some type of food and discover that we are much more psychologically dependent on it than we thought. Get thee behind me, coffee creamer! This is important information to know.

Thus, figuring out what we want to know about ourselves is a pretty good way to figure out what we should be doing during Lent. What Fr. Basil Maturin wrote in his book Christian Mastery about the struggle for perfection generally applies specifically to Lent: “Do as you would do if you wished to gain any fresh knowledge of nature: question yourself by action. In other words, if you believe that you are generally charitable—resolve, for instance, in the morning to mortify yourself in speech so many times a day. See at the end of a week’s time if this is more difficult for you than you had imagined.”

Lent is a perfect time to question yourself by action. You may have a very good idea of many weaknesses, and some of the things you resolve to do during Lent might be aimed at them. Perhaps you have come to realize you do need to mortify yourself in speech. You might speak harshly or rudely. Maybe your tendency is to react defensively. You might need to take a stab at mortifying those tendencies a certain number of times a day so that you can start to change.

But you might also, following Fr. Maturin’s advice, consider some of the areas in which you think you are strong. Perhaps you think you are generous with time and money. Taking on a next step of generosity might be just the right thing for you. As St. Teresa of Calcutta often observed, “Love means willing to give until it hurts.” No pain; no gain.

Thinking about Lent this way might be very painful. Approaching our Lenten tasks in this way will require a healthy dose of humility as we come face to face with the truth about our own weakness. T. S. Eliot famously observed that “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” We will need to pray for the grace to endure as the idolatrous images of ourselves set up in our own minds come crashing down.

A Lenten education can indeed be painful, but the gain to which that pain is a prelude is a greater sense of how God loves us even in our weakness—and how much He will do for us when we acknowledge our need. St. Thérèse of Lisieux insisted that we only really make progress when we learn how little we are and yet how God loves us “madly” even in our weakness. When we are patient with our imperfections and live in God’s love, we will rely more and more on His power instead of our own. When we do that, we will see exactly what St. Paul saw: that God’s “grace is sufficient” and His “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

(Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Servant.)