In 2019, forty days and forty nights is a long time to be nice

This year, I broke the habit of a lifetime and observed Lent. Let me tell you, it hasn’t been easy.

Lent. A time to fix our hearts and minds on denying temptation and, following the example of Christ, abstain from carbohydrates.

Forty days and forty nights Jesus wandered in the desert eating and drinking nothing, while tempted by Satan to turn a stone into a loaf of bread; to jump from a pinnacle to prove that the angels would break his fall; and to worship the devil in exchange for all the kingdoms of the world.

Compared to these sufferings and temptations, a month and a half without sugar, wine or bread always seemed a bit fickle to me and fickle at best. Lent has become a second shot at a failed New Year’s resolution, this time with a more realistic time-frame.

Perhaps it is the biblical influence that makes people trick themselves into believing their abstinence has been ordered from on high. “I’m not allowed any refined sugar,” I overheard someone at a dinner party say as they shunned a slice of lemon tart. And similar Almighty decrees have struck others in the form of alcohol and chocolate.

As humans do, we find ways to cheat divine providence, such as the oversight of Lent this year lasting 47 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday. Who knows what Jesus would have done had he been faced with an extra week in the desert?

But what is the end goal of all this fasting? Heaven? Or a beach body? Either way, it jars with the Doctrine of Grace.

When Shrove Tuesday came around this year, I didn’t eat any pancakes. Instead, I mused on what temptation would I find hardest to deny and came to a concrete conclusion by Ash Wednesday morning. For the next 47 days and nights I would try to abstain completely from any negative comments about anyone I do or do not know.

Henri Nouwen was a 20th-century Dutch Roman Catholic priest. In his book, Return of the Prodigal Son, he writes:

“It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of complaint. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticised, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile, even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.”

Could it be true? That strength and wisdom are not in any kind of righteous indignation or resentment for some wrong caused to me. Could it be true that wisdom and strength is to ignore what is ugly, wrong and unfair? I thought that I would give it a go and see what it did for my heart.

At the beginning it was easy, as all resolutions are. I skipped down spring streets with a new and deliberate blindness to the ills and evils that lie all around us and within us too. It was as if I had built new viaducts through my head and heart.

I smiled and changed the subject when a friend raised the topic of another friend who never gets in touch, not even to say “Happy Birthday”. She knew that I too had been on the receiving end of the radio silence and before I entered the desert, I had told her how much it hurt me.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s got good reason,“ I now said, and if that reason was that the friendship was dead, so be it. That’s not negative, I rationalised, that’s just life. You have to move on sometimes.

A discussion about politicians among friends and family, where everyone, as usual, espoused strong opinions, opinions that I would have once chimed in with: “She’s weak! He’s a pseud! He’s got no integrity!”

I said nothing much, and felt the relief of not saying something that I didn’t really mean, but rather had gleaned from a political magazine or someone who spoke with the most confidence.

In the shop where I work, a particularly tricky customer came demanding all sorts of things I could never give her. She left the shop in a huff. “Sensitive…” I said, and invoked Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

Well exactly. Everyone is dealing with battles, so what gives her the right to be such a witch? Backache? Come on.

And here, two weeks in, began the slip. The viaducts crumbled. It was as easy to break as it was to begin. And I immediately felt some kind of power come back to me, the power to analyse, assess and in some way to elevate myself as someone who would never say that, do that, be that.

The old patterns recrystallised, and it seems to me, harder than before. Every day is a battle. And only now do I have any kind of flimsy sense of the temptation that Jesus resisted. A battle of the heart against itself. I need a longer Lent.