Trading Materialism for Something That Actually Grows You

It comes around again. Every year about now, a lot of Catholics, and a fair number of Protestants, start deciding what they'll give up for Lent, the 40 days running from Ash Wednesday to Easter. But the core idea, setting aside something you could live without for the sake of becoming a better person, isn't owned by Christianity or any faith. You don't even need to believe in anything. What you need is a real interest in growing your character.

The honest first question: why give anything up at all? Plenty of people never bother with the practice, and that's fine. Nobody has to. And giving something up purely to say you gave something up is just vanity in disguise. I heard about someone who couldn't come up with anything, so they landed on giving up condiments. Condiments. What exactly does that do for a person?

If there's a point to the exercise, it's building strength. So before deciding what to surrender, or whether to surrender anything, it helps to be clear about what personal growth even means. Think of it as developing your character enough to raise your level of awareness and shake loose whatever is quietly running your life and keeping you from doing well. It leans spiritual, yes, though a nonbeliever, an atheist, or an agnostic can work at it just the same.

Given that, the one thing worth giving up is whatever you sense is holding you back. If your focus is your relationship with God, pick the thing that gets in the way of that walk and set it down for the 40 days. A lot of people this year are dropping social media because the hours on Facebook had piled up. In its place they're getting out of the house, meeting people, running into actual life again.

In religious and spiritual language this practice has a name: fasting. It's a kind of cleansing, something you do now and then so you don't get overexposed to any one thing. The whole aim, again, is growth. If what you give up doesn't make you a better person in some way, you've slid back into vanity. Condiments for 40 days, for instance. Coffee is a more serious candidate, since most people who love it drink well past the two or three cups a day that get recommended, often landing somewhere around four to six, sometimes more.

And if nothing at all comes to mind? Then you probably don't have anything with a grip on you, nothing you do to the point of excess. Don't force it. The principle underneath all of this is abstinence, which has nothing necessarily to do with sex. It's the habit of going without, of learning to master a weakness. Go without something for a stretch and you've proven you hold more sway over it than it holds over you.

When the thing you set down is something that interferes with your relationship to God, mastering it through a short absence strengthens that connection. Though from the Christian angle, God already made the single greatest sacrifice on behalf of humanity. So piling on sacrifices just to have sacrificed starts to feel legalistic, obeying the letter of the rule so rigidly it tips into something absurd.

Real freedom works differently. Chase only what you actually want to chase. The moment you pursue something because you feel obligated to, you end up feeling boxed in and stuck, and that stalls any growth. Which circles back to the whole purpose: to live free by lifting your own awareness high enough that nothing can keep you from your full potential. Free to be exactly who you were made to be. - Erwin Bishop