Giving things up for Lent

David Mills has a good piece up today on the value of fasting for Lent. Excerpt:

We are creatures of ravenous, indiscriminate desire. We want this and we want that, but most of all, We Want.

Hence the value of Lent, which begins today, and of an old discipline that seems, even among Catholics, to be now somewhat neglected: the traditional discipline of giving things up for Lent. Bookish people being as fallen as anyone else, we might take a brief break from the pressing issues and interesting intellectual questions to reflect on the value of this discipline. Giving things up for Lent has, in my experience, two obvious benefits.

The first is that you very quickly find out how much a hold the world has on you. This is a lesson to which the Christian will give intellectual assent, but few of us really see what it means. We like to think of ourselves being happy to give up anything for the Lord just like that, with a snap of our fingers, even our lives, but most of us find it hard to give up something that really doesn't matter. You dream of standing up to the lions in the coliseum, and find yourself snapping at the waitress because the restaurant is out of your favorite dessert.

We are not in shape, and we are also delusional. Spiritually, we're like the pot-bellied middle-aged guy in the speedo swimsuit at the beach, who is just shocked that the twenty-year-old girls in bikinis are not hanging all over him and cooing. He would have a better idea why were he to hit the gym.

As you might know, Orthodox Christians are obliged to go without meat and dairy for the entire Lenten period. We ease into it. After Sunday, we haven't been eating meat. After this coming Sunday, dairy will be out of our diets. (I'm about to go have raw broccoli and hummus for lunch). It is very, very tough, at least if you're not used to it. Father John at my parish advised Julie and me to take it easy at first, to grasp that the fast itself is not the point; the fast should be a means of bring us toward holiness. If you make following the rule of the fast the point of the fast, you're missing the reason for the discipline.

In my experience, David is absolutely right: you have no idea how much of a hold the world has on you until you try to give up something ordinary. This is why it's so important. Through the Lenten fast, we recapture some of our freedom. And, as David goes on to say, it makes you all the more grateful when the fast ends for all the good things we do have.

Are you giving up anything for Lent? What? Why? Discuss.