Ash Wednesday, this year on 14 February, marks the start of
the forty-day period of Lent that runs up to Easter Day. Some Christians follow
a longstanding tradition of fasting during Lent; denying themselves something –
chocolate, alcohol or even social media – that is good but not essential.
Today, this whole idea strikes some people as bizarre but in fact the idea of
Lent and fasting has perhaps never been more relevant.
Our modern culture is fixated not simply on having things,
but on having them now. Advertisements encourage us not to save but to buy on
credit and have what we want immediately: instant food, instant messaging,
real-time meetings and instant downloads of music, films or books. We don’t
‘do’ waiting anymore. Whether it is food, pleasure or possessions, we expect to
have them all now.
Yet there is something very dangerous about this demand for
‘instant gratification’ and it’s not just Christians who say so. The reality is
that all good things (whether food, pleasure or possessions) are truly at their
best when they are taken at the right time. Intentionally delaying a pleasure
(and that’s what fasting in Lent is all about) is a wise thing. The ability to
postpone our gratification may actually be critical to making us fulfilled
human beings. After all, if we want our pleasures now, we are going to struggle
with things like learning to play the piano or acquiring a foreign language
where it may be months before we can tap out a tune or engage in a meaningful
conversation on holiday.
Postponing a pleasure may even have been fundamental in
making the human race what it is. A great breakthrough in history was when
people realised that instead of eating grains of wheat or rice they could plant
them and wait a few months until the crops sprang up. The discovery of
cultivation allowed settlements, farms and ultimately civilisation to flourish.
In the bible, the chosen people of God has to wait for over 500
years – from the last message of the book of Malachi in the Old testament to
the starting verses of the Gospel of Matthew in the old New testament - before
God to reveal the new covenant and their salvation through the coming of Jesus
Christ.
It’s not just history that teaches us about the
disadvantages of instant gratification; there is also some hard psychological
evidence on the subject. In the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment in the 1970s a
group of four-year-old children took part in a psychological study. Each child
was given one marshmallow and promised that, if they could wait twenty minutes
before eating it, they would be given a second one. Some children could wait
the twenty minutes and others couldn’t. Records were kept and sixteen years
later children were revisited; those who had been able to delay eating were
found to score significantly higher in academic tests. The ability to say ‘no,
not now’ seems to be vital to both civilisation and education.
Lent helps us to learn to say ‘no, not now’; it teaches us
self-control and an expectation and an anticipation of what God may reveal to
us. Patience is the companion of humility and the enemy of pride.
Lent is then not just a human exercise but a sacred discipline.
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