The Slow Way: Lent and Self Denial
Can Jesus’s teaching of self denial track with the possibility that pleasure is good, and is in fact a way toward life in the presence of God?
“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” - Jesus, Mark 8:34-36
I had an appointment this past week with my neurologist. I meet with her every four months to discuss my memory and what preventions are working and not working, how often I’m spending in bed with migraines each month, how much pain medication I’m taking to survive the bad days, and whether there’s something new to try.
Beyond the list of medications, there’s a list of things I’m doing to keep myself healthy: barre class, walks, neck exercises, good sleep, (and supposedly, though I’m not great at this) adjusting my schedule to prevent stress. Supplements, therapies, pain management, acupuncture, massage. And, as always, there’s the little tests the neurologist does to make sure my cognitive processing is in working order. I can always remember the three words she gives me at the beginning of the appointment.
Later that day, though, I can’t remember the word or phrase to describe a specific diagnosis belonging to one of my kids. This happens when I’m with on the phone with a stranger, giving information about my son for an upcoming meeting. “Are there any other medical conditions we should know about?” she asks.
Yes, I say. And I turn the pages in my brain to get to it, but the pages are stuck together. I can’t find the words. “I’m so sorry, I had a head injury a few years ago and sometimes I can’t remember words.” I text my husband while I’m on the phone. “Quick, what’s that that thing ___ has that makes him need the epi pen?” This, readers, is something I’m embarrassed to tell you. I say “thing” even though I have filled out endless forms for him, requested prescriptions, taken him to doctors appointments, and sat with him in ERs because of this “thing” My husband texts the word back. A word I know deeply, a “thing” that has been part of our lives for the past nine years. It had just been buried in a drawer of my brain that I can’t always open.
My brain does so much for me, and I’m grateful for it. It allows me to write, to think creatively, to stand up and speak to crowds. But it glitches sometimes because it got hurt, and because I didn't take good care of it when I could have.
I tell you this because it’s time to talk about Some Things Jesus Said That Make Me Uncomfortable. This one comes up a lot in Lent, and rightfully so. Also, I don’t like it:
“Let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”
Here’s the thing, this passage worries me. It’s not because I’m a flaming liberal who wants to ignore Jesus’s hard teachings (actually, I might be a little flaming so I forgive you if you think this). I worry about this passage because this was the teaching of Jesus I most deeply believed and followed for much of my early adult life. This is the teaching of Jesus that I used to convince myself that my feelings of overwhelm, my exhaustion, and my discomfort were proof I was living a life of faith. This is a teaching that I used against myself.
This teaching allowed me to ignore my anxiety, the shoulder muscles I always kept pinched tight on high alert, so much so that my migraines begin in the spot of the knots that locked themselves permanently into position, no matter how much massage, needles, and muscle relaxers have tried to release them.
I believed for much of my life that if I ignored my body and my pain and my feelings of overwhelm, if I pushed myself harder, if I slept less, if I gave more of my time away to others and kept less for myself, that I would be taking up my cross and following Jesus. I would be saving my life by losing it.
In the meanwhile, I began having panic attacks. I screamed at my kids. I cried myself to sleep. I took on more ministry, more writing, and more commitments—believing that if it hurt I was really following Jesus.
This is a misuse of Jesus’s teachings, and a reason that abuse can run as rampant as it does in the Church.
What does it mean to deny ourselves, while believing that caring for our hearts and minds and bodies is good? Does Jesus’s teaching track with the possibility I’ve been writing about here, that pleasure is good, and is in fact a way toward life in the presence of God?
This teaching of Jesus, this calling to take up what Brian Zahnd in his new book The Wood Between the Worlds reminds us would have been an “outrageous” notion to Jesus’s original hearers: “There was nothing religious or spiritual about a cross—it was ugly and profane,” he writes. This teaching of Jesus is not something we can write off with a study of culture or original language. He was using brutal language, referring to a tool of torture that no one in that moment associated with him. What does this teaching mean for us in this season of Lent, the season in which we practice letting go of the comforts and dependencies that seem to keep us from connection with God? Can a person take up a cross and still care for their own lives?
I was relieved to find this passage explored in Walter Bruggeman’s Lenten devotional A Way Other Than Our Own, which I’ve been reading through this season. He points to this saying as one that is “loaded and dangerous and has often been misunderstood.”
So what does Jesus mean when when he teaches this kind of self-denial? “The call to discipleship is not a program to make us feel bad or impoverished or uncomfortable,” Bruggeman writes. “Or pressed more deeply, to deny self is taken too often to mean you should have some self-hate, feel bad about yourself, ponder your failure and your guilt, and reject your worth. But that is surely not what Jesus is talking about.”
Part way through writing this, one of my youth group kids got disappointing news from a program she applied to. The despair in her texts was palpable. When I texted her back, I was most concerned with the power she was giving to those who denied her. I told her I hope she will never let let adults who don’t know her determine her worth, her future, her sense of her own goodness and value to the world. Only she and God can determine that. (And God has already decided she is worthy.)
There is no good that comes from negative self-talk, from shaping our sense of self by the opinion of the people in power who don’t know or love us. There is no good that comes from deciding we are not of value because of the actions of someone else.
Those years in which I conflated following Jesus with working so hard I didn’t sleep enough or care for my own body were years when I refused to believe that I was good as I am. And when I say “good” I don’t mean denying that I can hurt other people, that I have sinned in what I’ve done and left undone. But I mean in my core — that I am a beloved child of God, that am a dream of God who is being made whole.
All that to say, discipleship is not the same as hurting ourselves. Taking up our cross does not mean taking up the beliefs about ourselves that unhealthy people have insisted we carry. Following Jesus is the opposite of believing we are unworthy. For me, learning to be whole and healthy for the people I love means believing that my worth is not found in my accomplishments, that I am allowed to rest because I am free. It means believing that reading and walks and good-feeling connections with friends and family is part of following Jesus.
So if Bruggeman is right and the call to “take up your cross” is not “a program to make us feel bad or impoverished or uncomfortable,” what is it?
Zahnd says that “The way of Christian discipleship is to deny the primal but fallen instinct to prioritize our own security and self-interest, and to voluntarily imitate what Jesus did with the cross. . . the cross is the call the self denial for the sake of imitating Christ.” Again, though, there’s that self-denial. Can I make the claim that I’m “taking up my cross” and refuse to deny myself sleep or play or beauty?
He goes on: “To deny self means to recognize that I cannot be a self-starter, cannot be self-sufficient, cannot be self-made or self-securing, and that to try to do so will end in isolation and fear and greed and brutality and finally in violence. It will not work because we are not made that way.”
There is something so valuable and significant in this differentiation. What Brian Zahnd is talking about is a self that is not connected. Self interest, he says. Prioritzing our security in a way that leads to isolation. There must be a difference between discipleship and self-harm. Perhaps the distinction is found in what care for ourselves accomplishes? Does my care for myself make me more connected or less connected to the people I’m called to love in this life? Or am I prioritizing myself in a way that separates me from others, that isolates me from community? Greed is not self love. Fear and isolation are particular forms of self-centeredness.
Zahnd quotes Soren Kierkegaard, who asked: “What is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An Admirer, however, keeps himself personally detached. He fails to see that what is admired involves a claim upon him, and thus he fails to be or strive to be what he admires.”
Following Jesus involves a claim upon us. What I have come to understand is that caring for the heart and body and relationships that have been given to me by God are part of acknowledging that claim God has upon me. I am a follower when I recognize that claim and live accordingly.
As Bruggeman says, “Lent is a time to quit running, to let ourselves be caught and embraced in love, like sheep with safe pasture, like a traveler offered rich and unexpected food. Our life is not willed by God to be an endless anxiety. It is, rather, meant to be an embrace, but that entails being caught by God.”
A Slow Practice
How do we differentiate between the good and harmful “denials” of ourselves?
This is a complicated question, and one I’m still working through. But here’s a practice I think might be helpful:
As is often the case around here, let’s get our journals:
Start with this prayer: “Lord, give me knowledge of myself and knowledge of you—that I might discern the ways I have misunderstood the words of Jesus and rejected the goodness of this life. That I might discern the ways I center myself and live from a place fear that isolates. Teach me how to take up my cross with a true and faithful spirit”
On the left column write: “Ways I harm myself by denying the good gifts of God.” On the right side write: “Ways I am invited to release my self-centeredness, my self-securing, and my isolating instincts.
Discerning the difference between these two distinctions is not easy. This may be a thought practice you need to come back to over and over this week. But I hope you’ll join me in considering what it might mean to recognize the difference between the two and seek the Holy Spirit’s clarity, that we might be more than admirers, but true, healthy and whole followers.
A List of Things
My beloved The Lucky Few Podcast is back with a new season! We’re doing some new things, including having a special guest host for the season—Ashley Barlow—an IEP expert, fellow Down syndrome mama, and special education lawyer. She’s helping us understand how the federal changes under Trump are affecting our loved ones with disabilities.
Speaking of the federal changes affecting kids in special education, for World Down Syndrome Day, I shared about what we all need to understand about what Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education will do to our loved ones who rely on special education services, and what we can do about it. Check it out here.
I’m taking a week off from The Slow Way Letter next week while I’m away leading a retreat in North Carolina. I’ll be back with a new letter for you on April 5.
Also, have you gotten a copy of Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole? You should get it here! Or find the audiobook version (I read it!) at Audible.