During Lent, the Church calls us to prayer, almsgiving, and, perhaps most prominently, fasting. What does Lenten fasting and penance look like? Well, besides the lenient strictures of abstaining from meat on Fridays and eating a little less on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, the Church leaves our penitential practices to our own discretion.

And that’s not necessarily bad, right? This allows us to look at our lives, see where we struggle and need improvement, and take action accordingly. True, this wasn’t the way Catholic Lenten penance was historically, but that was a different time and we can hardly be expected to adhere to those standards. Right?

Is this really the case? Should we select our own Lenten penances, or is there a better way? On closer inspection, we might discover that choosing the penances ourselves actually misses the purpose of fasting itself.

The Pitfalls of Self-Selected Penance

Regardless of whether it’s “the best way” or not, there are three traps we have to be aware of while doing penance during Lent—we’re missing the purpose of penance if it becomes one of these three things.

1. A Ceremony

When I was a kid and I would go back to school after Christmas break, one of the questions that would go around was “What did you get for Christmas?” Everybody got presents and they were probably brimming over to either brag or complain; this seems like a natural question for kids to ask.

What about the question “What did you give up for Lent?” (Yes, that’s a question that Catholic middle schoolers ask each other—or at least they did back when I was around.) Regardless of whether we make our penances the subject of small talk, this question manifests how we can often approach Lenten fasting: something that we do just because we’re Catholic, and that’s what Catholics do. They become like Christmas presents, just less enjoyable: everybody’s got them, and they can brag or complain accordingly.

Not only does this make penance primarily a show or ceremony, it’s also a terrible motivator to keep doing penance when it gets tough. If it’s just something you do because you’re Catholic, what kind of motivation is that?

2. A Contest

This can be a particular difficulty for men, especially young men, but it applies to all of us. We can see ascetical practices as a challenge, as a way to prove our strength and superiority. Fr. Walter Ciszek describes this in He Leadeth Me:

I had been a strong-willed boy. When I entered religion, I saw this character trait as a talent given to me rather than as a flaw. I took pride in developing it further, through ascetical practices such as fasting, severe penances, exercises of will, and personal discipline. . . . Yes, I prided myself on doing these things better or more often than others, vying as it were with the legends of the saints to prove that I . . . could prove their equal and somehow be better than my contemporaries.

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Unlike “ceremonial” penance, we do have a motive now—but it’s misguided. I heard a man talk about his experience with the Exodus90 challenge once. He said he crushed the disciplines, but he failed, because he was doing it just to prove he could. That’s not what penance is about.

3. Self-improvement

Some of the more holy people among us are experienced enough to avoid these previous two pitfalls. At this point, we’re not doing penance ceremonially, and we’re not doing it as a contest. But we can still fall into the trap of what might be called “Catholic self-help.”

This is where the intention of our penance becomes “making us feel better”—it’s about us, about ordering our lives, about giving us that satisfied feeling because we are able to do these penances. This is the underlying problem of all three pitfalls: it’s centered on ourselves and what we can do.

Well, if penance isn’t about us, then what is it about?

What is Penance For?

In the Introduction to the Alphabetical collection of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward says that

The desert was not a gigantic gymnasium where athletes vied with one another in endurance tests. . . .The monks went without sleep because they were watching for the Lord; they did not speak because they were listening to God; they fasted because they were fed by the Word of God. It was the end that mattered, the ascetic practices were only a means.

Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Introduction, xxv

This gets to the heart of the purpose of penance and asceticism. It’s not, as Ward says, an “endurance test.” Like everything in the spiritual life, when rightly ordered, it’s a means of drawing closer to God. Fasting and other types of abstinence are especially meant to teach us that we rely totally on God and God alone, not on ourselves or material things.

This means that penance always has God as its sole focus. When we fast, it’s not because it makes us feel good about ourselves or just because “we’re supposed to.” We’re called to make it an act of love to God, emptying ourselves of material pleasures so that God can take their place.

Tradition’s Penitential Ideal

Again in He Leadeth Me, Ciszek says that

. . . ascetical practices such as penances, fasting, or mortifications can be hindrances rather than helps if they are self-imposed. Striving instead to eliminate all self-will, to accept God’s will revealed in circumstances of daily life, is the surest way to achieve growth in conformity to the will of God.

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He’s essentially reiterating the point made by Ward about the desert fathers—that penance should never be about us—but he’s extending it to the idea of self-imposition. So is he saying that he should just give up our Lenten practices and live the same we always do? No, but he’s putting forward the idea that, when we choose our own penances, it’s extremely easy for them to become about our will instead of God’s.

Practically speaking, is there a solution to this? Think about it this way. When we “self-select” our penances, it often perverts their focus on God. But do our penances need to be “self-selected”? There are two possible solutions to this.

Traditional Penance

When Lent was first formulated by the Church, it looked a lot different than it does now. Every weekday, Christians would fast until sunset, and then eat a single vegan meal. On the weekend, they would still abstain, but wouldn’t fast. This is an ideal of fasting and abstinence given to us by Tradition.

It’s also nearly impossible to imagine doing it now. But it is an ideal, and it is something we can strive for. We might think it’s simply impractical in our current time—but the only way in which that’s true is that we’re not ready for it. This is certainly not “self-selected,” and it’s probably also something none of us want to do. But the whole point of penance is to get to a place where you say “I can’t do it,” because you can’t. This makes you realize that God and his grace are what sustain you, not your own power.

Probably, none of us are going to be able to fast till sunset—and, of course, there are valid medical reasons for that. But the closer we can get to it, the better. Maybe that’ll look like a fast till noon, going vegan without intense fasting, or eating two meals a day instead of three.

The Higher Goal

In all our Lenten prayer and sacrifice, we’re shooting for a goal: what might be called a “plan of life.” This is where we re-orient our lives towards God and build sustainable practices that foster our spiritual growth.

Giving up a couple arbitrary things probably won’t achieve a plan of life; watching less movies and praying stations on Friday are good, but chances are they won’t inspire radical conversion. Instead of simply “giving up” a few things here and there, we should try to re-order our lives so they center around God. Think of it in the positive rather than the negative. Maybe we need to get up earlier, have a daily holy hour, consistently get to Mass, or spend more time with our families.

It’s not about how many “sacrifices” we make; it’s about living our lives in a way oriented to God. That doesn’t mean we can get rid of penances, but once we’re acting with this in mind, the penances become tools to accomplish this ideal rather than burdens.

I say all these things as someone who makes these mistakes continually, and who still hasn’t been able to accomplish what I’ve put forward here. I’m telling this to myself as much as to anyone else. We’re all sinners, and we’re all going to fail and fall short in our penitence. But in the end, what we can do is constantly remind ourselves that Lenten penance should not be about us or an assertion of our will. We need to do everything we can to make it focused on God and leading towards the sacrifice of our will to his.