I have a puritanical streak right through the centre of my soul that has almost always been unhelpful. (I’m sure I can come up with an example of it being really helpful. It’s just, uh, taking me longer than I expected…) It’s the streak that wants everything to be nice and tidy; that says, “Some people are GOOD PEOPLE and some people are SINNERS.” It also says things like, “If you can’t clean ALL the things COMPLETELY then everything might as well remain filthy.”
Coming up with New Year’s Resolutions and Lenten disciplines has, therefore, been an interesting and evolving exercise for me. I want something challenging enough to help me grow spiritually, and something that addresses my personal besetting sins rather than handily according with my own personal preferences (no meat? no problem!), but something that’s moderate enough for me to not give up on. Crucially, I think, it has to be something where it’s easy for me to get back on the wagon when I fall off. Spiritual reading is bad at this for me. After all, if I’m only going to read 99% of something during Lent instead of my planned 100%, I might as well not have read it at all, amirite?
I had one heck of a pregnancy, which involved a lot of issues with food. Which foods I could and couldn’t eat. When I could and couldn’t eat. How much it was reasonable to eat. Whether it suddenly becomes OK to eat an entire cake in one sitting just because you’re pregnant and it’s yummy. I swung wildly between various extremes.
I have now had the baby (evidence peacefully sleeping on my lap as I type) and need to find that temperate middle ground. Food is good. God gave it to us. It nourishes us. It is tasty. But the love of food is the root of all kinds of evil.
So my Lenten discipline this year is going to be: moderation in food.
This will be hard in many ways because I am not giving myself any rules to follow. I am going to have to decide each day, each meal, what moderation means in that instance. I am breastfeeding, so it does not mean fasting and restricting calories. (And that’s not moderation even if you’re not breastfeeding.) It means letting the food I eat nourish my body and my soul. Enjoying what there is without eating to excess or obsessing over what I have or haven’t eaten.
Just moderation, plain and simple.
Homefaring 