Lent and Prosperity

The situation in Iran is continuing to escalate, and so are predictions about an impending energy crisis. Gas prices are up, inflation and a higher cost of living are looming, and lots of folks are becoming increasingly displeased that this move on Trump’s part is threatening to become a drag on their own lives. It’s unfair, it’s unjust, it’s a sacrifice that we didn’t sign up for, or so the cultural narrative goes.

This sort of spirit is probably unhelpful for making progress on any goal, generally. It’s especially unhelpful when it comes to very large, common projects like securing national or international political and economic interests. Those kinds of efforts almost always require a common willingness to sacrifice some short-term comforts for long-term ends. And whether or not one thinks that’s what Trump’s attack on Iran is actually all about – protecting common interests – it’s just worth noting how quickly this kind of self- and lifestyle-protective spirit has gotten into the air. Day by day, hour by hour, news stories are tracking the economic toll that may soon be trickling down to affect consumers, and outrage is brewing.

It’s a spirit worth just noting, largely because it’s a spirit almost exactly opposed to a Christian way of thinking. If many are worried about the inconveniences that may soon impose upon our very comfortable lives, Christians are meant to live from a readiness to give up those immediate gains for the sake of much better ones. Sacrificing in the short-term for the sake of the long-term is our bread and butter; recognizing that our material comforts are the illusion of security, not the promise of it, is our trusty hermeneutic. Thus too much affluence, too much luxury, too steady of a march toward wealth – that’s all something we’re meant to be wary of having, rather than wary of losing.

In the midst of the fearmongering that may be happening, then, and whatever our views of the politics are, it may be of good use at this juncture to resist the temptation to grumble and worry. Prosperity and ease are not the ends we were made for in this life, and often not the main tools serving our holiness. The pinches life deals us can be good medicine for remembering that.

It’s good medicine especially in this season of Lent, which stretches and pushes us in our willingness to sacrifice and in our willingness to remember who we are and where we’re headed. Indeed, Lent is meant to re-ground us in these very same realities: that what’s coming at the end of our road is much better than what we might secure along the way of it; that the astonishing promises we were made for are infinitely more valuable than anything we could give up in pursuing them. “Many voices speak to you of a joy that can be had with money, with success, with power,” John Paul II once said at a World Youth Day gathering, but “true joy is a victory, something which cannot be obtained without a long and difficult struggle. Christ holds the secret of this victory.”

So, if things right now appear dim – because of the stream of doomsday headlines flashing across our phones, because of a Lent that sometimes seems to go and on and on – that’s just a good promise worth holding onto. Not to fall for the fall for the false hopes that comfort and ease try to give. But to await and to pursue and to long for the true joy that comes out of our long and difficult struggle.