This Wednesday you will probably see a lot of people walking around with stuff on their foreheads. No, it's not dirt, so please don't try to rub it off our foreheads for us (yes, I know people this has happened to). The stuff, rather, is ashes of palm branches, and Catholics wear it every year on Ash Wednesday, the day that marks the penitential season that precedes Easter. Although this may all seem relatively unimportant to the average Dartmouth student, the Lenten season actually has importance for all of us.
Lent is about a lot of things, many of which have religious significance and thus are uninteresting to non-Christians. But there are two aspects of Lent that offer useful lessons that everyone can benefit from. The first is that Lent cultivates a spirit of self-discipline and sacrifice. Our culture today is, in part, characterized by over-indulgence and instant gratification. This in turn has lead to a marked physical (e.g. the rise in obesity), moral (e.g. unhealthy addiction to pornography), and social (e.g. the unwillingness to sacrifice for others) decline. These are all assaults on our freedom, because they deprive us of self-mastery, bringing about a situation in which we are ruled by pleasures instead of ruling them. We are most fully free not when we are simply able to do whatever we want without external impediments, but rather when we reach a state of virtue that is commiserate with our dignity as humans. And, as Plato would point out, this leads to internal justice, for justice is achieved within the human person when he or she harmoniously rules the passions by reason.
Therefore, in giving us a specific time to embrace self-discipline and sacrifice, Lent helps us to regain true freedom and internal justice. For Catholics, this manifests itself in fasting, abstinence from eating meat on Fridays and often giving up some pleasure or habit. But the actual way in which self-discipline is realized isn't the most important thing rather, it is the spirit of sacrifice that matters. Again, this is not only a theological imperative, but also a moral, cultural, physical and even aesthetic one. It is also a relational one, for if we can't learn to radically sacrifice for another even in ways that seem arbitrary or irrational to us our relationships will never fully embody loving friendship.
But sacrifice during Lent is never undertaken purely for its own sake. There are alternative motives that enrich the meaning of sacrifice, extending it beyond the mere exercise of self-discipline. Traditionally, people who gave up certain foods or other purchased goods gave the money that they would have spent on that product to the poor. And here is the second lesson of Lent: identification with the suffering. For Christians, this is primarily identification with the suffering Christ, but it is also about experiencing for yourself the hunger, the want, the lack that other people experience all the time. It is popular at Dartmouth to talk about solving the world's problems. However, helping the poor is about a lot more than merely devising some clever technical solution to get clean water to them. It is about having compassion for them, and compassion in its Latin root means "to suffer with." In Lent, we get the chance to suffer, albeit in a small way, with the poorer members of the human family. In the spirit of Lent we try to interact with the poor and their suffering not by bestowing on them gifts as a superior to an inferior, but by humbly stepping into their shoes to experience, in a small degree, what their life is like. This is an exercise that would, I think, be deeply fruitful for all students, especially for those who regularly participate in social justice work.
I propose that all students, regardless of their religious beliefs, try to observe Lent this year. Because Lent has the potential to help us recover our freedom and to teach us literal compassion, it is a season whose benefits cut across all theological boundaries and unite the Dartmouth community in a period of moral and social growth.