The Cosmic Insignificance Therapy of Lent

Welcome to Lent. We are all going to die.

That is what we remember annually as we head into this season through the tunnel of Ash Wednesday — the starkest, bluntest reality, one that we usually do everything we can to avoid remembering. That we are finite, we are temporary; someday each of us will be lowered into the earth never to be seen again. How’s that for good news?

Along with that, we remember that we are weak. We don’t do what we intend to do, and we do what we don’t intend to do. It is just who we are. It comes with the territory of being human. We’re passive-aggressive to our spouses. We lose our temper on our kids. We’ve still not bothered to figure out whether styrofoam is recyclable, evidence that we probably don’t care, and that’s the problem. We wished we cared about the earth and our housemates and the neighbor across the street who never shovels their walk, but we’re weak. We usually don’t say these things aloud, we’re a little too attached to our egos, but this is the time of year when we say it out loud. We’re weak, and we are all going to die.

Despite it seeming a rather dark concept on initial inspection, there is also a sort of strange energy that can be derived from remembering you have, as Mary Oliver puts it, “only one wild and precious life.” This is all we have, just this short little while between the birth canal and the coffin. The Lenten exhortation is then sort of like a Christian YOLO: You only live once, so make it count. Stop scrolling on Instagram and go outside. Stop buying avocado toast and give the unhoused guy on the corner some cash. Call your grandma and say hello. Because this is all we’ve got.

But the thing is that, while nice, this approach will also tucker you out.

Last year, I walked with my mom to her deathbed. She was only 55 years old when she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive blood cancer during an unexpected stay in the ICU where she nearly lost her life. She lived another nine months after that initial hospital stay and eventual diagnosis.

In the ICU, she didn’t say, “I wanted to write a New York Times bestseller!” or “I want to start a big charity that will help a million hurting people!” or “I want to climb Mount Everest!” She did say though, that she wanted to ride a bike at least one more time.

By the grace of God, she did. She made it out of the ICU with a long chemotherapy journey ahead, and as soon as she was strong enough, she and my brother and I got on two wheels and did a loop around her neighborhood. She had a huge smile on her face as we breathed the fresh spring air.

Then we went inside for some lunch, leftover soup and a bun with sliced ham. She hung some laundry on the line in the backyard and turned her compost pile. Then she went inside and sat on the couch. She scrolled on her phone for a while.

“What are you reading, Mom?” I asked.

“Oh, I got a suggested post on my Facebook feed about a type of potato plant that grows in the wild. I didn’t know there were wild potato varieties, so now I’m Googling whether they’re native to this region.”

And that is how someone who knows they’re going to die spends their day.

Cosmic Insignificance Therapy

Author Oliver Burkeman, in his book Four Thousand Weeks, writes about what he calls Cosmic Insignificance Therapy. “Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things,” writes Burkeman. “To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn’t a matter of resolving to “do something remarkable” with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and over-demanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping back down from godlike fantasies of cosmic significance into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely— and often enough, marvelously— really is.

When Lent arrived, you went to church to have ashes smeared on your forehead, and you were told that you are dust, and to dust you will return. And you walked back to your seat feeling small, and that’s because you are. This person you are now, a few pounds heavier than you wish you were, a bit more snappy to your partner than you intend to be, and much more tragically finite than you like to believe, is all you are. This life is all you have.

The Lenten impartation is not a reminder to hustle harder to be someone grander and finer and more put together. It is a reminder to love the only life you have. Love the bike rides and the compost piles and the moments of rest where you get to — thank God — waste a few minutes going down an internet rabbit hole because the only way to waste this life you’ve been given is to resent it.

Fail Your Fasts

Many Christians use this season of Lent as a time of fasting. Historically, and still now in many Christian traditions, it means giving up meat and a few other food items and eating very simply for the forty days leading up to Easter. Other people give up social media, chocolate, coffee or any number of things they find to be a vice.

This is something I like to do most years, and one year I decided I wanted to give up sugar. So I marked Ash Wednesday in my calendar and avoided sugar. The first few days were okay; I could feel the absence of my after-dinner piece of chocolate, but it was alright. I was getting by. And then maybe a week or so in, I swear I woke up jittery. It was like my body was going into withdrawal or something. And all I could think of was, what I wouldn’t give for a chocolate croissant. And I told myself, no Nina, you’re fasting. It’s Lent. Maybe pray instead or something. But I couldn’t get it off my mind.

So later that night when my husband and I walked down to a festival in our city, I noticed what I think was some sort of heightened sense of smell for sweet treats. My husband wanted a cup of tea, so we walked into a cafe, and I admit, I caved in. I had one of their brownies and I scarfed the whole thing down without a second thought.

Except that I did have a second thought. When we walked out of the shop, I thought, oh crap. I told myself I was fasting from sugar, and I didn’t need that sweet treat at all, and there I went, doing what I said I wouldn’t do. And then another excited thought fired up in a different part of my brain: maybe now I get to give up on my fast?

The whole rest of Lent was like that. There were good days where I did what I said I would do, and there were lots of bad days where I ate what I said I wouldn’t eat for no other reason except that I wanted to.

As you walk through Lent and engage in whatever fast God may have called you to, remember this: those moments of failure, of eating the sweet treat when you said you wouldn’t, of having that cup of coffee you intended not to, of re-downloading Twitter just this one time when you said you would take the season off of it — those are not the moments that break your connection with the God you seek to find amidst your fast. Those are actually your moments of salvation. They are the whole point of the fast. You fast not as a self-improvement project. You fast not as a Christian kind of New Years Resolution. You fast not to prove your strength, but to come face to face with your weakness. To recognize how bad you are at fasting, that is what makes worthwhile your Lenten journey. That is your Cosmic Insignificance Therapy.

The joy amidst the soberness of Lent is the recognition that just as you will die, so Christ died. And when he did, he was put in that tomb to go down to the depths of all our darknesses to shine a light there. He arrived at the lowest low of the pit where all our failures, weaknesses, bad diagnoses, unfinished fasts, unfinished lives are found and said, “Let these bones live.”

“And the one who believes in me will live, even though they die,” cries the firstborn from the dead. And so, let us love the life we actually live — the one Christ gave us.