You Don’t Need to Self-Optimize, in Lent or in Life

Or Why, If Jesus Were Alive Today, His Wild Beasts Would Be Algorithms

Welcome to The Slow Take, my very occasional newsletter about the strange beauty of being human. I’m Heather Lanier, the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, and the poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing. I’m glad you’re here!

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It’s the start of Holy Week, when folks who follow the Jesus tradition begin the week-long procession toward Jesus’s death. (Spoiler alert: He comes back.) And I’ve botched Lent. Again.

Lent is the 40-day period commemorating the days when Jesus cast himself into the desert and hung out with wild beasts, without any food or water. To evoke his sacrifice, we Christian folk abstain from stuff like ice cream. See the similarity?

I like Lent. I like the discipline of giving up something for 40 days. I like thinking about what changes I might make in order to live in deeper union with my goal of Not Being an Asshole.

To figure out what to “give up” for Lent, people sometimes ask themselves: What’s getting in the way of my relationship with God? If that sounds all pious and possibly creepy-evangelical to you (and, a decade ago, to me too) try re-hearing it like: What’s getting in the way of my relationship to Love? Or: What might I do so that I’m a hair closer to knowing Ultimate Reality?

Here’s what I know: social media rarely brings me closer to Ultimate Reality. Like, I’m not getting enlightened on Facebook. I’ve tried. It hasn’t happened yet.

I’d gone cold turkey with social media for extended periods of time. It’s doable, and (for me) beneficial. But for Lent, I wanted to try a balancing act. So I gave myself a “hack” of sorts: I decided to give up social media until 3pm. After that, I could dip my toes into the newsfeeds only after I meditated twice that day—once in the morning, and once in the afternoon.

For fifteen or so years, I’ve been a practitioner of a Christian form of meditation called Centering Prayer. And the guidelines of Centering Prayer are pretty simple: for twenty to thirty minutes a day, twice a day, surrender all thoughts to God. But, even though I’ve meditated every morning for years, I’ve never figured out how to build a second meditation period into my days. So taking up this practice for Lent would be hard. I’d try to use social media as a carrot.

And I did it!

….For like, one week.

And then I stopped. I ignored my commitment to a second meditation period, succumbed early and often to the scrolling.

And then for another week, I recommitted. Found the extra twenty minutes in the afternoons. Meditated in my car and in my office and even in my classroom while my students took a quick trip to an art gallery.

You’re never supposed to expect anything from Centering Prayer. If you try to get something out of it, then you’re not actually doing the practice, which is to surrender. I’m used to meditating with absolutely zero rewards or expectations. Mostly, it’s pretty boring. But after a few weeks of twice daily meditation, something surprising happened. I actually felt… different. I actually felt, on two separate occasions, briefly in touch with some very tender, Holy friendship that I can’t really name or explain. The most apt phrase I have is divine presence.

You’d think such moments would encourage me to keep going. Nope. The next week, I barely even tried. My kid was sleeping terribly, and I lost all willpower. I dove into Instagram reels like a wild beast into mud. I swam gleefully in the sludge. Threads debating the whereabouts of Princess Kate? Influencers peddling swimsuits and teeth whitening strips? Yes please! This is true happiness, right?

I got very grumpy.

“Lent is not about purity,” my husband said as I sipped his beer (I’d also given up alcohol). “Cheers to that,” I said, acknowledging how far my Overachiever-Self had come as I relinquished all hope of getting Lent exactly right.

My friend

Erin Raffety

wrote an essay called “Am I the Only One Doing Lent Wrong?” In it, she wrote this very smart question: "Have we 'hacked' even Lent to death?" It can be tempting to turn Lent and other spiritual practices into opportunities for self-optimization. Feeling both pious *and* out-of-shape!? Why not take up daily jogging?! Win-win! Sarcasm font, please. I don’t recommend this.

Lent isn’t about optimizing oneself, succeeding, achieving. No real spiritual practice is. I think Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche would call that spiritual materialism.

But it’s humbling to realize just how often I stray from what I know is good for me. It’s humbling to see how weak I am in the face of Silicon Valley’s algorithms.

And let’s face it, if Jesus were alive today, his wild beasts would probably be the algorithms.

If you’re a church-goer, first off, God bless you for braving that imperfect place on the regular. But also, then you know that every Palm Sunday we experience the whiplash of “Hosanna” and palms one minute, then “Kill Jesus!” the next. There’s greenery and joy in the opening hymn, and then, literally 30 minutes later, death. I mean, the congregation actually shouts, mid-liturgy, as loud as possible: “Crucify him!”

I used to think this was a liturgical failure. Churches, please stop trying to squeeze two major days into one! Palm Sunday and Good Friday? They’re different vibes!

But on this year’s Palm Sunday, the priest at my church made the following point: This whiplash is akin to our relationship with God. It’s akin to our relationship with Love. With the Divine Source.

However you translate it, this is my relationship with God, with All That is Good: One minute, I’m hailing the tender intimacy with this Goodness, via my Centering Prayer practice or otherwise. I’m at peace, awake, whole, connected to the Source.

The next minute: “Fuck breathing mindfully, I want the online Old Navy sale! $12 linen-blend pants!? THIS IS THE TRUE SOURCE OF JOY!”

Not that shopping online is always some kind-of “sin.” But in my case, it’s usually a dopamine-chase when I really seek something else. The blue plastic delivery bags come in the mail, along with the four pairs of linen pants and an ever-growing hole somewhere in my chest that cries out, “Oh no! The pants are not the Source! We’ve been fooled again.”

Do I just lack discipline? You could call it that. You could decide I need to wrangle my dumb willpower, exert more self-control, whip myself into shape.

But I like Maria Bowler’s voice here. Her newsletter,

Creative Courage with Maria Bowler

, made a perfectly-timed arrival in my inbox this week with a brilliant essay about discipline. She says if we aren’t exerting our discipline in an intended area of our life, chances are we’re exerting it elsewhere. Discipline, she says, is etymologically related to the word, disciple. It’s worth asking: What are we disciples of? That’s where we can locate our discipline.

And last week, when I wasn’t doing my second meditation, when I was suddenly tossing out all my Lenten rules around social media, when my kid was also not sleeping, I was very much a disciple of managing sleep-deprivation by scrolling through second-hand blouses on ThredUp.

So I got really quiet. I remembered that I have a voice of Inner Wisdom, and it gives me good advice. This voice resides somewhere in my chest, and when it speaks, it rings clear like a bell. It’s soft-spoken, but it delivers its wisdom with zero self-deprecation, shame, or apology. So I told my Inner Wisdom that I again fucked up my well-meaning practice. And I asked it what to do.

It said, simply, without pity or blame: Just try again.

So here we go, friends. We step into Holy Week, with our humility and our failures and our muck-ups and fuck-us. By the end of this week, every single one of Jesus’s disciples will leave his side . Every single one will become disciples of something else. Something they never actually wanted. Even if you follow other teachers, not Jesus, you know what that’s like—to wander from your way. To leave the Love you love.

So we just try again. We reach for Love again—which, it turns out, means we love ourselves too, in our muck-ups and fuck-ups. We love ourselves enough to keep trying.

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Thanks for reading this Lenten/Holy Week Special! I don’t always write about overtly religious stuff, but when I do, I file it under the special category called “Psalms of Unknowing.” If this isn’t your thing, you can unsubscribe to “Psalms of Unknowing” and still receive regular issues of The Slow Take. Just visit your subscription settings.