Lenten Misery Misses the Point

It’s Lent and I’m a Catholic.

So how come I’m not sitting in some dark corner, reflecting on doom, gloom, and how perfectly rotten I am?

Or at least moaning and wringing my hands over the world’s dreadfully dire state: as illustrated in my news feed.

Basically, it’s because neither will help me line myself up with Jesus: doing prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.¹ Work on lining myself up, that is: it’s a job that lasts as long as life does.

Fasting and Focus

Now, fasting I could feel guilty about, since “abstaining from luxuries”, as one resource put it, assumes that luxuries are already part of my everyday life.

I can’t give up lobster thermidor and Caribbean cruises for Lent because they aren’t part of my life.

No virtue there: they’re simply not options for me. On the other hand, avoiding lesser luxuries is possible, and emphatically a work in progress.

Even so, giving up stuff isn’t the point.

Working on “a true inner conversion … to follow Christ’s will more faithfully” is.¹

Gloominess, Health, and a Little History

Another reason I’m not working on my moaning and groaning, striving for every-deeper dives into despondency, is that it’d be a really bad idea.

That’s because ‘blessed are the miserable, for they shall spread misery’ is not one of the beatitudes, and melancholia isn’t healthy.

“Melancholia”, along with other Greco-Roman ideas about disease, humorism, and the mind, hasn’t been part of serious medicine for a century or so.

It’s associated with one of the four old-school personality types:

• Choleric
• Melancholic
• Phlegmatic
• Sanguine

“Melancholia”, as a diagnosis, wasn’t quite the same as persistent depressive disorder; but it wasn’t all that different, either. Both — bear in mind that this isn’t a technical definition — involve folks brooding on gloom, doom, and finding dark linings in every silver cloud.

In the Middle Ages, folks recognized it as one of the ways a person’s mind can go wonky.

Then, about five centuries back, something weird happened.²

Fashionable Melancholy and Me

Turns out that seeing gloominess as a sign of sagacity and serious purpose didn’t start in the 2oth century.

“Ficino transformed what had hitherto been regarded as the most calamitous of all the humours into the mark of genius. Small wonder that eventually the attitudes of melancholy soon became an indispensable adjunct to all those with artistic or intellectual pretentions[!].”
(“The Elizabethan Malady: Melancholy in Elizabeth and Jacobean Portraiture”, Roy Strong (1964). Apollo. LXXIX. Reprinted by The Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art/ Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited, London, as “The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture” (1969) via Wikipedia)

Maybe I don’t see the appeal of assuming a melancholic attitude because I experienced undiagnosed persistent depressive disorder for decades.

Heavy-duty antidepressants make using my brain easier these days: which is a good thing, since depression is just one of my psychiatric glitches.

I’ve talked about that, and Lent, before:

• A serious, but not despondent, season
  • “Elijah’s Cup: a Reminder, a Tradition, and a Memory” (December 7, 2024)
    • Elijah’s Cup in Context
    • Overheard While Getting Our Elijah’s Cup
      • Taking Traditions Seriously
  • “Making a Cross From Four Palm Fronds” (April 3, 2023)
    • Lanyards and a Video
  • “Lent 2023: Prayer and Prepping For Easter” (February 22, 2023)
    • Lent: Pointing Myself Towards God
      • Original Sin: Living With Consequences
        • Wounded, But Still Basically Good
      • The Bible, Very Briefly
      • Goals: Short- and Long-Term
        • Simple, Yes; Easy, No
• Fashionable or not, melancholia isn’t healthy
  • “Saints, Depression, Assumptions, and Me” (March 23, 2024)
    • Dealing With Depression — and Suicide
      • Depression, Faith, and Making Decisions
    • Assorted Saints
    • Poverty, Terminal Illness, and Ham Sandwiches
    • Doing My Daily Prayers
  • “Pandemic Perspectives” (March 31, 2020)
    • Mindsets and Medicine
      • Hippocrates and Monastic Research
      • Humorism and Varro’s Animalculae
  • “Wanting Truth” (October 22, 2017)
    • Fashionable Melancholy

¹ A few resources, and a quick definition:

• USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)
  • Lenten Prayer Resources
  • “10 Things to Remember During Lent” (2018)
    Bishop David L. Ricken

“What is Lent?“
Wednesday, February 18, 2026 – Thursday, April 2, 2026
USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops)

“Lent is a 40 day season of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving that begins on Ash Wednesday and ends at sundown on Holy Thursday. It’s a period of preparation to celebrate the Lord’s Resurrection at Easter. During Lent, we seek the Lord in prayer by reading Sacred Scripture; we serve by giving alms; and we practice self-control through fasting. We are called not only to abstain from luxuries during Lent, but to a true inner conversion of heart as we seek to follow Christ’s will more faithfully. We recall the waters of baptism in which we were also baptized into Christ’s death, died to sin and evil, and began new life in Christ….”
[emphasis mine]

² It’s complicated, and I haven’t backtracked all of what happened:

• Wikipedia
  • Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (AKA DSM, I don’t know why it’s not DSMMD)
  • Dysthymia (AKA persistent depressive disorder, dysthymic disorder: sort of like major depressive disorder, only different; and definitely not fun)
  • Four temperaments (Humoral theory applied to psychology; Greco-Roman ideas, now part of pop psychology)
    • History
  • Humorism (AKA humoral theory, humoralism)
    • Black bile
  • Major depressive disorder (AKA clinical depression)
  • Melancholia
    • English cultural movement
  • Marsilio Ficino (Catholic priest and Neoplatonist, yes; aligned with Catholic beliefs, no)
• Marsilio Ficino (First published Thursday June 9, 2011; substantive revision Tuesday May 28, 2024)
  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• “The Golden Age of Melancholy” (2023)
  The Library, Royal Society of Medicine, London