Life, we come to understand, is not only about joy. It is about the power to endure what is not joyful as well.

I remember quite clearly the day in grade school when my teacher put a large box on the corner of her desk and posters of starving children around the room. Lent was coming, she explained to us. We should give up candy and put the candy money we saved in the box for the missions. These were the poster children we should be sacrificing to save.

It was a child’s catechetical exercise, yes, but it carried with it spiritual messages enough to last for a lifetime. Clearly, we were being put on notice. There were things in life, other people in life, for which each of us was responsible, however young we were and whether we had any association with them or not. There were things in life so important, it seemed, that we would need to give up some things for ourselves in order to take care of the needs of others. And it all had something to do with God.

When you’re young, the act of giving something up for Lent is an epochal moment. It involves a complete revaluation of what it means to be human. If life is not about permanent and continual self-satisfaction, what is it about? And why? How is it that the notion of bridling the self can be as important as satisfying the self?

Over the centuries, thanks to a better appreciation of both the body and the material world, religious figures have been careful to curb the excesses of asceticism. The starving, wild-eyed holy man is a figure of the past now. But the notion that self-control is an essential part of the spiritual life is a basic one. What’s more, it is also a psychologically healthy one as well.

Athletes practice asceticism to achieve physical development and somatic control. They give up food and time and physical comfort to conquer mountains and swim channels and win athletic competitions. Spiritual seekers do the same things, but they do them for a different reason. Their goal is to conquer themselves and develop their souls.

There is nothing passive about asceticism. It is the active giving of the self—physical and spiritual—in order to concentrate the soul, viselike, on the center of life rather than on its peripherals.The ascetic knows that to become what we can become spiritually, some things—even good things, perhaps—must be forgone. It is not that good things must be forsaken; it is that they must be indulged in with balance. The Talmud says that “If a person has the opportunity to taste a new fruit and refuses to do so, he will have to account for that in the next world.” The ascetic lives with the spiritual awareness that choosing between the good and the better is the discipline that makes us the best of what we set out to be. Asceticism is not about giving things up for their own sake. It is as much about achieving more life—another kind of life—as it is about giving it up.

—from The Liturgical Year by Joan Chittister (Thomas Nelson)