This Lent, Women Deserve Better than the Self-Love Lie

My 16 years-of-Catholic-school, prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving-engraved-to-my-prefrontal-cortex mind was taken aback when I saw a graphic online reading, This Lent, focus on self-love.

A hobby of mine is following trends in fashion, food, and culture—what’s next in working out, what’s hip in health, what’s coming in clothing. I’ll be the first to disclose the recent targeting of women, as industries conspire to blur the line just beyond health, relaxation, and the occasional treat. Women are coaxed toward excess and the non-essential and they are encouraged to overspend and overstimulate. To this muddle, markets attach an umbrella term “self-love,” and the strategy is genius.

Genius? How so?

Because without fail, every bath will lose its bubbles. Every bottle of wine has a bottom. That designer bag will soon be last season’s. The face mask rinses off; the hair dye fades; the nails grow out. Impermanence brings back customers seeking another quick fix.

But wait—there’s more. God created us intellectually and spiritually free, His first act of Love for the human race. Today’s culture—probably unknowingly—honors this gift through respect for a woman who crafts her career path or shakes up a social norm, christening her the Independent Woman. Unfortunately, this too has been muddled.

Today’s culture feeds a woman the pretty-packaged lie that only she can love herself the way she is meant to be loved through products and pampering, phone time and alone time. The “independent woman” persona has been morphed into an “isolated woman” by platforms promising empty answers to fill our deep voids. 

The self-love lie is nothing new but rather, repurposed. It is the same lie Satan used to charm Eve at The Tree: 

You don’t need these rules. You don’t need this God (Gen 3:5). You can do it on your own.

Like he did Eve, Satan seeks to isolate every woman from her God. He’s no fool; he knows exactly how to confuse her intellectual independence with enticing isolation.

Now back to that graphic. How did the Church reach this point? How did the self-love lie slink its way into Lent?

Lent is modeled after Jesus’ 40 days in the desert when He too is paid a visit from Satan. The Devil preys upon the starving, isolated Christ, attempting to seduce Him with His own power and con Him through His own Word:

You can feed yourself (Mt 4:3). You can save yourself (Mt 4:6). You don’t need the Father. You can have it all on your own. 

It is the same lie.

In the decade following the death of Christ, Saint Paul noticed the lie’s prevalence throughout the Roman Empire. The Corinthians (1 Cor 13:5), Philippians (2:3), and Romans (2:8) seemed to have this “self-love” thing down. Knowing no one focusing on self-love would seek Baptism, Paul included several exasperations regarding what love should be in his epistles.

I reflect further on peak academia, VeggieTales’ Madame Blueberry, the story of a sentient fruit who lives in a tree and suffers from shopaholism. Like so many of us, Madame Blueberry seeks the next best products and evidently has a very comfortable life. Madame Blueberry has this “self-love” thing down. However, the novelty of each purchase is fleeting; our protagonist claims she is “so blue” that she “don’t know what to do.” It is not until a disastrous interaction with scallion salesmen and losing every comfort and possession that she seeks completion in God. Finally finding permanence to fill her spiritual void, Madame Blueberry is no longer—metaphorically, of course—blue.

Our fruity friend falls into the same trap we do: the notion that we can complete ourselves through excess, impulse, or immediacy. That only we can show ourselves the love we deserve. That we can do it on our own. The same promise of happiness is flashed at us on social media and in commercials, yet the dopamine cycle always leaves us lost and “blue.”

If I could change the Internet graphic, it would read, This Lent, fix your eyes on God’s Love. The truth is, if we are to strive to live like Christ, Lent is not meant to be comfortable. In order to know God’s Love, we must empty ourselves.

There is Someone Whose love for us is so unfathomably whole that He empties, deprecates, hollows Himself in order to fill us permanently and sufficiently. This same Someone wants a relationship with us, and this Lent, amidst the flood of pretty packaging and secular suppressants, amidst the self-love lie, He awaits our conversion.