Lenten purity: it isn’t what you were told

Mark Shrime, MD, PhD
5 min readFeb 14, 2024

Lent begins today, a season in the Christian calendar dedicated to purification and to preparation for Easter. As one church describes the season on their website: “Year after year, the Church wisely offers a specific time for purifying our innermost desires.”

Because “purifying our innermost desires” sounds…vaguely sexual, it’s got me thinking about what purification means.

A few months ago, I ended a blog post by paraphrasing James 1:27. I wrote: “True Christianity, as [Jesus’s] brother wrote, is this: to care for those at the margins.”

Predictably, some folks were big mad that I didn’t quote the entire verse.

GMail’s suggested responses are the best.

If you’re familiar with James 1:27, you know there’s a tiny bit of merit to that accusation—it’s true that I stopped before the end. The complete injunction from Jesus’s brother reads:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

By focusing on the first requirement — looking after the marginalized in their distress — the angry email man seems to imply that I’m intentionally downplaying an important call to purity, to righteousness.

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Mark Shrime, MD, PhD

Author, SOLVING FOR WHY | Global surgeon | Decision analyst | Climber | 3x American Ninja Warrior Competitor