😇 Lent 1
Readings: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7; Psalm 32; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11
From the TRNG Room:
Central Thesis/Theme:
Lent is not meant to be a season of self-punishment or performative deprivation — it's a season of discernment. I argue that the tradition of fasting and penitence has been co-opted by cultural pressures that actively harm people, particularly women navigating body image and veterans carrying unprocessed moral injury. The real call of Lent is to quiet the noise, listen to the still voice within, and stop giving up on yourself.
Key Textual/Historical Insights:
The Greek word at the center of this episode is diakrisis — discernment — which I argue is a far better translation for what the Genesis text calls "the tree of knowledge." The Greek supports tree of discernment, not mere information-acquisition. I also note that the woman in Genesis — named Zoe (Life) in the Septuagint — is already exercising discernment before she eats the fruit. The eating itself produces an epistemic shift, not a moral one, because the knowledge was already present within her.
Theological Argument:
The original sin belongs to the serpent, not the woman. The serpent, uncomfortable with its own cunning, pulled humanity into self-awareness prematurely. Eve's act was not rebellion — she was already doing what the fruit was supposed to unlock. This reading challenges the traditional framing of the Fall as human hubris and reframes it as a failure of the serpent's discernment. I tie this to the broader biblical pattern: humanity is not the problem; the misuse of power over humanity is.
Contemporary Application:
For veterans, Lent's call to catharsis is not just relevant — it's urgent and largely unmet. We've been told for generations to shut up, drive on, and leave our experiences in the past. I'm calling that out as a failure of community, not a virtue of discipline. Similarly, the industrialization of knowledge — paywalled academia, credentialism, AI scraping — mirrors the same dynamic as eating the apple without the wisdom. Discernment can't be purchased or downloaded. This Lent, I'm giving up giving up on myself, and I'm inviting you to do the same.
Questions Raised:
How do we distinguish healthy penitential practice from self-harm disguised as spiritual discipline?
If Eve was already discerning before eating the fruit, what does that tell us about innocence and moral culpability?
What does it mean for a community to "bear moral weight" — and who in your life is actually doing that for you?
Is the industrialization of knowledge — academia, AI, credentialism — the modern equivalent of the serpent's move in Genesis?
What would it look like for veterans to have genuine catharsis, rather than simply retelling trauma?
Reflection:
Good morning and welcome to Lent 1, Year A. This is Brother Logan Isaac broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon. We are late again — I'm trying to get ahead of myself and put these out before the Sundays they're due. Our readings come from Genesis 2, Psalm 32, Romans 5, and Matthew 4.
Lent is the opening of the major penitential season in the Christian tradition. Penitence and self-reflection are important. Sadness is a primary emotion, and it makes sense that the historic tradition of Christianity has preserved these practices. But they can also become so ingrained that we forget what they're for — or we use them in ways that hurt people, and sometimes hurt ourselves.
I owe that realization to Lauren Winner. Lauren Winner taught American Christianity at Duke, and I was one of her teaching assistants — we called them preceptors. I didn't take her classes as a student, but she had this practice that a lot of students really appreciated, particularly the women. She would point out that Lent and purging have a lot of difficult overlaps with eating disorders. So in her classes — and I think other professors picked it up from her — she would encourage female students: for Lent, why don't you give up giving up on yourself? Why don't you give up chocolate only if fasting is actually sharpening your mind and soul? Lent is supposed to help us process grief, sharpen our psyches. But that tradition has become confused because it hasn't accounted for the contemporary realities within which it is situated. If you're a woman being told to give up chocolate for Lent, to get into a no-carb diet, while you're already told all year exactly how your body is supposed to look — Lent is not a healthy season for you.
I say that because, as a veteran, this is the first Lent where I'm saying: no, I'm not doing that. I believe Lent is meant to produce catharsis — to bring emotions to the surface so we can exercise the demons in our own psyche, our own soul. Veterans don't get catharsis. We don't get to sit in a movie theater and re-experience emotion through someone else's story. Reliving your own trauma is just reliving it.
I remember hearing early on — at a Hawaiian Islands Ministry conference when I was living on Oahu — that as a veteran processing trauma, you should retell the event, not relive it. I wrote Reborn on the 4th of July — you can find it at pewpewhq.com/merch — but I wrote about my time in Iraq without having properly experienced catharsis. I wrote that book after going back to Iraq as a civilian and having an absolutely terrible time — being exploited, having my voice extracted and monetized for someone else's platform, someone else's audience, someone else's flock.
So this Lent, if you're a veteran: maybe don't self-deprecate. Maybe give up giving up on yourself. If you need permission to not subject your soul to the civilian gaze, consider this permission offered. We've been telling soldiers since World War I: whatever happened over there, don't tell us. Come home, find a job, put money in a bank account, and die without having shared the true moral weight of what you experienced. And we did it again in World War II, again in Vietnam, again in every war of convenience since. Shut up and drive on. Cut that part off from yourself and leave it in the past.
I've heard so many veterans tell me that it's in the past, that they've worked through it. The fact that you're telling me you've worked through it tells me you're still working through it — you just haven't found the community that can bear that moral weight. That's my diagnostic of myself and other veterans. Grunt Works and The Fighting Word — I'm doing this for myself. I've learned not to be beholden to others who are not holding me in return. I trusted a lot of people more than they trusted me, and that was a red flag. If you want to know more, go to pewpew.ghost.io — that's my e-newsletter. I'm also writing about it at gijustice.com/blog. It's been twenty years since I got out of the military and took my first stand when I could have just rolled over.
Our protests didn't work. Our picket signs didn't work. We are still engaging in wars of convenience, and the culture wars that have been raging for decades are still going. We live in a land of unclean lips, because truth does not exist in much of what we say publicly. If you need permission this Lent to stop giving up — to give up giving up on yourself — here it is. Fasting is about sharpening your own mind, soul, and body. It's about realigning what's going on in your head with what your body has experienced. If Lent isn't doing that, don't do whatever people are calling Lent. Call it something else. Call it self-care. Do something to get out of those cycles that untrustworthy people keep putting you in.
Now, a bit about the translation — I meant to talk about scripture and haven't been. I'm clearly getting more confident in my own interpretive abilities, and I've been taking more systematic moves in my hermeneutic. I won't get into all of them here, but I did write an essay specifically for this episode and posted it at pewpewhq.com/tng — the Training Room, which is the blog for Grunt Works. It talks about why "the tree of knowledge" may not be the best English rendering for a modern audience.
I use instead "the tree of discernment." The Greek word diakrisis — which the text actually supports — is not the same as what we in the modern capitalistic West mean by "knowledge." We think of knowledge as something you can acquire through books, just hoover it all up. That's essentially what large language models do: scrape all the language you can find and apply a logic machine to it. That's not knowledge. That's episteme — your invisible theoretical framework before it's been lived out. It's not techne either — the artisanal craft, like a potter. You can learn pottery from books, then you can learn pottery from doing, and then you combine the two. That integration is what phronesis — practical wisdom — looks like. That's what Lent is supposed to produce. It's supposed to slow down the stupid voices in your head, stop eating, stop the noise, focus — concentrate on that one still voice. We call it conscience. We call it God. We call it the universe. It's a symbol pointing to something real that we experience in our minds, our consciousness. Listen to it.
But to listen to it, you have to quiet all the peripheral, insecurity-driven, validation-seeking voices. Discernment is what I think the Bible as a whole is calling us toward. It was the original temptation: if we can discern, we are somehow like God, with no one above us. It's a failure of discernment to think we are our own creators — but it's also a failure of discernment to want more than we need, to be dissatisfied with our category as humans. We have everything. What more could we possibly want to be than what we already are?
As I point out in the essay, Eve — in the Greek, her name is Zoe, meaning Life — is already discerning before she eats the apple. A close reader will notice that the terms and structure of the story indicate that discernment is already inside her. The serpent merely brought it right in front of her face. The eating itself produces an epistemic awareness, not a moral transformation, because she was already doing the discerning. She was already exercising knowledge. Innocence isn't purity of mind — it's plausible deniability. Perfect purity doesn't exist in Aristotelian terms; it's an idea, a theory. There's no perfect cube or perfect sphere. We cannot cease being ourselves.
What Genesis tells us about humanity is that we are the best of creation. What do we do with that? Do we become entitled and think we are God — or do we take it as a responsibility and use our power humbly, confidently, in service? Eisenhower saw the problem in 1961: the military wasn't the problem. The industrialization of the military was the problem. The same goes for current academia — the industrialization of knowledge, the paywalling of awareness, making people pay tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper. We are the best. If you believe that — what does that move you to do? Is it a reach toward power, or a reminder of responsibility?
You can read the current lectionary translations at pewpewhq.com/tfw. I'm putting more time into these and building them over time into a lectionary that we can use as a community — a body of work that hasn't been filtered through the biases people have built up just to get ahead of their neighbor.
