With the season of Lent upon us, we have the opportunity to reflect on Lewis’s wisdom regarding the three traditional Lenten disciplines of fasting, prayer and almsgiving – and what prompts us to undertake these obligations in the first place.

Why do we fast during Lent? We assume it ought to be a trial, something to be endured, so we ‘give up’ things we like, things we enjoy. Chocolate is the favourite choice; alcohol another. But these things that we desire, and for which during Lent we crave and wrestle with ourselves to resist, are not only things we enjoy, but also, more often than not, things we consider to be our vices. So we begin to equate enjoyment with sin. Desire itself becomes something to be avoided. We teach ourselves that, if we feel “want” for something, if we enjoy it, it must be bad for us, and therefore God would prefer us to deny our desires.

In The Weight of Glory, undoubtedly one of Lewis’ most moving addresses, Lewis helpfully turns our logic on its head and reveals to us that, far from denying our desires, we ought to be asking ourselves whether our feelings of desire are strong enough, when a far greater reward is on offer:

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

Lewis is asking us to raise our ambitions: ‘Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth … they want to convince you that earth us your home.’ But the things of this earth are only like ‘the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’

Perhaps rather than giving up chocolate, Lent can be an opportunity to lift up our eyes to the hills, as the psalmist says, to become aware of the deepest desire within us for the ultimate reward and consummation of life itself.