Francis Young:

As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It can turn into a purely human striving for perfection, of the kind that once became quite dangerous for me; it was, in fact, the scourge of performative spiritual perfection that was probably the single most dangerous thing I was exposed to at university. It was the one thing that nearly took me off the rails and risked turning me into something less than human, and I am thankful every day that I ultimately escaped it. Performative perfection is the besetting sin of people who define themselves, collectively or individually, as self-consciously devout; because once you make it part of your identity, you are socially locked into maintaining devout behaviour – or at least the appearance of devout behaviour, and that’s where the danger starts.