American culture is actually counter-culture. Rebellion is normal here. Fitting in is square, uncool. We glorify revolution as the response to taxation without representation. With these as common ideals, it is hard to do discipline.

“I don’t want to,” seems like a complete argument.

“Who’s gonna make me,” does, too.

It makes it hard to hear the word discipline without a desire to reject it. It is our associations with authority, power, and independence that rule us.

We have so many devil’s advocates, we can’t see the irony.

What I’m trying to say is that we have a pretty tortured relationship with discipline. Those that love it, seem to love it for the wrong reasons. And so many others just hate everything about the word.

The other part of the problem is definitional.

It isn’t just that we seem to be constitutionally built to rebel. It is also that we don’t entirely get what we’re rebelling against.

What actually is discipline?

One of its most common uses is as a euphemism for corporal punishment. In these cases, to discipline is to strike a child, to enforce the rules, to teach through behavioral reinforcement.

The data is abundant and clear that this doesn’t work. But it doesn’t stop some from continuing to embrace this approach to parenting as an essential part of their tradition and culture. And perhaps this latter reason is why it is so dangerous to be a child in the US.

The other common use of the word discipline is to speak of a particular sort of obedience and rule-following most common with top-down command organizations like the military. We speak of discipline as rigid, uncompromising, and total.

In both understandings, discipline requires one who enforces discipline on others. Someone who is above the one receiving the punishment or reinforcing the rules. An overseer. A judge, commander, parent. One who never, themselves receives “discipline.”

In the church, discipline is different.

Discipline isn’t punishment. Nor is it militaristic rule-following. For Christian tradition, discipline is centered around devotion, life, and relationship!

We need to let go of the torturous and narrowed visions of discipline which prevent us from faithfully encountering God in our present moment. Visions which have us rebelling against the creative freedom of Jesus for the oppressive convenience of modern life.

In Christ, discipline is better understood as creating an opportunity in our lives for reflection, for learning, and for communing with God. It is about actively participating in our lives with intention — to be the kind of people we want to be. Not because anyone is making us, but because we’re missing out on something great when we don’t. Because the practice of study and prayer can shape our lives in the very ways we want them to.

In Lent, we come to recognize discipline as a virtue. Not in spite of pain or frustration, but because the point is the learning, the becoming, the awakening to life, to joy, to the beauty that is growing around us, below the surface, just waiting to burst through, in bloom.