The Temptation to Be Less
Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? ~ Isaiah 58:5-6 NRSV
I have had a fascination with Russian Orthodox spirituality for years. I am drawn to the practice of hesychasm: mystical, silent and still prayer that allows one to have an intimate experience of God. This is a practice that is available to anyone, regardless of class or position in a societal or church hierarchy. But, through my study of Christian history, as well as the history of the Russian autocracy, I've come to realize something problematic about this practice. Orthodox Christians under Peter the Great were to be taught obedience to their emperor, and consequently the focus on sin became personal rather than communal. Devout Orthodox Christians who were silently praying and preoccupied with their own sins were not a threat to the status quo.
Lent is similarly a time that has become focused on personal sin. We decide to give up things like sweets and Twitter in the hopes that it will make us better individually. I'm starting to realize this is a way in which Christians miss the forest for the trees.
My personal Lenten practice this year has been to fast from social media. I haven't completely cut it out from my life, because I still use it in order to post church business (such as live streaming Sunday services). However, I'm wondering if this is actually a practice that is helping to bring about the Kingdom of God. While I spend time in prayer and spiritual reading, which of course are great things to do, if I put up a wall between myself and the world while I'm doing it and don't pay attention to the things happening outside of my personal piety, what good does that really do?
I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about this temptation to make ourselves less. Lent pushes fasting and abstinence - we restrict ourselves from things that ordinarily bring us pleasure. While there can be some benefit to this, causing us to look at things other than our own personal comfort, it is way too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that self denial brings about superior spirituality. I think this may be a holdover from the early days of Christianity's association with Greek philosophy and dualism, in which the spirit and body were separate things, spirit being good and body being bad. That doesn't sound like God's intent for creation in the beginning: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gn 1:31 NRSV).
The temptation to be less has caused fasting to start to look like another diet fad. I downloaded a Bible app to my phone this Lent to help me in spending more time on scripture and less on Facebook, and I'm a little disturbed by how many fasting-centered Bible reading plans there are on this app that 1: look like advertising for a new diet, and 2: look like they're geared toward women in particular. As a feminist I'm particularly angered by patriarchal attempts to use scripture to subjugate women. One of the leaders of a women's social media movement in the Episcopal Church that I follow, Her Way of Love, wrote a reflection on fasting at the start of this Lent that keeps coming up in my mind.
I'm open to fasting that is done with the intention to take the money that would have been spent on a meal and donate it to a feeding ministry. It deeply troubles me, though, that fasting may become a punishment for having a body and believing it to be sinful.
We already do enough to deprive our bodies. We hear too many voices telling us we should be ashamed of our bodies. That we should change them. That it's wrong to have a body that hungers, thirsts, desires.
Women hear so many damaging messages; and I know I, for one, have internalized them in ways I'm just beginning to understand... Our flesh is where God lives... Jesus came into human flesh to embody divine love, to enter into the beauty and pain of the life we know, and to call us home to our belovedness. Now, we are the incarnation of God's love on earth.
At my current place on my spiritual journey, I'm looking for spiritual practices that honor incarnation and nurture appreciation for this body that enables me to live as God's heart, hands, and voice in this world. (Rev. Kay M. Houck)
How can I take on a practice to appreciate my role as God's voice in this world, if I choose not to use that voice? Quietness and stillness are important to hear the voice of God in one's life, but I feel like there's also a point where God wants us to quit sitting there and get moving, start speaking up!
In the Daily Offices of the Episcopal church, we say a confession of sin right at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer. We not only confess that "we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed" but also in "what we have left undone". I think maybe one of the biggest temptations many of us face is to beat ourselves up for something little we may have done, while not realizing that we have neglected to do something even more important. I don't think God is nearly as bothered by our swearing or "impure thoughts" as much as by our indifference to the suffering of others. Instead of fasting from things that make us happy, as if happiness were something bad, maybe we can start to fast from apathy. I know, it kind of sounds like a double negative - "not not caring". But that is the paradoxical kind of fast that the prophet Isaiah refers to in the opening passage - a fast that is action-oriented, and the only "less" involved is the lessening of oppression and injustice.
I have had a fascination with Russian Orthodox spirituality for years. I am drawn to the practice of hesychasm: mystical, silent and still prayer that allows one to have an intimate experience of God. This is a practice that is available to anyone, regardless of class or position in a societal or church hierarchy. But, through my study of Christian history, as well as the history of the Russian autocracy, I've come to realize something problematic about this practice. Orthodox Christians under Peter the Great were to be taught obedience to their emperor, and consequently the focus on sin became personal rather than communal. Devout Orthodox Christians who were silently praying and preoccupied with their own sins were not a threat to the status quo.
Lent is similarly a time that has become focused on personal sin. We decide to give up things like sweets and Twitter in the hopes that it will make us better individually. I'm starting to realize this is a way in which Christians miss the forest for the trees.
My personal Lenten practice this year has been to fast from social media. I haven't completely cut it out from my life, because I still use it in order to post church business (such as live streaming Sunday services). However, I'm wondering if this is actually a practice that is helping to bring about the Kingdom of God. While I spend time in prayer and spiritual reading, which of course are great things to do, if I put up a wall between myself and the world while I'm doing it and don't pay attention to the things happening outside of my personal piety, what good does that really do?
I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about this temptation to make ourselves less. Lent pushes fasting and abstinence - we restrict ourselves from things that ordinarily bring us pleasure. While there can be some benefit to this, causing us to look at things other than our own personal comfort, it is way too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that self denial brings about superior spirituality. I think this may be a holdover from the early days of Christianity's association with Greek philosophy and dualism, in which the spirit and body were separate things, spirit being good and body being bad. That doesn't sound like God's intent for creation in the beginning: "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good" (Gn 1:31 NRSV).
The temptation to be less has caused fasting to start to look like another diet fad. I downloaded a Bible app to my phone this Lent to help me in spending more time on scripture and less on Facebook, and I'm a little disturbed by how many fasting-centered Bible reading plans there are on this app that 1: look like advertising for a new diet, and 2: look like they're geared toward women in particular. As a feminist I'm particularly angered by patriarchal attempts to use scripture to subjugate women. One of the leaders of a women's social media movement in the Episcopal Church that I follow, Her Way of Love, wrote a reflection on fasting at the start of this Lent that keeps coming up in my mind.
I'm open to fasting that is done with the intention to take the money that would have been spent on a meal and donate it to a feeding ministry. It deeply troubles me, though, that fasting may become a punishment for having a body and believing it to be sinful.
We already do enough to deprive our bodies. We hear too many voices telling us we should be ashamed of our bodies. That we should change them. That it's wrong to have a body that hungers, thirsts, desires.
Women hear so many damaging messages; and I know I, for one, have internalized them in ways I'm just beginning to understand... Our flesh is where God lives... Jesus came into human flesh to embody divine love, to enter into the beauty and pain of the life we know, and to call us home to our belovedness. Now, we are the incarnation of God's love on earth.
At my current place on my spiritual journey, I'm looking for spiritual practices that honor incarnation and nurture appreciation for this body that enables me to live as God's heart, hands, and voice in this world. (Rev. Kay M. Houck)
How can I take on a practice to appreciate my role as God's voice in this world, if I choose not to use that voice? Quietness and stillness are important to hear the voice of God in one's life, but I feel like there's also a point where God wants us to quit sitting there and get moving, start speaking up!
Some of the fasting-centered Bible reading plans on the YouVersion Bible app. Does God really want us to be less?
In addition to this temptation to be less, there's a temptation to believe that pleasure is inherently bad. As Rev. Kay said, we hear too many voices telling us to be ashamed. I don't think this is only applicable to bodily pleasures though.
I read a passage in a Lenten devotional on pilgrimage that highlights this. "I remember a parishioner who was deciding how she would observe Lent. What should she give up - should she fast, or maybe start volunteering at the soup kitchen? Her husband had died weeks before her visit to me, and she had spent the previous year as a caregiver. I told her that it sounded like Lent for her might best be observed by giving herself a break - to rest and allow God to love her." (from Are we there yet?: Pilgrimage in the Season of Lent)
This hit home for me, as a member of a congregation that has experienced a lot of loss in recent years. On Ash Wednesday, our priest told us in her sermon that we already know grief so well, that this Lent may be a time for us to look for joy and wonder in our lives as "Christ's own forever" rather than bewailing our sins and contemplating mortality. After all, we know all too well how mortal we are at this point.
I know that for me, it's taken years to unlearn the concepts of self-denial and punishment in this life in order to prepare for joy in the next. I don't believe this world was meant to be a training ground or a test to see if we are worthy for another. That doesn't mean that I don't believe there is another world beyond this one, by the way; it just means that I think we do ourselves and God a great disservice by not allowing ourselves to experience joy in this one. For me, maybe this social media fast I'm on can be changed to only allowing myself to post things that center on joy and love, the good news that God calls us to spread. And it could also look like setting a limit on how much time I spend looking at news feeds, especially when things begin to look dark. When I see too many things on social media that make me angry, or afraid, or cynical about the state of the world, it tempts me to despair. That is the kind of social media use I want to give up. But I can't go completely in the other direction and ignore the world either. In spite of centuries of Christian hermits and monastic orders striving to shut out the world in order to practice their spirituality, the need to engage with this world has only gotten greater.
I look to the example of Jesus, who would indeed go away into lonely places and pray, and would then reemerge to minister to those who needed him. We all need to replenish ourselves from time to time before we can be any good to anyone else. The thing that I think I need to remember, from a personal perspective, is that my voice does matter. I can be tempted to be less, to not speak up because my voice might seem like another "noisy gong or clanging cymbal" (1 Cor 13:1). But that, I believe, is temptation coming from the enemy. To not use one's voice to spread the light and love of God is not an example of pious silence.
I look to the example of Jesus, who would indeed go away into lonely places and pray, and would then reemerge to minister to those who needed him. We all need to replenish ourselves from time to time before we can be any good to anyone else. The thing that I think I need to remember, from a personal perspective, is that my voice does matter. I can be tempted to be less, to not speak up because my voice might seem like another "noisy gong or clanging cymbal" (1 Cor 13:1). But that, I believe, is temptation coming from the enemy. To not use one's voice to spread the light and love of God is not an example of pious silence.
To be sure, we need to learn to empty ourselves of selfish desires in order to live a life like Jesus did. We need to learn to give up our self-centered lives of privilege in order that all can experience joy and have enough to live on. This is more of a communal focus on self-emptying, rather than a personal one. A communal focus on sin, rather than a personal one, causes us to work to dismantle oppressive structures rather than berating ourselves for having desires and pleasures.
In the Daily Offices of the Episcopal church, we say a confession of sin right at the beginning of Morning and Evening Prayer. We not only confess that "we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed" but also in "what we have left undone". I think maybe one of the biggest temptations many of us face is to beat ourselves up for something little we may have done, while not realizing that we have neglected to do something even more important. I don't think God is nearly as bothered by our swearing or "impure thoughts" as much as by our indifference to the suffering of others. Instead of fasting from things that make us happy, as if happiness were something bad, maybe we can start to fast from apathy. I know, it kind of sounds like a double negative - "not not caring". But that is the paradoxical kind of fast that the prophet Isaiah refers to in the opening passage - a fast that is action-oriented, and the only "less" involved is the lessening of oppression and injustice.
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