I'm hungry for some structure this Lent.
I'm also hungry because I'm fasting, even though it is only 12:58 PM on a Wednesday.
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Happy Lent, I’m going Catholic-mode this year.
Growing up, Lent was a funny religious moment of the year. Though I come from a family who did attend the Holy Days of Obligation, we didn’t go much harder than that in general. No fasting that I can remember and only loose commitment to meatless Fridays (though my dad seized the opportunity to pick up fried catfish on occasion). Mostly it was a time where I got to pick something to be performatively virtuous about (forgoing candy, for example, despite living in a house where we almost never had candy) and pretend to be mysteriously pious at elementary school with my smudged forehead on Ash Wednesday.
This year, following the lead of Sarah Coakley and her belief in the power of ascetic practices, I’m going to take it a little more seriously. I doubt I’ll make it to an Ash Wednesday service today, but I am fasting, will fast on Good Friday, and will observe a simpler diet on Fridays.
I’m also going to do something I’ve never done before, something I had never even considered doing growing up. This Lent, I’m going to read from the Bible.
Outside of my classwork, I’m workshopping a paper on the Song of Songs and queer love relationships, so I’ll take the season to work my way through that book, practice some Lectio Divina (meditating on words), and see what comes up. I’ll share some of that here, I’m sure.
Finally, I’m going to show up for myself in this place, with y’all. Avoidance is a favorite tactic when I have goals that I really care about and somehow since last summer I’ve let this work fall prey to that. There are a lot of reasons, but none of them are all that good, so I won’t bore you.
However, I am (once again) pointing out my lapses and announcing my commitment because: (1) I’m associating that commitment to Lent, to a religious commitment, and (2) I have a question (or three…) for you.
Is two emails a week too much? I’m definitely going to start it up, but I want to give you a way to opt out of these second emails. If you are not interested, you should definitely respond to the survey, because I will filter you out of those emails based on your response. If you are interested, I’d still love if you could fill out the survey, but it’s less important.
The plan is to let my Sunday email be more personal and journalistic, a response to what I’ve been reflecting on and experiencing in my spiritual practices each week. If that’s not of interest to you, my feelings won’t be hurt. But if you are interested, I hope those blogs will be especially conversational. I’d love to get responses and continue the conversation in our inboxes. Of course, you can be a passive voyeur, that’s one of my favorite things to do, but if you feel inspired to weigh in, I’ll be grateful.
To kick us off with something a little more interesting than my navel-gazing ramble, I wanted to share a quote I came across recently from the theologian Paul Tillich in Theology of Culture.
Religion is the aspect of depth in the totality of the human spirit … You cannot reject religion with ultimate seriousness, because ultimate seriousness, or the state of being ultimately concerned, is itself religion. Religion is the substance, the ground, and the depth of man’s spiritual life. This is the religious aspect of the human spirit. (pgs. 7-8)
This hit me, because it speaks to why I have been feeling more and more like the accurate way to describe my basic stance is “religious but not spiritual” as opposed to the much more common and (in my opinion) overhyped spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR).
I am not “not spiritual” and I’m certainly not anti-spiritual, but I think spirituality is something much harder to get at than we portray. While we often associate spirituality today with an openness to God, to god, to goddess, to Spirit, to crystals and astrology and signs from the Universe, I think these are, more often than not, oversimplified symbols than they are markers of spiritual experience or depth. I think spirituality is something different. To be spiritual, by my definition, is to be in conversation with the fruits of religion.
Crucially, I do not think this must be organized religion, which is why I appreciate Tillich’s definition of the religious so much. Spirituality is a fruit of allowing oneself to be religiously sincere about life, about almost any part of life. Far more artists who take their work seriously, treating it with “ultimate concern,” seem to me to be in touch with the spiritual than do many “very online Christians” who can quote scripture or describe the Catechism but who don’t find ways to be rooted in the world beyond their comfort zones. This is a problem.
Finding the means to be earnest, to be ultimately concerned and not (only) jaded or harsh is an urgent need today. And it can’t be achieved just by deciding to do it, it cannot be casually developed. This pseudo-depth is the kind of spiritual bypass that is frequently on offer by “spiritual types” who want you to buy something from them. This is a brittle way. No, the kind of religious concern and depth that I’m talking about builds like a strong relationship, slowly and with intention.
Without a means to develop this deep stance in ourselves I don’t know how we can be sustained through the hardest times. I don’t know how we bridge gaps if we don’t have shared experiences of depth, of earnest connection.
Many examples of organized religion are great ways to develop a relationship with the spiritual and they often offer specific benefits (in-built community, mentorship, tradition), but they aren’t the only way. Its important to understand this, because it does not seem realistic to expect these fraught institutions to shoulder the burden of demonstrating the value of “being religious” today. They work for some, but the Church (and its organizational foils everywhere) has done too much damage to be the one and only fountain of grace today. So, where is grace for the rest of us?
We’ll call this a taster for how the next forty days or so will be and how things will feel going forward after Easter now that I’ll be back in my consistent schedule. Next week I’ll move past the hypothetical and try to share some interesting examples of this kind of depth and religious stance I’m talking about, specifically examples that have less of the baggage of traditional organized religion.
P.S. If you expressed interest in Sunday reflections above, the first post will go out this week! Look out for it in your inbox <3
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.