Deliver Us from Our Comforts: Lent Beyond Bourgeois Disciplines

By David Dault

A lot of us believers tend to look at Lent like it's an exhibition of spiritual bench-pressing. Like it's the redux of failed New Year's resolutions, giving us a second chance to prove that this time, we'll be faithful and true. We wake in the morning and gird our loins to look into the mirror and admit that we are small, that we are weak, and that we are wholly undeserving of the cosmic attaboy we so desperately want.

We live in a neoliberal world, where merit and hard work are counted as the deciding factors for the kind of success we mistake for grace.

In contrast to this logic, Lent is about our weakness, and weakness breeds contempt.

So the answer is to redouble the macho bravado that lies at the heart of all market solutions. We gotta do more, gotta be more. Whether it's the Axe Body Spray of righteousness or the benzoyl peroxide of scrupulosity, we grab for anything in the cabinet to cover the gaping maw of our insecurity.

That brings me, of course, to the Epistle to the Ephesians.

"Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil," is that most favorite of well-handled phrases. It's perfectly tailored to a neoliberal sensibility: Lent is a struggle. It's either a struggle against the world, or against the devil, or against yourself. Either way, you have to choose a side - and the way you show which side you have chosen comes down to your choice of outfit.

My co-religionists who confuse righteousness for self-righteousness revel in this language of struggle. Lent is for them the great proving ground, a parade field of barely disguised Pelagian fantasies.

It has given me pause, more than once, that this oft-quoted section of Ephesians comes just a moment after another oft-quoted verse in our history. Namely, that part where we are told that slaves should "be obedient to your human masters with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ."

It was fashionable back in the day, as it is in some corners of our faith today, to trot out this verse as a justification for all manner of human horror. The notion that chattel slavery was not only approved by God but in fact desired by God, has grabbed the face of our nation like a toothache, the wince in the smile drawing attention to the rot inside.

That the breastplate of self-righteousness should sit so close to the slaver's whip in our holy book should come up in conversation more than it does. But Lent seems like as good a time as any.

I'm reminded that, back in the last years of the eighteenth century, the old Quaker John Woolman started dressing in grey. It seemed odd at first, but then those around him began to realize it was a discipline. In season, out of season, John showed up in his Quaker grey.

Woolman's reason should arrest our attention today. You see, one day he looked at the colorful clothes on his back and wondered, "Where does the dye come from?"

It did not take him long to realize that the barrels of dye rode the seas on the same ships that carried bondmen to the Americas. More, he realized that his vanity for colorful fashion, because of this connection, made him complicit in the death and destruction of the slave trade. So Woolman prayed about it.

And after he prayed, he began to dress in undyed clothing. Not as a fashion choice, but as a ministry.

Woolman spent years traveling up and down the Atlantic seaboard, visiting slaveholding families and reasoning with them about the danger that the practice brought to their souls. He sat with them and he preached to them across their tables and he loved them but when the sun set he would not take shelter in their homes. Instead he would go and sleep in the woods.

That's the thing about the armor of God. We expect we will cut a dashing figure, a figure that all who see us in it might admire. We expect it to be comfortable. That it will be tailored to us, and not us cut down to fit it.

A mind like Woolman's thinks differently. He realized that caring for the souls of slaveholders meant the hard labor in the fields of kitchen tables. More than this, he knew that care for the souls and the circumstances of those enslaved meant that he needed to rethink every aspect of his life, in light of solidarity.

A mind like Woolman's is a lenten mind.

Today, we're lucky if we remember to buy fair trade chocolate at the coffee shop. More than two centuries ago, by contrast, Woolman was seeing the global impact of his economic choices, and leaning into the visible display of solidarity against the transatlantic slave trade.

"If Woolman were alive today," I want to write. Because if we were to wish for a witness like his, it would be now. When so many of our comforts have unseen roots in the suffering of the world, we are perhaps hungry to see - for once - a model of Lenten discomfort undertaken for righteousness' sake, rather than self-righteousness.

What does this look like? Well, we can see the edges of it, at least. It starts with asking about the economic entanglements that enable our ease and comfort. We already know how to do that with coffee and chocolate (our demand for “fair trade” being what it is), and some of us extent that to diamonds on our jewelry and coltan in our phones.

But Lent is an invitation to prayerfully expand these bourgeois disciplines into unfamiliar territory. Solidarity with the homeless, the prisoners, and the refugees of our world might demand some visible, as well as invisible, discomforts on our part.

Again, Woolman is one model. Seek this Lent to listen to the promptings of the Spirit. Pray for visible, evangelical poverties that will bring you closer to the Lord. And when they come, embrace them as the blessings of Christ that they are.

David Dault is a columnist and editor for The Bias Magazine, focusing on the intersections of religion, law and the Left.

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