A Simple Lent

by Greg Kay

Back when my daughters and nieces were 1 year old’s, one of my favorite toys was stacking cups. They were plastic cups of increasing size designed to stack on top of one another making a colourful tower. But if you put them in the wrong order, they were either unstable and the top ones would crash down, or, alternatively, the bigger ones would simply encase the others. When they were successfully stacked in the right order however, I always enjoyed seeing the satisfied joy on the children’s faces, not to mention the joy on my face as they smashed the tower down like Godzilla decimating movie prop buildings. In a similar way, the health of our spirituality—the ways that we invest in our relationship with God through our whole being, mind, body, heart and spirit—is greatly impacted by what blocks we choose to lay down first. Depending on what we prioritize, our spirituality can grow strong and beautiful, or it can tip and fall over. I don’t know about you, but over the past couple of years, I feel like my spiritual tower has been constantly on the cusp of crashing over. When so much has been taken away from us leaving us isolated, anxious, fearful, sick (or afraid of sickness), many of us have sought comfort, pleasure and/or escape through thing besides God: bingeing on Netflix, Prime or other TV and movie

services; desserts and other foods, alcohol, video games and social media, etc. etc. The thing about all of these is, none of them is bad in and of themselves. In fact, many of them I think can be experienced as gifts from God to bring delight, joy and godly pleasure. It’s not having them in our lives that negatively impacts our spirituality (and therefore our whole health), but it is our relationship to them. It is the order of priority we give to them. Is our relationship to them ordered like a properly stacked tower of colourful stacking cups, or is it dis-ordered and therefore bound to cause a great crash in our lives? —and it is not a question of if the crash will happen, but when. Of course, this metaphor breaks down very quickly in the sense that, our relationship with God is not about getting everything perfectly in the correct order and doing everything “right”. That kind of approach to spirituality is equally disordered in the sense that it seeks to bring comfort through control and legalism; an equally unhealthy tower that is bound to crash in failure. No, the healthy ordering that I am talking about is not one of legalism or getting things precisely “right”, but about seeking God’s voice above all other voices; about discovering what affections we have in our lives that are keeping us from experiencing God’s loving and gracious presence; about making space for God in our lives to help us reorient our loves towards what will give us the most abundant life possible—intimacy with God. Reordering what St. Ignatius calls our “disordered affections” is about seeking the One who is love first, that we learn to find our comfort and pleasure in God, so that the rest can fall into place. In Christian spirituality there is an ancient practice called Simplicity. At the most basic level, it is about cutting out unnecessary and unhelpful excess in our lives to give proper space for God in our lives. In the past decade it has found some nonreligious trending in society, one example of which is Marie Kondo’s KonMari Method of tidying up (she’s worth googling if you haven’t heard of it).

However, as Jan Johnson writes in her book Abundant Simplicity: Discovering the Unhurried Rhythms of Grace, unlike trends of Simplicity in society, “the point of [Christian] simplicity is not efficiency, increased productivity or even living a healthier, more relaxed life. The point is making space for treasuring God’s own self… [it is an] inward reality of single-hearted focus upon God and [God’s] kingdom, which results in an outward lifestyle of modesty, openness, and unpretentiousness which disciplines our hunger for status, glamour, and luxury.” As Richard Foster writes in Celebration of Discipline, “simplicity is the only thing that sufficiently reorients our lives so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us”. This Lenten season (if you don’t know what Lent is, I’ve added a brief description at the end of this article) we will be exploring these themes together Sunday mornings as well as in Life groups and discussion groups as some of us read the devotional book 40 Days of Decrease together (if you’re interested, please go to page 10 for more information). Jesus went to the cross so that we could have abundant life, yet so often we allow these unhealthy attachments and affections to garner our devotion. Things meant for our good become hindrances to the life God wants for us when we have unhealthy relationships with them. We invite you to join us this Lent as we contemplate how the spiritual practice of simplicity can help us reorient our affections to the only One who is worthy of our devotion.

Lent is the season of the Christian year leading up to Easter weekend. It is a time of journeying with Jesus to the cross—to his death and then his resurrection. Historically it has been a season of practicing the spiritual disciplines of fasting, repentance and “almsgiving” (almsgiving is a very old word for what we today would call benevolent giving or charity—giving to those who are poor or suffering food insecurity, housing insecurity or other forms of poverty). These are practices that help focus and prepare our

hearts for the tragic and beautiful mysteries of Easter weekend. Lent is officially 40 days long, modelled after the 40 days that Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). However, because Sundays are traditionally always a ‘feast day’ where we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, Sundays are not included in the 40 days of fasting. That’s why if you count from the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday (March 2nd this year), to the last day of Lent, Holy Saturday or Black Saturday (April 16th this year), it adds up to 46 days. A helpful way of understanding the relationship between fasting and Lent (and our focus on Simplicity as well) is found in Kimberlee Conway Ireton’s The Circle of Seasons: “The point of Lent isn’t what [we] give up, or even if [we] give anything up. The point is that [we are] intentionally creating space in [our lives] for [our] relationship with God. Fasting, when done with proper motives, is an amazingly fruitful way to create that space, for it creates in us an emptiness—where there used to be something (food, a book, a TV show), now there is a blank, a hole, a space. God longs for those blank, empty places in our lives—not for the sake of emptiness, but so God can fill us with himself. If our bodies are too full of food or our lives too full of activity, we have no space for God to pour himself into us.”