For Lent, let’s give up being “spiritual”

I was raised Catholic for the first 10 years of my life – baptized in the Catholic Church, went to catechism, made my first communion, etc. Lent was a normal part of the rhythm of church life. But even as an evanglical christian, whenever spring came around, my friends and I would ask each other what we were “giving up” for Lent. It was often a favorite food or drink (wine, chocolate, soda, carbs), or a particular activity that we felt took us away from focusing on our faith (watching TV, social media, listening to secular music, etc). The idea, of course, was that we needed to discipline ourselves to spend more time reading our Bibles, praying, fellowshipping, whatever; i.e. We should be doing something that is more spiritual that what we had been doing up to that point. We also talked about how we would be relying on God/Spirit to help us overcome whatever addiction or attraction we had been feeling towards the thing we were giving up.

It all felt very godly and good.

These days, one of the first things people want to know after a faith shift or faith deconstruction is what practices they should do to stay in touch with some kind of spirituality. Meditation? Yoga? They want to know what do I do now???

It was around this time last year when I first met with my spiritual director and I asked her this exact question: WHAT DO I DO?

Her answer shocked me.

“Nothing. I want you to do nothing.”

“Don’t read your Bible, don’t pray, don’t fast, don’t listen to podcasts, don’t read any spiritual books, don’t journal, don’t think about spiritual stuff, just do nothing.”

To be honest, I was a little annoyed. I had just paid this woman $120 to tell me to do nothing. Awesome.

BUT.

I took her advice. I did nothing spiritual for the next 4 weeks. And the way it changed me shocked me again.

I hadn’t realized how much I had seen doing as a key part of my faith. All that stuff in christianity about how we don’t need to “earn” God’s favor is pretty much cancelled out by all the pressure to have a quiet time, speak kindly, teach our kids about Jesus, do Bible study, spend time in prayer, help others, serve in the church, tithe, not get angry, etc. etc. etc. When you’re full of the holy spirit, all of this should [supposedly] come naturally, but I think we all know how easy it’s NOT.

Anyway, after 4 weeks of not doing anything spiritual, I felt surprised by how SPIRITUAL I felt. Somehow, my dropping all of those things I thought I should be doing enabled me to feel even more connected to this Divine-Whatever-It-Is.

How is that possible? I wondered.

Don’t I need to be seeking?

No. It turns out, you don’t.

There is nothing, really, to be found.

Most of what we call “faith” these days, is just glorified self-improvement. Oh, we put it on “God,” but it’s basically just us trying to make ourselves into a version that seems more acceptable and palatable to others and to ourselves. It’s the christian’s form of social currency. It doesn’t feel this way when we’re in it, of course, because everything in us is sincerely desiring to know Jesus and live a life that is pleasing to Him. Unfortunately, the earnestness of our desire doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. What if the thing we’re seeking can only be discovered when we stop believing we don’t already have it?

My favorite christian mystic, Meister Eckhart*, seems to have described it like this:

If you want to be ready for
and worthy of
the Spirit of God, 
just look inside and see
your spiritual being.
Can you see
how you already resemble
what you seek?

We spend so much time seeking what/who we believe is outside of ourselves, is other than ourselves, that we don’t see we are just putting up one obstacle after another in our path to finding it, because it is IN US, it IS US.

So, for Lent, I encourage you to try doing nothing. Don’t give up anything (except maybe all of your spiritual practices)! See if you can experience and sense the Divine without actually being or doing anything “holy.” After, all, these bodies are just DUST, and to DUST we shall return, so there must be something already pretty “holy” about your pile of dust just as it is.

_{*From “Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart: Meditations for the restless soul” as translated and curated by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows}