Give Up Unnecessary Things

All week, I have been haunted by a “Monday in Holy Week” journal entry from The Duty of Delight, a collection of Dorothy Day’s journals. Allow me to quote her at some length:

Not that we must not do our share too in generous sowing. Especially of all unnecessary things … food and clothing we need … But people are horrified at the idea of giving up cigarettes, candy, liquor, movies, radio, newspapers—and all these things are so unnecessary. Without them we would be so rich, our family life would be so full. We deprive ourselves of so much in order to have these anodynes, these means of forgetfulness. When we should be sitting down and meditating in our heart on the richness and glory and generosity of God.

Day’s sundry list of “unnecessary things” calls to mind, for me, exactly what I am so resistant to giving up each time Advent and Lent return: cigarettes, candy, liquor, movies, radio, newspapers. For each of us, the list is different—mine might be something like chocolate, social media, music, podcasts, coffee—but all of us have a list of unnecessary things to which we are unduly attached. And all of these lists signal the same impulse to find hope (or rest, peace, joy, forgetfulness, pleasure, healing, etc.) in something that is not God.

Possessing unnecessary things is, of course, not necessary for me to live, or love others, or honor God. But when opportunities arrive to do without them for the sake of drawing closer to God, I find there is a snatching movement my soul makes to clamp down on and claim whatever I’ve proposed to give up. Perhaps you can relate. It would seem that some part of me wants to believe I will die if I give up the things I want—the things I act like I need, even if I understand that I don’t need them—so that I can proclaim them necessary and carry on my merry, distracted, unexamined way.

But the part of Day’s entry that haunts me most is this: We deprive ourselves of so much in order to have these anodynes, these means of forgetfulness.

Because she’s right, isn’t she? What more are our pet dependencies than ways to forget some part of the present moment we are desperate to avoid? And what do they give us, really? We cling to these things; we willfully fail in our fast, or pick up our stale, bad habits; and every time, our familiar anodynes deprive us of what we might have seen or heard or known in the openness their absence could have made. What does an afternoon spent scrolling social media or watching Netflix episodes back to back give me, other than a mild headache, exhausted eyes, and a scattered, overstimulated mind?

Perhaps I have given up listening to podcasts and music while I do chores for Advent. If I listen to them one night, simply because there are so many dishes to do today, and it’s going to take a while, and I want to be distracted from my task, I am deprived of my opportunity to receive the task itself—however mundane, boring, or even disgusting it might be—as a gift. The necessity of doing the dishes each night is, after all, a way to practice an embodied knowledge that I am tied to the physical implements by which I am fed; that my body remains dependent for its health on physical matter, on soil and sunshine and rain, on food. By running away from the task in my mind via the distraction of unnecessary noise, I will have lost an opportunity to receive this humility.

I will have also lost the hour of silence that might have bloomed in the relative quiet, a silence in which God might have made His nearness known.

Silence is difficult for us, even painful. We know that, having offered our silence to God, we may not find His arrival to our liking. He might visit us with tenderness and peace and intimate comfort—yes. But we might do all the work to settle into silence only to find Him . . . quieter than we want Him to be. Or He might seem absent. Or we might find Him confrontational, a Presence challenging us to examine our behavior and acknowledge our sin. We might even find He arrives with an encompassing, accepting love that simply holds us, a love we do not understand and are surprised to find we do not want—and then be called, by the silence, to examine our impulse to refuse the Lover of our souls.

By willfully surrendering our anodynes so we might enter God’s silence more fully, we make ourselves accountable to accept reality as He offers it, not as we might wish to find it or think it ought to be. So much of the challenge of our fast lies here, in this unremitting accountability it calls us to accept.

As we press into the third week of Advent, Christ beckons us from the silence of our fast. He calls us to enter that silence even more deeply and receive it as a gift, whether or not it opens the way we hoped it would. As we enter that silence, even if it is painful in some way, we may discover in its expanse textures we did not know how to hope for when fear gripped us at its edge. The pale rush of highway traffic a half mile away; the call of an owl; our own breathing, or the breathing of the people we love. Perhaps, as we become more patient with it, this silence will become beautiful to us—a source of peace, a delicious nourishment for our souls.

Christmas is coming, and soon. Our task is to prepare for its arrival by surrendering unnecessary things, these alluring implements of willful forgetfulness, that we might deepen instead into the silence that opens in their wake.