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. 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.
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