Today’s reading is entitled “Living Lent’ and written by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton a well-known Episcopal Priest from the Manhattan area of New York. The reading is a pointed, bare confession of how the excesses of life can creep in and dominate our lives. Crafton talks of overwork and excess of appetite as creatures that we at some point realize become our motivations, we don’t control them they control us.
This spiritual diagnosis is crystal clear in our lives and a Biblical principle that we see throughout Scripture of how seemingly good things, hard work, food, entertainment can dominate our lives if we let them. She writes of what she calls the self-contempt that falls upon us as we realize that these things have come to have this dominion over us. Often we just grow callous and lament that this is just the way it is. We are controlled by stuff and we just have to live with it. This is where what Crafton calls a “collision” happens. A life event that can jolt us into the realization of our needs over and against our wants. This is an act of the grace of God.
I do not think that the grace of God demands a total ascetism, getting rid of any and every “thing.” It comes down to relationship. Is our relationship with our stuff overshadowing, pushing aside our relationship with God? Our lives can really only have one master, and the fragile mastery of stuff can subtly yet pervasively overtake us if we are not careful.
Crafton’s ending prayer is poignant and helpful, “ Refresh us. O homeless, jobless, possession less Savior. You came naked and naked you go. And so it is for us. So it is for all of us.”