Voluntary Deprivation - A Costco Awakening

How do people without SUV’s shop at Costco? It staggers me that people with little cars would even bother to come. 

Today as I was visiting the Mecca of overabundance (Costco)  I caught myself thinking about how important it is to hoard things in order to avoid the dreaded circumstance of running out. 

You might think that I’m being dramatic to make a point, but my behaviour (500 garbage bags…really?) suggests that I’m actually a little afraid of running out of stuff. What if it’s morning and I don’t have enough cereal options to choose from? What if I’m hankering for a turkey burger but don’t have pineapple jalapeño sauce to top it off? I always have at least 4 jars of peanut butter - just in case Costco doesn’t carry their brand of it for a few months.

One day at check-out, I told the cashier that I was overjoyed that a product was back because they hadn’t carried it for months and I had almost had to go without because my stash was depleted. I reflected to her that this might be a part of the corporate strategy; a kind of intentional practice to induce fear of deprivation, which would increase my tendency to hoard (by which I mean: buying 4 kilograms of sun-dried tomatoes). She smiled at me, in a knowing kind of way. Not acknowledging the hidden liturgy of the church of Costco out loud, but affirming my moment of recognition, my realization that I had been formed by the practices of the corporation. 

So today as I was gunning down the aisle to see if they finally have the 18-pack of organic mac and cheese that’s been out for a little while, this hits me: I’m afraid of deprivation. Afraid, not quite in the same way that I’m fearful of my family being annihilated in a tragic car crash, but at least mildly anxious about the prospect of going without. And while I may not experience the emotion of anxiety, my behaviour tells the story. 

My next realization was that we tend to be anxious about things we aren’t exposed to. The key to treating most forms of anxiety is through exposure: your brain learns that the anticipated outcome either doesn’t happen or if it does, it isn’t as awful as you expected. But if you don’t have any exposure, you don’t learn that you can cope with that thing you’re anxious about….which is a round about way of coming to terms with the fact that I haven’t had to experience deprivation in any significant way in quite a while. 

While this absence of deprivation might seem to many like an achievement, or even the way things are supposed to be for white middle class professional men, to me it’s a recognition that power and privilege have begun to insulate me from the real world. 

My position in this society has allowed me to create an illusion that my independence and self sufficiency can create a personal version of the world in which being deprived is non-existent. The overabundance of my world, and its celebrations of excess, have shaped me into a person who fears losing things I don’t even need. 

A part of my poverty of excess, is the belief that I need to protect myself against the loss of inessentials. 

Hoarders aren’t just the folks who won’t throw anything away and can’t walk on the floors of their living spaces for all the junk that is in the way. We are a society of hoarders. We are constantly taking more than we need to protect ourselves against the fear of being without.

Am I the only one who has spiritual awakenings in the freezer section of Costco? 

So I started putting some stuff back. I started making a few specific choices to either risk deprivation (relax, there’s still two jars of peanut butter in the pantry) or actually enter into some small forms of deprivation right now. We have no almond bark, and we shall go without this week, even though it was on sale. 

And I started thinking about what else I might do to intentionally expose myself to this dreaded deprivation. What kind of practices might help me lean into this fear?

After the check-out, as I passed through the food court part of the store with it’s delicious and cheap soft-serve ice cream, I remembered that there’s a long standing practice from a variety of spiritual traditions that might just be designed to help me with this problem: fasting.

Fasting is a form of temporary voluntary deprivation.

It’s not the same deprivation that billions of people on the planet face each day, but it’s an experience that invites transformation. Fasting allows us to choose deprivation for the sake of allowing it to form us in all the positive ways it is able.

We tend to think of deprivation as entirely bad.  I realize that some might read this and see my exaltation of deprivation as proof of how privileged I am that I would dare consider it to have any merit. They might think that only people with too much would start to idealize being hungry. (A similar argument has been made about anorexia being an expression of Western decadence) But I think we can still engage in some voluntary deprivation without idealizing it, or forgetting that most others in the world are deprived without choice.

I'm not suggesting that we should all adopt a kind of asceticism that turns deprivation into something we use to prove to ourselves or others how "spiritual" we are. But in a culture of overabundance maybe there is real value to choosing some occasional deprivations, like fasting, as a form of counterconditioning from time to time.

I fasted once for non-medical reasons years ago. It was awful. I became obsessed with food. Instead of it being the beautiful spiritual experience I imagined it would be, it became a hyper-focus on my physical desire to feel full. But what I didn't grasp at the time was that embracing deprivation rather than becoming obsessed with escaping from it was crucial to the practice having real value.

Deprivation, when we aren’t frantic for escape, can form us in good ways.

It can reorient us to our interdependence on the planet, and on each other, while shifting us away from our illusions of self-sufficiency.

Deprivation can help us turn away from our endless preoccupations, and allow us an opportunity to be present again with ourselves and the world. What happens when people are “deprived” of their smart phones? It invites us to be here and actually with each other, although we may not always capitalize on the opportunity. 

And in my Costco awakening I realized that deprivation can expose us in small ways to the experience of lacking something, and in turn help us learn that we are able to cope. Many of us catastrophize the experience of hunger. I sure do. It's not really a rational fear, but our emotional reaction to the idea of being hungry, or being without is so overstated, and so untested, that we live lives dedicated to avoiding the possibility of going without. Fasting brings us into confrontation with those imagined catastrophes and lets us experience that going without is not a so terrible and even is something we can cope with.

Perhaps little cars, however “impractical” or inconvenient are an invitation to some forms of deprivation. Perhaps our commitments to ever increasing capacity is feeding our clinging to overabundance by supporting our avoidance of deprivation. Perhaps a little car at Costco is the safest way to go after all.

Anxiety Part X - Doesn't the Bible tell us not to be anxious?

There's some thinking and writing hanging around Christian circles these days on the topic of anxiety that I have significant concerns about. It would be easy to ignore if it wasn't being presented under the banner of a movement that refers to itself as "biblical counselling", which implies a sort of indisputable authority and truthfulness. But the work coming out of this school of thought is not just bad psychology, it's bad exegesis.

When looking to the bible for wisdom on anxiety the most frequently cited passages are: Philipians 4:6 ("...don't be anxious about anything...") and Matthew 6:25 ("...don't be anxious about your life, what you will wear or what you will eat...").

In both, the greek word being translated to "anxious" is merimna. This word has been translated to "anxiety" in these two passages but often translated to mean "worry" or  "care", as in 1 Peter 5:7 (..."cast all your cares upon him..."). But merimna really derives from the Greek merimnaō, which is about being separated from the whole. Some scholars suggest that this usage of the word is inferring a dividing and fracturing a person's being into parts. Perhaps a caring about something so much that it divides your soul rather than being a fully whole person. Interestingly, Jesus' words in the Matthew 6 passage are immediately following his teaching on not being able to serve two masters - that a house divided against itself can't stand.

It's a huge leap to assume that what Jesus or Paul, or the authors of the biblical texts meant by the word "anxious" was exactly the same as how we mean it today.

What do we mean exactly by the word "anxiety" today anyhow? This is another problem - we don't even have consistent or precise definitions of anxiety in our popular culture, or even in clinical usage. 

So before you go reading these passages and assuming God is against or displeased with your particular experience of anxiety, we need to slow down a little and admit to a lack of textual clarity.

Moreover, these passages in Phil 4 and Matt 6 are not the giving of commandments. Notice how when Jesus summarizes the law He says: "love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself"....he doesn't add, "and don't be anxious, either". Obviously not all passages of scripture are commandments, some are instructive but within a particular context. When Jesus tell this group not to be anxious about clothing or food, he's talking to a specific context, not necessarily laying down a universally applicable principle. 

The sad thing is, by throwing these verses at people, we've often made them feel like failures for having anxiety, as if to experience this part of humanity is to have sinned. 

John McArthur suggests exactly this in his book: Anxious for Nothing. McArthur comes to the conclusion that anxiety is simply a failure to trust God, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you're anxious, you're sinning, because you're telling God He isn't enough, isn't worthy of your trust, isn't really going to take care of you.

Perhaps this works for McArthur in dealing with his own life, but from where I sit, this is not only terrible theology, it's useless psychology. It only makes people feel worse and keeps them stuck in their anxiousness. Now they're not just anxious, they're also feeling like depraved failures who are spitting in God's face when they worry.

I'm going to avoid a long rant here about so-called "biblical counselling", but this is exactly the kind of dangerous and misguided "advice" that movement is producing. It's dangerous because it pretends to have the authority of the Scriptures to give bad and even damaging answers to people who are in mental anguish. Even worse, its advocates openly state that health care providers not under this banner are giving untrue and ungodly counsel. The largest Christian domination in the United States publicly supports and funds this approach.

But let's not forget, friends of so called "biblical counselling" that Jesus sweats drops of blood the night before He's crucified. A bizarre physiological reaction indeed - but for sure sweating when not exercising is a classic symptom of anxiety. He also calls out to his Father to spare Him from being crucified. This seems like avoidance to me, which as most people know, is associated with....anxiety.  He can't sleep. Well, insomnia does tend to hound the anxious. So if anxiety is a sin, you're going to have to tie yourself in some pretty tight theological knots to explain away how the sinless Son of God is visibly anxious the night before his death. 

And just because you read the bible and quote it doesn't mean you're teaching God's truth. Jesus makes it plenty clear to the Pharisees of his day that they have a perverse way of using the scriptures to impose an agenda on people and that very often they've completely missed the ways God works in the world. So let's get off our Christian high horses and approach this with some humility and honesty about the complex ambiguity of scripture, especially when it comes to many things psychological.

What if we were to accept that anxiety is a natural human experience? An emotion, accompanied by certain kinds of physiological manifestations and certain characteristic ways of thinking?

Remember how years ago the church used to teach that sexual desire was a bad thing? In more recent  years some people of faith kind of came to their senses and realized that sex is a gift, that the desire for it is also a gift, but that the real problem is how we relate to that gift, or what we do with it?

It's time for anxiety to get a similar sort of re-understanding. Anxiety is a gift. It keeps us safe. Unlike almost any other species on earth humans can think ahead and anticipate the terrible things that could happen and plan for how we might reduce the likelihood occurrence. We wear our seat belts in our cars because we have the capacity to be anxious about being mortally wounded in a collision. And if the building you worked in today didn't collapse in a heap of rubble, you can thank human anxiety. Someone else lost sleep trying to anticipate the loads the walls could safely hold up without having a string of collapsed buildings to prove what was safe. We have building codes that require structures to be built in a manner consistent with what our thinking ahead has taught us..."thanks anxiety!"...because we don't have to experience every tragedy before we can plan ahead to avert others. 

Really, when you get down to it, anxiety, as the human experience to anticipate negative outcomes and to be motivated to avoid them, is one of God's great gifts to us as a species. To call the gift of anxiety a sin is absurd. 

What's broken, is our relationship to anxiety, our way of interacting with it.

Which really shouldn't seem so strange when you think about it, because most of our sin is about broken ways of relating to God's creation. The way we relate to each other - broken. The way we treat natural life and our environments - broken. The way we relate to God - broken. The way relate to our sexuality, our vulnerability, power,....broken, broken, and broken. (The attempt to use the Bible as a literal textbook for counselling complex psychological phenomena - also broken by the way) Why should our relationship to anxiety be any different?

So if the sin in this situation is not anxiety but the way we relate to anxiety, what else might these biblical passages have to teach us?

If the greek marimnao is pointing to the kind of experience of anxiety that involves being divided from self, overtaken, preoccupied, or drawn off course, we might have a little better idea as to what kind of relationship we should be trying not to have with our anxiety. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety takes us away from ourselves: from being fully human and yet formed in the image of the Divine. It's the kind of relationship to anxiety that draws us away from being loving because we are allowing our fear to guide our decisions. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety is our master, and we answer to it. The kind of relationship in which the gift of anxiety, has actually become something that enslaves rather protects us and leads us to flourishing.

Jesus corrects the Pharisees when they criticize him for healing on the Sabbath. He reminds them that the Sabbath is gift designed to help humankind, and the humans were not made to serve the Sabbath or be enslaved by it observance. The same is true for anxiety. Anxiety has been gifted to us for our flourishing, not to be our master or run our lives.

On Anxiety and Gratitude

I've been thinking and writing a lot about anxiety recently (offline for now...but today a little sneak peak).

Because anxiety is so unpleasant, we often wonder how to make it go away. And while I don't think that our primary focus should be on removing anxiety, I do think that we as humans can do things to reorient our relationship to the anxiety that is an essential feature in all of our lives.

One of the key ways to do this is cultivating the practice of gratitude.

I don't mean just being thankful, or communicating appreciation to others, or even summoning up a warm fuzzy feeling after binging on turkey.

Instead I'm talking about gratitude as an entire perspective, perhaps even a world-view, that recognizes that all that we have in our lives are gifts.

This computer to write on.... a gift.
These words and ideas to share with others... a gift.
This meal to enjoy and be nourished by... a gift.
This friend who calls to unburden themselves because life is hard... a gift.
This house to live in and create a space of hospitality... a gift.
This sinus cold that forces me to slow down... a gift.
This breath... a gift.

When we immerse ourselves in this way of thinking, it reminds us that our belief that we possess so much of what we cling to is an illusion. It shows us that these temporal things were given to us, and will be taken away at some point even if only by death. We can be grateful for their presence in our lives today, and in doing so we remember our correct place in relationship to the universe.

This practice alleviates anxiety because we no longer have to worry in the same way about losing things or people…or the uncertainty of losing them…because we recognize that they were never ours to begin with, and that they will certainly be taken from us at some point. In our anxious moments we often create a false sense of uncertainty...."what if someone I loves dies", or "what if I die?" But there is no real uncertainty here - people you love will die and someday you will die too - the only uncertainty is how and when. To cling to others and own lives is deeply human. It is engrained in the architecture of our biology. To seek self-preservation and deny the reality of death is also deeply human. But we are more than human animals, we are creatures with consciousness and the capacity to transcend our humanity. We can overcome our clinging and denying by recognizing and living the higher truths of the universe. In this case, the truth that all that we experience is passing, temporal, and limited, and that to cling to anything is futile.

My daughter found a wildflower at a park and was captured by its beauty. Naturally she wanted to continue enjoying its beauty, so she picked it in order to keep it. On the ensuing walk home, she realized that she might drop it and lose it, so she grasped it tightly in her hands. By the time we were home it was crushed, dry, and in pieces, no longer a thing of beauty...and she too was crushed with the sadness of losing something precious.

When we recognize and experience the futility of clinging, the desperate attempts to protect, hoard, and secure things that can’t be kept indefinitely, we can learn to stop clinging so hard. But because letting go is so counter-intuitive for us as humans we must have a higher principle and practice that can allow us to transcend our instinctive grasping. It is gratitude that reorients our perspective, diminishes the illusions of permanence, and allows us to begin again the process of not anxiously holding on to things that we can’t hold on to.

So we must cultivate gratitude, like a garden that we attend to each day. It is not enough to make a mad dash to be thankful once a year, because gratitude at its heartfelt level is a perspective that extends far beyond a feeling of thankfulness.

It is that perspective of being a receiver of gifts.

Some of the gifts we freely welcome – prosperity, health, children, happiness, strength, skills. Others seem less welcome or even unwelcome; suffering, sadness, anxiety, pain, limitations, difficult people, bad weather. But each of these, in spite of our desire to avoid them can be experienced as gifts if we do the hard mental work of recognizing their temporal nature and opportunity to be redeemed for something good.

And as it turns out those gifts we heartily welcome and pursue can bring with them their own share of suffering. As I've written about before, sometimes the things we desire end up enslaving us, and the things we avoid offer freedom.

In spite of our culture which teaches us that we are entitled to everything our heart desires, we can learn to refuse that deception and recognize our true identities as receivers of gifts. When we cultivate gratitude, we become increasingly able to view these things in our life for the gifts that they are, even those things which seem negative.

Try this. Ask yourself: 

What do I fear losing in life these days? 

How do I think losing that will affect me?

How did I get the thing I'm afraid of losing...did I really get it all by myself, or did certain things outside of my control occur first to bring it into my life?

Is it something I can actually hold on to forever?

What might happen if instead of clinging to it, I loosened my grip, gave thanks for it, and truly enjoyed what it brings to my life today?

How can I use this gift to make life better for others?