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.

Creation Care

I'll be getting back to writing about rest shortly....I've been busy prepping talks for Hillside Church, but plan to get back to writing soon.

You can hear my first talk on Creation Care, here:

http://www.hillsidelondon.com/sermons/creation-care/

Peace.

David.

Carefree Summer

Lately I've been frustrated by all the things on my growing to-do list.

It seems we have a variety of responses to having too much on our plates, but for right now I'm frustrated. I don't mind so much having ten thousand things to do in the winter....but summer...it just seems like a crappy time to be preoccupied with a to-do list that's too long to get done.

I was trying to put my finger on why it irritates me so much to be overly busy in the summer...part of it is the short period of time of great weather, part of it is the fact that I've had a few overly busy summers in a row, but part of it seems related to this idyllic notion of summer that I have.

Summer to me is supposed to be carefree.

It's supposed to be that time where responsibilities and work and all the demands just get set aside for playing. I think this is a pattern most of us develop when we're young - work hard during the school year, but cut loose during the summer. Wake up and find a new adventure each day. No plans, no places you have to be...

I miss that. I miss the memory I have of it anyway...I realize that part of the glory may just be nostalgia, and its perfection may be a function of remembering.

But it makes me wonder about the heaviness I feel in my not-so-carefree life these days. I feel careworn instead.

Maybe some of it is self-imposed. Maybe I feel the weight of responsibility when I buy into illusions of life that make things heavier than they need to be. Illusions of permanence. Illusions about myself and my false sense of omnipotence and importance.

Maybe having my butt kicked to the curb by life lately is actually a gift. Maybe losing some battles in life can remind us that what we've been working so hard for, is actually not so important.

When things started to come apart in my professional life a few months ago, I had the wisdom (occasionally) of stopping and listening. Trying to sense the Spirit's voice in the midst of my sadness and anger. All I could hear was "don't get lost in the details". I wasn't exactly sure of what that meant. It seemed to be a reminder that the details weren't so important...but I neglected the first part..."don't get lost".

It's easy for us to "get lost"; to be emotionally and mentally far away from our true identity, the true sources of our value, the truly important and meaningful things in life.

In my desire to have a care-free summer, I've been hoping for a removal of difficult and pressing things. It's the typical North American mindset - that happiness is the absence of suffering or strain. But the truth is that to be carefree is not to have the demands of my life disappear, but rather, it requires me to re-orient my relationship to those demands, seeing them for what they really are, and not taking them at face value or getting sucked into their traps.

To be carefree (not careless) is perhaps ultimately about "not getting lost in the details", about re-aligning our perspective to the bigger realities of life. That we are valued because God has infused us with value as his creation, his children, his friends. That most of life is fleeting and temporary and that all that really matters is to love God and love the things God loves. That the world is ultimately a safe place, not a place where everything works out how we want it, or place that's free from suffering, but a place but a place where God will not be thwarted in his work of redeeming all of creation.

My carefree, or at least not careworn summer is available if I choose it. If I choose to believe and act as if I believe certain things about the world. If I refuse to get lost in the details.

Postscript:  ....and my anger about the people who did this to me? Well, I think I can avoid becoming bitter if I recognize that the things they've taken are not of ultimate importance, and that they can never take away the things that really matter in life.

Norman Wirzba Extended Interview

As part of my ongoing thinking about our relationships to food, I've been including the great thinking about this topic from Norman Wirzba.

I found a great clip here of him summarizing the body of work he's done in the theology of food.

Norman Wirzba Extended Interview

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
 

Members? or Consumers?

A few weeks ago I blogged about the journey I'm beginning in being attentive to food. I've started paying more deliberate attention to my relationship to food, where it comes from, how my food choices impact others, and where food fits in my life.

It's been enlightening to read Norman Wirzba's book:
Food and Faith; A Theology of Eating

Wirzba suggests that we require a fundamental reorientation of our relationships with the rest of the world. Rather than being consumers, we need to become aware of ourselves as members of a created order.

It seems that our primary way of relating to many things in life is now as consumers. In her thoughtful work Monoculture, F.S. Michaels suggests that the dominance of the economic worldview, has shaped us into people who relate and interact primarily in terms of consumption. For more on this see my most recent post "One Story".

But what could be problematic about interacting with food this way? Shouldn't we view food as a consumable? Isn't food just a fuel source to allow us, the pinnacle of evolved beings, the opportunity to live our lives according to our own consciences?

The problem according to Wirzba, is that relating to food solely as consumers, removes us from the complex web of interdependence we have with the rest of nature. Putting it bluntly, Wirzba reminds us that our eating requires the death of other organisms. We count on the death and birth cycles of life for our survival. We may have removed ourselves from our food so far that we only experience it coming from boxes. But this only perpetuates an illusion, an illusion that our eating has no impact. The illusion that we humans are independent and self-sufficient.

The reality is that we are members of a complex system of elements, of an ecology. Our ignorance or denial of this membership leads us to make many reckless and destructive choices. Our wealth insulates us from some of the consequences, for now.

But as Wirzba, and Wendell Berry, and many other important voices are reminding us, we live these detached lives, these lives which deny our interconnectedness with the rest of creation, not only at the peril of others who are more vulnerable in the world, but also at our own peril. Whenever we pretend to be self-sufficient and independent, we live an incomplete, false existence, one which stumbles into the realm of idolatry and ultimately self-destruction.

The word "whole" shares it's common Latin root with the word "holy". So when we relate to food as consumers only, and not as members of the created order, our lives become fragmented, detached, or "unholy". Whether you identify with the religious language of "holiness", or you prefer the popular culture's term of "holistic health", either way we must recognize the need to see ourselves as interconnected parts, rather than self-reliant individuals....members, not just consumers.

One Story

I talk a lot with people about their stories. Personal narratives are crucial to the work I do in helping people find healing and redemption in their lives.

But we also have bigger, societal stories that we connect to, that we use to think about our lives, our world, our choices, our actions.

F.S. Michaels, in her brilliant book "Monoculture", describes how societies often have a story that dominates, and that this story changes over broad historical periods. She makes an awfully good case for the idea that the dominant story of our time and place is the economic story. It's a story about the world that filters how we think and relate to everything, through the role of consumers.

We relate to everything and everyone, primarily through a relationship of consumption.

Whereas education used to be about broadening minds, developing knowledge, creating beauty and ideas, it has now been reduced to an economic good or product to be consumed. We actively promote it as an investment for people to use on their path of career building (which of course, is also now purposed as accumulating things of value to be consumed, whether it be wealth or personal fulfillment)

Michaels compellingly points out how this is also true in areas of our life such as religious life - we treat church as an experience to be consumed, and even God as a product to be used and manipulated to our own ends.

Clothing, time, food, families, friendships, leisure, sport, volunteering, art... all of it... is being subtly transformed into products and services that we relate to as consumers, as part of this dominant economic story. Listen to the pundits who advise about "building your personal brand", and you'll see the most obvious expression of this. Look at Facebook and see how people are defining themselves in terms of a set of consumptive practices - assets, experiences, brand preferences, etc. and establishing status by associating with certain consumptive lifestyles.

Of great concern to me is that way we (I) have begun to treat each other from a consumption point of view. None of us would want to admit that we are shaped by this mindset in our friendships and relationships, but I'm afraid that few of us are likely exempt. It takes unusual honesty to admit that at times we view our spouses in terms of what they can do for us: make us happy, take care of us, compensate for other relationship disappointments in life, build our egos, meet our physical needs, meet our wants, upgrade our status, take away certain negative feelings, etc.  All of these, subtly become characteristics of a product we want to consume rather than a living, breathing, broken person who is with us in life.

And while it is probably fine for us to wish and hope that our partners will do some of these things at times, it is deeply flawed when we construe our partners primarily in terms of their success or failure to perform as products, and perform in the way we expect.

So even our personal stories become shaped by this economic story. It's as if the larger dominant societal story of consumerism, becomes the template in which all other stories are told. When it comes to each other as people, we're rarely so crass as to admit our commodification of other humans. We dress it up with words like "love"...which seems like a sacred term, but often what we mean by "love" is a personal experience of gratification, rather than persistent dedication to caring for the other. (Watch an episode of The Voice and notice how people use the word "love" - it almost always refers to the individuals own sense of enjoyment or how they are made to feel by the other)

But as Michaels points out, the issue is not about relinquishing consumption entirely, but becoming aware of how our minds are immersed in this story, and engaging in practices that reflect other stories, non-economic ones. She doesn't say it, but I think the logical extension is that the story of love, of sacrifice for another, is a story we must practice on a daily basis to escape the economic story becoming dominant in our lives.

Mindlessness as a form of Privilege

In turning my attention to things in my daily life, I have become aware of this truth:

That being mindlessness (being inattentive) can be a form of privilege.

I've known this is true in certain areas of my life for some time, but I never realized how deeply it runs.

I've learned that not thinking about sexual orientation, ethnic status, gender, socioeconomic status, is a privilege that comes with being a middle-class straight white man, in a culture where these things are dominant. I've learned that being able to "forget" how these things deeply impact a person's daily experience is a privilege, and one that adversely effects others around me.

My intent is not to draw attention away from the injustice of all this, but I'm starting to realize that my inattentiveness starts to pop up in a whole range of contexts where I have the privilege to not have to pay attention or care.

I can ignore the ramifications of my food choices, because of where I live, my wealth, my mobility, and my unfettered access to any kind of food, from any place, whenever, and however I want it. I don't know when certain foods are "in season" because I've never had to think about it - it still just shows up in my grocery store.

Even more problematically, I can ignore how my choices degrade local and far-away ecosystems because my privileges allow me to live in an insulated world, encapsulated from the consequences of my actions. Others do not have this privilege. Others will go hungry, live in war zones, suffer damaged ecosystems, and not be able to do anything about it, while I continue to ignore it and live however I choose.

In the process of becoming a mindful person, a mindful, attentive follower of Jesus, I am learning that the privilege I have had to ignore these issues is vastly destructive in its impact on others.

Recently I bought the cheapest relish on a store shelf, later reading that it came from India. I have no issues with India making relish and exporting it, but it's hard to believe that saving 20 cents over the national brand that was manufactured in the US, didn't come with more than 20 cents of consequences for other people. Not to mention the fact that relish could be made in my own backyard, with no burning of fossil fuels involved, for probably the same price.

But it's been my privilege to ignore these issues. I didn't need to care about where the relish came from, because I wasn't the one facing the consequences burning diesel fuel to ship a jar of relish 7000 miles.

But Jesus teaches us a different way. We learn that all of us are connected - like brothers and sisters connected, and that my deep bonds with the rest of humanity and creation mean that their suffering is my suffering. I may not have been aware of it, but now I am, and I have choices to make in how I respond to it.

Probably going to start with making my own relish.

Paying attention to Food

How often do we pay attention to what is in our mouths as we're eating it?

How often do we pay attention to where our food came from? (I don't mean which store, I mean where it actually came from - which field or barn, how far did it travel, what conditions was it grown in)

A couple weeks ago I was in Florida and experienced a moment of confusion. I was in a large grocery store and noticed that orange juice was exactly the same price there as it was at home in London, Ontario. At first it seemed wrong that I should pay such a high price for a local product, but then I started to wonder if the local price was more reasonable, and my home price was being somehow subsidized....was I not paying for the thousands of miles of transportation (not mention the environmental costs) of having Florida orange juice in wintery London?