We are Dust

For many years, I took Lent as an opportunity to add a spiritual practice. This has been fruitful and I’m grateful for those spiritual experiences. However, my very first Lent as an Episcopalian sticks out to me as one of my most powerful, because it was a time I gave something up.

When I was in college, freshly Episcopalian, I embarked upon my first ever Lent. I decided to give up a piece of clothing, shoes, or accessories every day for 40 days. The thing is, I love clothes. I still do. I have loved fashion since my teens (like I grew up watching Project Runway and trying to snag copies of Vogue). When I contemplated Lent for the first time, I tried to honestly answer the question: What feels like an excess in your life that you could do without? I wanted to pick something that I would feel when I went without it.

Each day for those 40, I’d pick my item. Living in a college dorm, it wasn’t as if I had massive storage bags of clothing to choose from. I could only pick from items I was, at the time, very much using, which is important because right now I could easily come up with a bunch of items to donate that I haven’t worn in years (do not tell Marie Kondo) without any real spiritual enlightenment.

But the final resting place of the items was more important to me than the items themselves. My friend Allison had spoken in passing about a shelter in her hometown that offered safe haven for women who were escaping abuse. I knew when I decided this discipline where they would go. As I picked the item, I said a prayer for wellness and healing to bless whoever might receive it. When Easter came, we loaded up all 40 of my items into her trunk, and she delivered them to the shelter for me.

In the past few years, maybe echoing the push of our culture, I’ve taken things on, more and more, adding to my life even as I was on the edge of burnout. I wonder, sometimes, if that was the ‘easier’ choice for me, because clogging myself with more meant busying myself enough to miss the quiet voice of God. I wonder if making Lent more busy means I missed the quiet whisper of a God who knew I would thrive if I had a little less.

I actually know I missed the quiet whisper of God to live with a little less, because for the past few years, I’ve lived in a variety of different places. I’ve had 3 bedroom homes, to 2 bedroom condos, to 1 bedroom apartments, and now I’m in a studio. Imagine my surprise when I realized the place where I feel most happy is here, in the studio, with all my less.

This is not to say we shouldn’t take on spiritual practices. I assure you that my Lenten discipline this year—as I return to exploring minimalism and community the way I did all those years ago in college—will certainly add practices of prayer and reflection to my life. I will read more scripture and I will turn to theological texts. But this added prayer and reflection will, I pray with God’s help, be born out of hope for less, not more.

I don’t know what you’re feeling called toward this Lent. I don’t know what the bid of the Ash Wednesday liturgy might be evoking in your soul and I’d never pretend to know better than you. I do hope that, in some way, you can resist the push of our culture for more, that you won’t let Lent be the season of the year that pushes you to burnout, that you will hear the quiet whisper of a God who knows you could probably thrive with a little less.

But remember that if you accidentally end up pushing yourself toward a soul hurting more, or if life happens and Lent ends up being the season that pushes you to burnout, or if you try as hard as you can but can’t hear the quiet whisper of God over all the noise, we have hope in this: We are dust. If Lent pushes us to our end—through more or less—it has done its work, because Lent ushers us into this very end so we may remember our eternal beginning.