A very stupid thing I made a few years back

I’m writing this on “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday. I have numerous bulletins to make, as well as preparing the ashes, but the brain God gifted me with needs the dopamine produced by posting this entry before it can get to work on those other things. Plus, I’m trying to develop a discipline of writing, which means I really ought to be doing this right?

Anyway, Lent begins tomorrow. It marks 40 days of fasting and spiritual discipline for the majority of Christians around the world (Evangelicals not included—they don’t really observe Lent), kicked off for Western Christians by the observance of Ash Wednesday. This is a day where we go to church and have ashes smeared on our heads (or sprinkled on them) as a reminder of two things: we sin and we die. It is meant to get us in touch with the frailty of our humanity as a way to underscore the magnanimity of what Jesus did in re-orienting our humanity through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But I look at things in much of the world right now and I’m not so sure we need the ashes to remind us of these facts. Ukraine and Gaza (as well as the under-reported turmoil of what is happening throughout Africa, particularly in the Congo region) are stark reminders of the ubiquity of death. And the current state of things in the United States is perhaps the clearest reminder to us that sin is far from gone in the world—and also demonstrating to us how sin and death inform each other. Furthermore, Lent itself is a season of voluntary austerity and deprivation. Lent, in a way, assumes a degree of “affluence” as the “norm” and “deprivation” as the outlier. Given the direction of the economy, Lent feels less like a thing we Christians choose to enter into for a time and more the general reality in which we are moving.

So, why bother? I mean, can we even afford to do Lent this year? Since much will likely be taken away as this administration goes on, wouldn’t we be better off using the time we have as a sort of extended Mardi Gras and treat ourselves until we can’t? Shouldn’t we take the advice of the wise Preacher in Ecclesiastes and “eat drink and be merry” since everything around is “a puff of smoke” and “chasing the wind?”*

Well, this more or less assumes the Western Christian view of Lent. Eastern Christianity (think Greek or Coptic) has a different mindset. For Eastern Christians (whose theology is arguably more reflective of ancient Christianity), Lent is about balance. See, in Eastern Christian practice, one fasts for about half the year and feasts for the rest. This serves as a kind of balance for the earth and our bodies, similar to the YinYang thinking of East Asia or the Ku/Hina thinking of ancient Hawai’i. And this can have notable economic repercussions in Christian societies.

There’s an old tale that gets repeated (one that I’ve been known to parrot myself) that says that fish was deemed appropriate for Lent due to the lobbying of fishmongers. Apparently there is no evidence to support this story. But this does not negate the fact that fasting can carry implications for resisting the “principalities and powers” of our current economic reality. The food industry, for instance, wants to dominate our kitchens and push the kinds of foods they want us to eat. They want us to lean into excess. In his 2016 documentary series Cooked, food author Michael Pollan notes that the sort of foods pushed on us are foods that, if we were to cook them ourselves, would be excessively time-consuming. Think about French fries, for instance. We view them as basically “filler.” But consider what it takes to make French fries: growing potatoes, peeling them, slicing them, blanching them, then frying them. Think about all the little prepackaged cakes or tubs of ice cream in our freezers. Their delectability is largely informed by the difficulty that comes in making these things ourselves. But that labor is outsourced and now these things are largely treated as staples in the Western diet and not the exceptional items they’re really supposed to be.

And the food industry is making bank on that fact.

Pollan’s documentary further notes that the food industry sold us on these things by hammering us with messages that reinforce how stressful our lives are, thus pressuring us into buying their products as a means to relieve some degree of stress. Capitalism selling us their solutions to the problems they created. And the messages are only getting stronger and stronger. The stress and chaos of this administration in the United States is very good for business (and probably why so many CEO-types have gone hard for Trump in the first place).

So, fasting becomes a form of refusal, a form of resistance. It also becomes self-empowering in a way because it can help us remember that we can make choices free of corporate and political pressures.

Saint Paul asserts that while we are at war, our war “is not against blood and flesh”. Which means that we don’t fight this war in the same way we might fight others. The Chinese theologian Watchman Nee notes that Saint Paul’s instructions in this passage are rooted in a defensive stance and not a march into battle. Which means, quite literally, that our war against the spiritual forces that assail us is waged as resistance.

So, food can become a tool in that resistance. Refusing to eat certain foods becomes an act of resistance against the very forces that capitalize on our stress and fear.

But the fasting of Lent is not only a curbing of the foods we eat. It’s also the giving up of certain activities. There’s been much press about the various economic blackouts people are participating in right now. What if we made every Wednesday and Friday (the traditional days of general fasting for ancient Christianity) in Lent a “buy nothing” day? And alongside that maybe consider using any money we save from our refusals and give it to various people (software engineers, journalists) that could really use the money?

Yes, we are facing a reality of involuntary austerity. But Lent is more than just a time of tightening the belt for some vague spiritual benefit. It is about a life of balance. It is a tool in a war of resistance against the very power of Satan itself, manifested in the economic pressures foisted upon us by billionaires addicted to wealth and gaining it at our expense.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Lent #Christianity #spirituality #religion #Church #Jesus #Episcopal #politics #economy

We are in the midst of a wave of what is now known as enshittification, which is a term coined by Canadian author Cory Doctorow on his blog, Pluaralistic. It’s a phrase that has taken parts of the internet by storm, a perfect word to describe how seemingly everything has gotten worse. (Apologies to anyone who is bothered by a priest using the word “shit,” by the way. I get that some Christians are offended by swearing, but Saint Paul pretty much uses the word “shit” in Philippians 3:8 when he considers his life before Christ as skybala, so make of that what you will.)

“Enshittification” is marked by four things, according to Doctorow:

first, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Notice that those four markers are not exclusive to technology, where the term “platform” could be used for just about any institution.

Including the Church.

Just think back to the 15th and 16th Centuries. The Church had been good. It managed to change the direction of the Roman Empire and even managed to preserve elements of culture and society after the fall of that empire. It was nimble and adaptive to the needs of people in the agrarian days of the early Medieval period and managed to counterbalance the worst impulses of kings and lords (for the most part) because kings and lords were seen as subservient to the lordship of Christ Jesus and His Church, which wielded the power of excommunication as a way to keep things in check. But then, kings and lords wanted more from the Church, an institution they were largely funding. Further, many of the bishops had been welcomed into the halls of wealth and power and now saw themselves largely in political terms rather than spiritual. So the laity began to be exploited through practices like the selling of indulgences (used to fund wars and, later, the construction of Saint Peter’s at the Vatican). Then, the bishops began to exploit the lords and kings to get what they wanted (just consider the story of Henry IV traveling in the snow to get the pope to reverse an excommunication). Then, we get the Reformation Era (which gave birth to my branch of the Church, known as Anglicanism).

Now, we see the same things happening in regards to Protestant Christianity, particularly the Evangelical side of things. Pro Publica is running an article about one of the several Evangelical pastors that are leveraging their spiritual influence in the service of political power. And the question is why? Why would any organization that calls itself Christian engage in this sort of thing?

Why would the Church ever return, like “a dog to its vomit,” to the well of enshittification?

It’s because Christians seem to forget what their religion is all about, largely because Christianity is a pretty inconvenient thing. We want to change the world, we rightly recognize that Jesus calls us to change the world. But the lure of doing such things quickly and conveniently is very very strong. Which I feel like we’ve heard something similar before...

Oh. Right.

I’m beginning to think more and more that “inconvenience” is a Christian virtue, a thing we need to embrace, cultivate, and value (I’ve plans to write more on this in the future). When we consider that the ancient rabbinical interpretation of the Fall was the result of the serpent telling Eve and Adam that they could short-cut their way to god-like-ness that the Holy One was moving them toward by eating that piece of fruit, we see that “convenience” or “expedience” becomes a very alluring temptation. Further, in a prophecy about Jesus found in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom (frequently called The Wisdom of Solomon) we read:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. (Wisdom 2:12-15, NRSV)

So, even the Bible itself acknowledges that the ways of Jesus are inconvenient, while also exposing the short-comings and even wickedness that come from a life of convenience. And those things result in Jesus being crucified. Which is all to say that convenience is powerful and can come with a dark side if we’re not attentive to it.

Christians, as with anyone else, are sinners. We know this, we confess this, we (are supposed to) try and overcome this. But, nevertheless, we live in a sinful world and it is very hard to successfully resist every day. (But this is why we also believe in grace—which is another topic for another time!) The allure of a short-cut to what we think we want is too strong. And so we make a concession here, another there, and then in time we have Rube-Goldberg-machined our way into abandoning our faith and/or calling a heresy or idolatry “Christian.”

Christians have an uneasy relationship with the so-called “separation of church and state.” Our faith demands that we be public and call on the public to repent and follow Jesus. This fact was not lost on some of our most ancient thinkers, most notable being Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great sage of Western (scholastic) Christianity. His mountainous masterpiece, The City of God, deals with the questions of Christians in political leadership. What he effectively argues is that Christians are baptized into a world affected by sin and so all things we humans develop are going to be marked by that fact in some way. But because we confess that sin and confess that Jesus has freed us from sin having lasting, defining power over us, we are able to see past the marks of sin and into a new way of being. So Augustine argues that the Church must make use of the systems of this world, but in such a way to move past the sin-defined flaws of those systems. Judicial punishment, for instance, is supposed to be understood by Christians as a tool that leads to people being restored into the community and not a means of punishment for the sake of punishment. Augustine understood that the guilt of the knowledge of the sin itself is more punishment than the law could ever apply, and so mechanisms of “punishment” are only to help an offender realize the sinfulness of their actions, so that they could come to a place of confession—which is the catalyst for repentance and restoration to the community.

In short, Saint Augustine argues that the Church make use of governmental systems in order to persuade people of what they ought to do, rather than coerce them. In effect, this subverts the systems of government, sinful as they are, in the aims of hopefully working them out of a job.

But, as we all know, persuasion is inconvenient. It takes time. Think of how hard it is to convince people to leave Facebook or Instagram in favor of the far superior experience of decentralized social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Wouldn’t it be easier, more convenient, to just force people to leave?

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just vote the right people into office and get them to make people behave the way we think they should?

Such a view is deeply heretical, from a Christian perspective, because it attempts to supplant the work of God and put it into the hands of us people. Like the Marvel villain, The High Evolutionary, we convince ourselves that we can do it all faster and better because God is not behaving the way we think He ought.

The only way out of the cycle of enshittification is to properly repent and then continue to resist the lure of convenience.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

header image by J Dean, via unsplash.com. The image of the Temptation of Christ is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain

#christianity #church #enshittification #technology #culture #politics