Monday, April 4, 2022
The Rev. Charlie Nichols
Got Junk?
1-800-GOT-JUNK bills themselves as the world’s largest junk removal service. You may have seen their television commercials where the smiling fellows show up, and to remove your no longer wanted or needed accumulations of stuff, “All you have to do is point!”
Junk is not something we usually think about in our faith communities. But then again, perhaps we do when we need to remove the unsold leftovers from the white elephant table at our church fairs or we descend into our dark and foreboding church basements.
I was recently reminded of how junk may be lurking in other places. Each day, I receive and read Brother Give Us a Word, the daily snippet from the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastic community in Cambridge, MA. If I look back at the offerings from a typical week, I see words like lament, enemy, abstain, connection, enough, prayer, fruitfulness – all words that we might expect to encounter at some point in our spiritual lives. But junk ? That truly got my attention. Brother Lucas Hall writes:
“An unending appetite for junk points to a deeper dissatisfaction: deep-seated feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, isolation, confusion, frustration. Maybe your “junk” is news, social media, work, or literal junk food. The myriad varieties of this experience come from the same source: a desire to be comforted in our inmost fears.”
I spend many hours of many days staring at my computer screen. While some of what I consume is edifying, a good deal is not. Truth be told, it is junk. When we ingest junk food, it offers little to no value to our bodies apart from some momentary satisfaction. Similarly, when we ingest visible or audible junk the lack of nourishment is the same.
During Lent, the Brothers supplement their daily word with a suggested practice for that day. Brother Lucas adds:
“Today when you find yourself reaching for whatever your “junk” is, ask yourself what hole it’s trying to fill. Is there a better choice you can make to address it? Or can you simply sit with that feeling?”
Our Lenten journey provides a very fitting time to clear away some of – most of - the junk in our lives. There is so much junk. It pulls us every which way and fills our heads to overflowing with anxiety, frustration, confusion, anger, and panic.
May we make it our intention to purge some of our junk, and with that newly freed up time and space, might we turn our attention to our First Love.