40 Days of Nothing
When Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, February 21, the Servants Quarters community will embark on 40 Days of Nothing. As described in the Book of Common Prayer,
The first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting. [Likewise, we are invited] in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy Word.
The Litany of Penitence for Ash Wednesday calls on us to confess, among other things,
the pride, hypocrisy and impatience of our lives, [o]ur self-indulgent appetites and ways, . . . our exploitation of other people, . . . our envy of those more fortunate than ourselves, [o]ur intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, . . . our blindness to human need and suffering, . . . our indifference to injustice and cruelty, . . . our waste and pollution of [God’s] creation, and our lack of concern for those who come after us . . . .
Having confessed, we turn to the Lord, praying that He would restore us and accomplish in us the work of His salvation so that we may reflect His glory in the world. This is why we will undertake 40 Days of Nothing, so that we may honor our Lord by deliberately and systematically identifying and removing obstacles that impede our relationship with Him.
What will 40 Days of Nothing look like from a practical perspective? Because the culture’s materialistic onslaught ensnares each of us in different ways, 40 Days of Nothing will look different in each of our lives. But we will share the same motivation (described above), as well as a commitment to (1) limiting our acquisition and consumption to what we need rather than what we want, and (2) seeking to use the resources we save to the benefit of God’s Kingdom. To see how one family recently implemented this concept, see 30 Days of Nothing.
When we gather next, on February 22, we will discuss the contours and specifics of our individual plans, lending each other a hand in discerning between needs and wants, and discussing what we might do, individually or collectively, with the resources we conserve. In preparation for this session, it might be useful for you to spend some time reflecting on similar movements against consumerism such as the “Compactors” (see here and here), Adbusters and people inspired by Judith Levine’s book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.