{"id":1985,"date":"2024-03-23T10:15:50","date_gmt":"2024-03-23T15:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2024-03-23T10:15:54","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T15:15:54","slug":"waste-not-want-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/?p=1985","title":{"rendered":"Waste Not? Want Not?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Waste not, want not.<\/em> So says the eighteenth-century aphorism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Implied is a warning against the desperation of neediness. Presupposed is a sense of scarcity and a fear that there won\u2019t be enough. Many of our families and our church institutions have lived by this adage for multiple generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does Jesus have to say about wasting or wanting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Palm Sunday, we listen to the story of his Passion (Mark 14:1-72), beginning at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper. A woman enters with an alabaster jar full of costly nard, breaks the jar, and pours the contents over his head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her extravagance elicits outrage from several of the guests \u201cWhy this waste of perfumed oil? It could have been sold for more than 300 denarii! The money could have been given to the poor!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They make a fair point. One denarius was the daily wage for a laborer. Multiplied by 300, we\u2019re talking about somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000 by today\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Jesus praises the woman for lavishing this gift upon him. The poor will always be with us. Jesus will not. She has anointed him for his burial, and her good deed is to be remembered throughout the generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Jesus\u2019 view, there is a time and a place to be \u201cwasteful\u201d \u2013 especially when it comes to showing honor and delight to those we love. If we are dominated by a fear-based frugality, then our message to others easily becomes, \u201cLet me calculate how much you are worth,\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t think you matter that much.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What about \u201cwanting\u201d? What does Jesus have to say?  Actually, quite a lot!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the crowds gather to hear his preaching, he begins with the Beatitudes. He invites us to experience true and unshakable blessedness by embracing<\/em><\/strong> poverty of spirit, mourning, and meekness. He invites us to feel the ache of hungering and thirsting for righteousness. It is in the depths of our needing that we are most capable of receiving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesus did not merely teach us to need and depend and receive. He modeled receptivity, as did Mary and Joseph. They went in want. They lacked basic shelter as Mary\u2019s pregnancy came to term. They fled into Egypt as immigrants, without knowing how their necessities would be met. Jesus spent thirty of his thirty-three years in relative obscurity, engaging (it seems) in far more receptivity than sacrificial giving. Nor did he stop allowing himself to need and to receive during his brief public ministry. He willingly received kindness and care from others. Even when his \u201chour\u201d came and he said a free and wholehearted \u201cyes\u201d to sacrificing everything, he lodged in Bethany with his good friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWaste not, want not\u201d contains a small amount of wisdom, but ultimately dehumanizes. It teaches us to be terrified of going in want, of needing, of depending, of receiving \u2013 in stark contrast to the teaching and example of Jesus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can we be curious about where this attitude comes from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I see it as a survivor mentality, including an inner vow (\u201cI will never<\/em><\/strong> go in want again!\u201d). Doing what it takes to survive is great in a desperate situation. If you\u2019re stranded on a ship for months, \u201cwaste not, want not\u201d is an outstanding motto. But when that survivor mentality becomes enfleshed in everyday life, it becomes a burden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of my childhood, and pleasant-enough visits to my great grandmother on my stepdad\u2019s side. The house was, shall we say, \u201ccozy.\u201d Stuff piled everywhere. Like so many, she was a survivor of the Great Depression, determined never to go in need again. When she passed, my stepdad and his sisters spent many hours cleaning out the clutter. He joked about the piles of used paper cups from McDonald\u2019s. You just don\u2019t know when you might need them again. Waste not, want not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He joked, but he lived by the same mentality. Shortly after her death, he needed to move his tools out of her garage. So, we tore down our one-stall garage and built a five-stall. He cleverly salvaged the old door, turning it into a back entrance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new garage was huge, but we never parked cars in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was way too full of stuff. Some of the things (his tools) were quite valuable.  Much of it was, well, less valuable. When my stepdad passed in 2010, my sister and I spent a few days toiling to clear out the garage. We didn\u2019t find any paper cups, but we sure got rid of stuff. It was a great moment of triumph when we announced to our mom that she could start parking her car there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we cleared out the junk, I made trip after trip to the curb. I discovered the power of another proverb, \u201cOne man\u2019s trash is another man\u2019s treasure.\u201d Between trips to the curb, all had magically disappeared \u2013 into someone else\u2019s five-stall garage, apparently?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cluttered garages and homes can be joked about \u2013 and we\u2019ve all seen them. They range from mildly annoying to utterly disgusting and dangerous. The deeper question here is around the survivor vow that gets taken amidst heartache: Never again!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Never what<\/em><\/strong>, exactly? That\u2019s the problem with vows made out of fear. Over time, they cut us off from really great things: in this case, from the capacity to receive and give love in healthy community, to flourish, and to experience abundance together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Survivor vows are not merely individual \u2013 they entrench themselves in the collective: families, churches, schools, entire dioceses. Many of our institutions are darkened by a cloud of fearful protectiveness \u2013 and then lament that membership is so low. In one of my previous parishes, I repeatedly turned on lights that others had shut off. I was expecting first-time guests, and (with sensitivity) expecting them to be nervous. I felt like it would be kind to have them enter a warm and inviting space, rather than snake their way around dark corners. There were some in the parish who couldn\u2019t handle such extravagance, whispered about my wastefulness, and shut the lights back off the moment I wasn\u2019t looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently, I heard about \u201cPlategate.\u201d A priest friend was hosting with pizza after Masses in his church. He had the gall to use the paper plates stored by some of the church ladies. They made a point of hiding those before the next Mass. So he purchased his own plates. They proceeded to hide those. I imagine there are hundreds of priests nationwide who have their own versions of \u201cPlategate\u201d as they try to invite renewal in their churches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fear is a normal human emotion. But when fear of that<\/em><\/strong> happening again takes over and hops into the driver\u2019s seat, we stifle the capacity to receive, to grow, and to bear fruit. We wind up embodying the parable of the talents, living like the fearful servant who buries his gift in the ground (Matthew 25:14-30). We cut off all vulnerability and risk, and in the process stifle any real growth or fruitfulness for the sake of the Kingdom. That choking off affects not just us, but all of our relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our God is not a God of scarcity but of abundance. When we allow ourselves to be secure in his love, we can feel confident and creative. We can collaborate and innovate. We can go beyond the math of adding or subtracting, and discover the power of multiplication \u2013 something Jesus often talked about and did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our God is first and foremost a God of relationship. God is an eternal communion of persons. Jesus is eternally \u201cfrom the Father.\u201d Who he is and what he has are the fruit of receiving. He desires to share the same abundance with us. He invites us to become truly blessed precisely by learning how to desire, to want, and to need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During Holy Week, we will ponder just how much Jesus embraced our human condition of wanting and needing. I invite each of us to be curious about the ways we resist that level of vulnerability, and how he might be inviting us to conversion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our God is not a God of scarcity but of abundance. When we allow ourselves to be secure in his love, we can feel confident and creative. We can collaborate and innovate. We can go beyond the math of adding or subtracting, and discover the power of multiplication \u2013 something Jesus often talked about and did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1986,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[58,57,61,55,54,60],"tags":[406,153,553,227,95,395,608,610,68,609],"class_list":["post-1985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church-renewal","category-healing","category-reception","category-scripture","category-spirituality","category-the-church","tag-anointing","tag-beatitudes","tag-bethany","tag-desire","tag-fear","tag-hoarding","tag-need","tag-palm-sunday","tag-renewal","tag-wanting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/False-Frugality.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1987,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/1987"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.abideinlove.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}