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[ Back to index of May articles ] BEARINGS:
Is there such a thing as a spirituality of shopping? The question isn't facetious because there ought to be a spirituality for every activity. Religion doesn't consist in rare supernatural experiences, but it interprets all experience, exploring its depths. Spirituality allows the sense of God's presence in and with us in any activity to become real to us through our imagination so that it evokes a response from our hearts. Many of us have picked up the expression "shopping therapy" to admit wryly to ourselves that sometimes shopping expeditions are inspired by other motives than the need to restock empty shelves. We often set out for the mall to seek healing. And that awareness is one way into the exploration of a spirituality of shopping. Spirituality is not meant to be an anxious scrupulosity that makes us second guess our every move. But it is about the courage to take soundings in the deeper currents that flow beneath our everyday activities. What are the feelings that prompt us to seek the 'therapeutic' benefits of shopping? What difference does it make to bring those feelings and needs into a conversation with God before we get our fix? The one who is really prepared to sit with those feelings and learn their meaning begins to differentiate himself or herself from our consumerist culture. And scripture helps us by naming and supporting that movement of differentiation. Words of Jesus recorded in the Sermon on the Mount straightforwardly identified the anxiety that is preoccupied with food and clothing as typically pagan: "It is the Gentiles who strive for all these things." Jesus asked "Why do you worry about clothing?" - and it is anxiety that he asks us explore. He isn't a fierce ascetic, and he assures his followers that " your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things." The issue is summed up as "Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" Those are the questions that prayer explores. Our culture is riddled with anxiety about our unattractiveness, covering deeper angst about the hollowness of our lives and emptiness of our bodies. Experts in consumption offer their innumerable remedies - the ones that are currently displayed on such shows ranging from the charming "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," and "Style Court" to the darker ones that exploit the extremes of plastic surgery. Stuff done to us from outside, applied to the surfaces of our life to revitalize us. The experts often seem to admit that the secret is an interior one, and recommend their remedies as keys to inner well-being. But these insights exist in uneasy tension with the blatant consumerist emphasis on makeovers available for money. Jesus' words "Consider the lilies of the field how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these," evoke more inner skepticism than assent even among the devout. Yet they define the focus for the kind of prayer that goes to the root of our susceptibility to the propaganda of consumerism. The kind of "makeover" of myself that I can get for money can bring a sense of well-being that frankly can seem more potent than anything I get from "going to church." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow." The question is what kind of religion is that? Spirituality is the practice that digs deeper to the possibilities of a profound inner healing that addresses the root anxiety about our lack of well-being. Healing prayer means a willingness to face our anxious sense of lacking beauty and lacking worth in our selves. It means a readiness to allow ourselves to accept the beauty that we have and embrace the worth that is intrinsic to us through our oneness with Christ. The lily does not toil or spin in a frantic quest to gild itself, and there's no need to manufacture or makeover something we already have - our beauty. The scriptures speak of being clothed with Christ. You can't get more beautiful than we are already, only we don't realize it. The one who is prepared to be healed inwardly through prayer knows his or her own beauty in the eyes of God and her or his own worth and richness in union with Christ, and is going to be a very different kind of shopper. Not driven; more likely to keep things simple and well-chosen. As we grow more spiritually mature, we are freer to let the things we wear and buy celebrate and express an inner fullness that even "Solomon in all his glory" didn't have access to. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of May articles ]
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