February 15th, 2024
“Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom.”
Choose life, says Moses, and isn’t that obvious? Its immediate benefits seem more apparent, at face value, than Jesus’ command to take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow him.
Who wouldn’t choose life—choose the blessing rather than the curse?
The Israelites have 27 chapters of Leviticus and 20 chapters of Exodus that lay out the law of their covenant with God–that articulate exactly what it means for a community in relationship with God to choose life. But, after today’s reading, there follow nearly just as many books of the Old Testament that detail all the ways in which God’s chosen people struggle to follow the path of life and prosperity. They choose doom and death comes upon them.
After a painstakingly detailed covenant, how could God’s people become so swayed from the obvious good?
I genuinely would rather read a book than open up Instagram, but it’s very easy to just open my computer browser and type in Instagram.com (Deleting the app off a phone is hardly a deterrent, I crossed that Rubicon long ago). We know that Amazon underpays and overworks its warehouse workers and has run small businesses owned by families out of business, but still, half of our country is subscribed to Prime. We know the speed and bargains actually cost the dignified livelihood of a worker who is our neighbor. But still, we buy $5 shirts, we curate lives for the internet, and we find our distraction frittered away in the glowing silo of a screen.
None of this is activity we say we want, ideals we aspire to. It’s just easy to forget what brings the most joy isn’t actually the easy hit of dopamine or the most convenient route between two points.
There are many places we can go for quick hits, brief rushes of enjoyment. It is easy to be distracted and entertained—but the more rewarding and life-giving aspects of human existence often seem an uphill battle. It was not always this way and it does not have to be this way.
During Lent we embark on a personal conversion, we know this. We embark on our own attempt to bring our focus back to the Beauty that gives us life, and to teach our hearts to desire it rather than the spectacle of Mammon’s empty glamour. This is, of course, a necessary askesis–or ascetic discipline–of the season.
So perhaps a good question to bring into Lent is the question Moses sets before the Israelites: what does it mean for us to choose life together? Why does our culture–in so many ways–make it easier to choose misery than seek the good?
This Lent, we rend our hearts, to render them softened flesh rather than stone. But perhaps we might also consider how we could create a world, as Peter Maurin– the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement –would say, in which it is easier to be good? In which we make it easier for one another to choose life–and love of neighbor–rather than death.
Renee Roden is a freelance writer, journalist, and playwright. She is the Vice President of the Board of The Catholic Artist Connection.