[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Steak

I spotted the little parcel wrapped in pink-brown butcher's paper in one of 
the frozen food bins and picked it up. A rib-eye steak, the label said (the 
best of all steak cuts, in my opinion): a tidy $8.42. Clearly someone had 
ordered it at the butcher's counter and then changed their mind and simply 
abandoned it. Hmph. At least it hadn't had a chance to freeze yet... so I 
took it back to the butcher's counter and the butcher sighed, unwrapped the 
steak, and put it back out with the other rib-eyes. "At least it wasn't 
left on one of the grocery shelves until it got warm," he said. "We have to 
throw out more good meat that way."

I'll believe it, just as I'll believe that they lose a lot of lettuce, left 
either out in the warm or tossed casually in the freezer -- too much 
trouble to put the stuff back where it belongs. Someone else will look 
after it.

It isn't malice; it's sloppiness and stupidity. It's the same 
sloppiness/stupidity that makes people casually leave their grocery carts 
out in the parking lot, blocking the handicapped spots. It's the same 
sloppiness that litters the landscape with tossed-away empty water bottles, 
which will not pick themselves up and put themselves in the recycling bin. 
It's the same sloppiness that pours paint thinner down the sink, as though 
somehow it would dispose of itself instead of fetching up in the lake, from 
which we draw our drinking water. People just don't pay attention.

They don't pay attention to other people, either. He's preoccupied; that's 
why he let the heavy store door swing shut as she was trying to wheel her 
baby's stroller through it. She''s deep-listening to her I-Pod, so she 
doesn't see the elderly woman standing in front of her, her balance 
uncertain as the crowded subway car lurches to a stop. We're all closed in 
our little worlds of self-preoccupation, and so we just don't *notice*.

It's all too easy to go from home into car into work into office into car 
into home without realize that there's a whole, big world out there, full 
of people who struggle just to get by. It's all too easy to focus on "I 
want" (which becomes "I need, I deserve") instead of looking into the 
hunger-sharpened faces of the poor.  All we have to do is to shrink our 
horizons enough. If I compare my lot in life only to that of people who are 
better off than myself, then I can justify self-pity (and stinginess). It's 
not, for example, until the newspaper runs a front-page picture of a 
hard-working young man who's down to his last two rotting teeth that it 
occurs to us that maybe dentistry is a huge problem for the working poor. 
After all, *we're* covered by the company plan.

It's easy, too, to focus on others' shortcomings so that we don't have to 
regard our own -- and it's especially easy to sugarcoat our bitchiness with 
pretend-concern for the other's "problems". What was that about splinters 
and two-by-fours? Why is it that we need to establish our own 
psychospiritual health by running down someone else's?

Maybe this is what fasting is supposed to be about. Not just deprivation 
for the sake of deprivation; not even fasting to follow in Christ's 
footsteps as he spent his days in the desert. But fasting is an ancient 
practice to heighten consciousness. It opens out our senses, sharpens our 
perceptions, makes us see and hear and touch and (above all) smell in ways 
that aren't ordinary to us. It makes us *notice*.

And maybe that's what Lent ought to be about -- simply paying attention. 
Observing. Taking note. Raising our heads from our own overwhelmingly 
important concerns and getting them cut down to size.  Doing a little 
reality check, or even perhaps a large reality check.  *Listening* to 
others, instead of hearing from them what we expect and want to 
hear.  Exercising a little humility, a lot of thoughtfulness, some modest 
common sense. Removing ourselves from the centre of the known universe and 
letting God be there, where God belongs.

Fasting is also about extending ourselves for ends beyond the satisfaction 
of our own immediate ease.  Perhaps it might be a little like backtracking 
20 feet to hand the steak back to the butcher saying, "Sorry, I've decided 
not to buy this after all" instead of simply dumping the thing  in the 
expectation that someone else will deal with it. Or it might look like 
taking on something not-quite-comfortable -- our own outrageously 
extravagant consumption, for a start.  (And no, the fact that one's 
neighbour drives a Hummer does not justify driving a Hummer oneself. Two 
wrongs never made a right, although three rights do make a left.)

Lent is for realizing that there is indeed a Gospel Way, a Kingdom Way, and 
our job is to try to align our lives with that Way, which is rarely easy, 
sometimes no fun at all, but inevitably fruitful and ultimately 
outrageously joyful. The price we pay for our deep preoccupation with Self 
is that joy.

And when you're in the supermarket, keep your eye out for wayward packages. 
You'd be surprised by what people leave lying around in the oddest places.