BEYOND THE NECESSARY: LAVISH, NOT TECHNIQUE

JOHN 12 - “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?" (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, "Leave her alone.”

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” - Jacques Ellul

We need to tend to the garden of our imaginations, tilling new space for other ideas to grow. So much of our disposition, so much of my disposition, comes to me by way of assumption and not attention.

One way this operates in me is found in my sensibilities that eschew waste. We live on a relatively trim budget. For the majority of clergy, pastoring is not a lucrative endeavor. It shouldn’t be. This does mean, however, that we need to be sober-minded and cost-conscious in our decision-making. When we eat out, Diana is masterful at making decisions that benefit our family, giving us more for our money (a skill that suits most of us with the rising costs of absurd inflation). It does occur, on occasion, that some food is not enjoyed, or finished, or for some odd reason goes to waste. It was, for a long time, an inescapable annoyance to me. Keeping in mind the psycho-dynamic of children harmed by being forced to finish their meals and those who were lectured on global starvation around the dining room table, it is still reasonable to infer that none of us like to see food go to waste. We don’t like to see anything go to waste.

Waste is a scandalous reality of our time. We exist in an era of extraordinary opulence and excess. Yet, with billions being exchanged, budgeted, and allocated for weapons, salaries, commodities, and immeasurable transactions, poverty relentlessly exists and is tolerated. And, systems that churn cycles of poverty are clung to. Poverty is sustained not due to a lack of resources, but due to a lack of spiritual maturity. The U.S. spent roughly $850 billion this year arming itself. Global hunger could be eradicated for a little over $200 billion.

Waste is the condemnation that indicts us all in light of these disturbing disparities. We are all complicit in the systems and complexities of the culture that we’re enmeshed within. Ours is a world of insatiable consumption laced with a tranquilizing apathy that allows us to ignore those experiencing poverty in our communities.

The account of Mary’s spikenard has been preached to death, risking the loss of its impact and significance. Churched people have heard how it most likely cost a year’s wages. Estimates place it around $58,000 to upward of $65,000. Then, just like that, it’s all over the floor - all over Christ’s feet. Can we imagine being in a room where, even for our greatest heroes and inspirations, tens of thousands of dollars are poured out, “laid waste” on the floor? Mary had within her means the “excess of the precious” and poured it out.

There is a word we do not appropriately utilize enough: lavish. We hear it as “luxurious” or “opulent” but not as a verb: to bestow something in generous or extravagant quantities on. To lavish upon is to broadcast goodness indiscriminately. When the Sower went to sow his seed in Christ’s well known parable, he did not selectively and strategically allocate each seed placement, burying them methodically, choosing the precise and most efficient location. Rather, he broadcasts them unsystematically, even if that meant that only one-fourth fell upon ground that could sustain the goodness lavished upon it.

This could run contrary to our modern sensibilities. In a technological, neo-liberal capitalist society, we imagine data and metrics as the calculative means to bring about the good life. Our culture worships at the altar of efficiency and expediency, where the ends tragically justify the means. Technique is religiously adhered to as the totality of the efficient or the reign of the systematic. It's the relentless obsession with a singular vision, the myth that the particular and relative do not exist, that we can find the “one best way” to do everything, from building bridges to organizing our sock drawers. Here, the universal becomes oppressive. This is the impulse that drove colonialism: a singular, dominant culture viewed as the model of “civility,” while the rest are are categorically perceived as uncivilized, and therefor utilized as resource. Jacques Ellul writes extensively on the ways technique has, “taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth, all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.” Again, technique is the oppressive universal, and mastery and efficiency are often its expression.

An example of this that I touch on quite a bit is “whiteness.” To mention it can disturb some, almost landing as hate speech, but whiteness is not phenotypical; it does not speak directly of skin color. No one is born white. To talk about whiteness is to name and describe “a historical process of identity reconstruction” (Jennings). For this essay, it’s important to notice how whiteness functions as a “singular vision of maturity: a set of particularities cloaked in neutrality” that offers a sense of belonging by way of a social mechanism that grants, often unfelt, advantages to descendants of Europeans, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. In the words of Toni Morrison, “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized and categorized as the “civil” standard by which all other cultures and people groups are measured. This reality is the lasting legacy of a social framework that self-identified as masterful, efficient, and expedient.

Today, we are constantly immersed in systems, constructs, and institutions permeated with the fetishization of mastery. It is the gateway drug of acquisition, possession, and management (control) that often goes under the name of professionalism, maturity, and formation. This is all bound up with pedigree and prestige. It is seen as desirable. What I want to emphasize, however, is how damaging this is. The minute we narrow maturity into a singular, narrowed vision of efficiency and effectiveness, we’re on the path of oppression. Judas is calculative and narrow in his vision of “right use.” “This should have been sold…” Utility and functionality animate oppression. Betrayal and violence were his natural next steps. He is a stark reminder of technique’s trajectory.

What does management, technique, and mastery have to do with Mary and her spikenard? I would offer that nothing runs more contrary, more resistant to technique and mastery than an ethic of lavishing. This is Gospel: goodness dwelling among us, freely broadcasting a loving, liberating word and deed that does justice, loves mercy, and walks humbly, without one trace of management or coercion. There is no technique, just abundant grace: a lavish stream of life poured out for the sake of the world, regardless of reception. Here is abundant love poured out, whether it’s received or not. Here is radical forgiveness poured out, whether it’s cherished or not. The essence of love resides in the unconditional. True love is unqualified, unreserved, and unrestricted. It flows like a river of goodness into the life of the other.

I want to return back to the dilemma of our family eating out while trying to remain financially accountable, prioritizing prudent spending in our shared life. Something happened to me one day when I realized that I was actually making our children feel bad. The lesson of being resourceful was being washed out by my overbearing presence, which made them feel a sense of shame. In reality, they’re very resourceful and deeply conscious about the ways they consume. The realization came to me in a moment where I began to realize that waste is a part of the human condition. Our bodies produce it. Granted, we can develop broken and diseased forms of wastefulness, catastrophes like plastic in the ocean, fresh food thrown into dumpsters, and ceaseless landfills polluting the earth. Wastefulness in balance, however, can receive its rightful transfiguration in the form of lavishing.

In that moment of clarity with my children, I realized that love always lavishes. Love always pours out. It takes the family on vacations that will create a cherished memory, and only that, not a product or an outcome that can be commodified. Love buys flowers that will wilt, meals that will spoil, gifts that will be stored, and experiences that will end. It does not prioritize the efficient but does everything it can to see past the “efficient and necessary” into the more loving and human world of “the beautiful and the good.” This is Mary’s gift to Christ, and Christ’s gift to the Body. Soon, that fragrance will mingle with odorous wounding and bleeding. Yet, Jesus resists the ethic of efficiency and once again reveals the Gospel, a beautiful lavishing of goodness and love.

Christians are an incarnate people, a people of sacred, anointed embodiment. We anoint bodies at baptism, ordination, healing prayer, and death. The burial rite that Mary practices not only reveals her understanding of the moment but orients the Totus Christus (the whole body of Christ, including you and I) for a clarifying vision. She heals our sense of sight from the blindness of efficiency that enslaves us to technique and severs us from human connection. Moreso, she makes known to us the very posture and nature of our shared worship.

Alexander Schmemmann, when writing on Christian worship, liturgy, and how its practices are so often seen as unnecessary, says this,

The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering…this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful. Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation and joy.

The Gospel is “beyond the categories of the ‘necessary,’” and it is the only thing that will save the world. Lavishing will save the world, not management and efficiency, no matter how well we organize. We will not engineer our way into justice nor progress our way (by means of advancement) into human flourishing.

Paul Kingsnorth calls this “the myth of progress,” where we subscribe to the false narrative of our culture that human beings “started out as ignorant savages and are moving through a series of progressive steps in which, at every point, we get more clever, rich, smarter, healthier, and technology is the vehicle of human flourishing, the good life.” We have not been able to progress our way out of greed, coercion, subjugation, exploitation, and oppression. New tools usher in new power, which almost always tend to oppress through mastery. Neo-liberalism, an economic ideology, carries with it a framework with a set of moral lenses. It likes to quantify things as data, metrics, and, ultimately, categorize efforts as a failure or success. Again, this is technique projected as a cure for the human condition. But technique will not save the world. Dostoevsky speaks to the future, “beauty will save the world,” or at least beauty when it’s transfigured. And, whatever beauty is, it is not “necessary,” it is lavished goodness.

My prayer for this Holy Monday is that we may prayerfully cultivate an ethic of lavishing, a holy wastefulness that does not ask “is it efficient, or is it expedient?,” but instead, “is it lovely, is it sacred?” And then, “what can I pour out?” What do we have, stored up, unused but fragrant, that we can pour out upon the sacred bodies in our lives? Anything “wasted” in-love is not wasted at all. So much in life, like hair and perfume, is superfluous. And, it is precisely the superfluous that finds its rightful place being lavished upon the sacred other in our lives. Fundamentally, to be a human, according to St. Francis, is to be poor. We are all born into dependency and, ultimately, headed back toward dependency. All of our lives are inextricably bound up in what Dr. King called an “inescapable network” of mutual interdependency. As we journey to the Cross with Christ, we’re reminded of what saves the world: that which is lovingly poured out, even for a people who don’t know what they’re doing. Lavishing will save the world. We should aim our gifts at their rightful place, without measuring or calculating for efficiency, but instead with the vision of indiscriminate abundance and love. May God’s grace teach us to number our days and to transcend the necessary so that we may live in the lavishing, loving, liberation of God’s goodness and beauty. AMEN.

“What you have in excess, give to the poor, and then you have wiped the feet of the Lord. For the hair seems to be the superfluous part of the body. You have something to spare of your abundance: it is superfluous to you but necessary for the feet of the Lord. Perhaps on this earth the Lord’s feet are still in need. For of whom but of his members is he yet to say in the end, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of mine, you did it unto me”? You spent what was superfluous for yourselves, but you have done what was grateful to my feet.” Augustine, Tractates on The Gospel of John, 50.6.21