Gifting or Grasping
One of the many benefits of taking up a Lenten discipline is that it can sensitize us to certain behaviors or tendencies that we may have been blind to up until Ash Wednesday. If we give up eating fast food, maybe we didn’t realize how often we would opt for this kind of quick meal or even how we’ve trained our bodies to crave whatever is really in a McDonald’s burger. If we are trying to avoid using social media, perhaps we are surprised when we catch ourselves mindlessly reaching for our phones, not realizing how addicted we’ve become to doom scrolling our way to oblivion.
Our Lenten disciplines have the power to reveal these behaviors to us and hopefully, by the grace of God and our own cooperation, teach us new ways of approaching what we gave up so that our lives can be ordered towards our ultimate good.
We all have those little choices that bring us some sense of comfort. No matter if it is something from a drive-thru or checking Instagram for the 100th time in an hour, these actions can bring us some sense of consolation when faced with stress or frustration -or even just to fill the empty spaces within us. Our response to the situations in our lives, however, is not just limited to buying new things or certain online habits. If we go much deeper, we will find that there is a common root beneath the choices we make. At our very core, we really find that we are confronted with a choice between two options: to gift or to grasp.
God has created us to live in freedom, and with that freedom comes the potential to make choices each day that reflect our desire to make a gift of ourselves or to distort our own self-image by grasping after people, things, and feelings.
We can see how we are faced with the choice between gifting and grasping most clearly when we find ourselves in a situation that pushes us to our emotional extremes. When someone we love dies, if our time with someone is coming to an end, or if a relationship that we value is suddenly taken away from us, our hearts can be inclined to grasp for things that bring us comfort. If our significant other suddenly breaks up with us, it is no wonder that we immediately begin looking for someone or something to fill the void. We try to grasp in order to avoid the pain within our hearts. It’s not that surprising, really. If we find ourselves in pain, we want to try and find something or someone that can soothe us.
Our hearts can be conditioned to grasp for the attention of others, to grasp and cling onto relationships in a way that is harmful for ourselves and others, and even to grasp onto others in a way that they only become useful in satisfying our emotional or sexual needs.
Grasping not only takes place within the extremes of an unhealthy relationship; it can surface within mostly healthy relationships as well. We grasp when we act selfishly, we grasp when we lose sight of the personhood of another, we grasp as we make everything about satisfying our own needs and desires. We can even grasp in our relationship with God when we become fixated on the consolations He gives us rather than God Himself.
Grasping can infect us and permeate so many parts of our day. Living this way leads us on an unending quest to find satisfaction in things, feelings, and behaviors that are ultimately unsatisfying.
Making a gift of ourselves, however, will lead to a completely opposite result. This odd equation doesn’t seem to make much sense, but when we give of ourselves, we find that we receive much more than we could ever hope to have by grasping.
In making a gift of ourselves, we learn that loving our neighbor is a choice that must be made every single day. In making this choice, we learn that in dying to our own sense of entitlement to certain feelings or experiences, we can actually find greater satisfaction and meaning in our lives. We can see choosing gifting over grasping in all of the lives of the saints, but of course we see the best example of gifting in Jesus on the Cross. In the midst of jeers and taunts to save himself and come down from this instrument of torture, we see the perfect act of self-gift. Instead of clinging to his divine power, “...he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philipians 2:7-8)
Making a gift of ourselves always involves a little death. We put to death and abandon our own preferences for the sake of the will of God. We lay down our lives for the sake of those around us. Instead of trying to hopelessly cling to something or someone, we grow conditioned to make our hearts more available to love others.
So much of learning to love well points us to the little ways that we choose to love each day, so that when the bigger challenges come along, our hearts are already directed towards making a gift of ourselves. We may not have the same experience of climbing Golgotha, but we are all called to pick up our cross and follow him. As we look to the great gift of Easter, let us prepare our hearts by crucifying them with Christ - ordering them to choose gift over grasp, love over lust, His will over mine.