What do you worship? Open up your wallet.

“If what you believe is what you say and do, the guiding provocation runs like this:  Show me your receipts, your text messages, your gas mileage, your online history, a record of your daily logs and, just to get things started, a transcript of the words you’ve spoken aloud in the course of a single day, and then we might begin to get a picture of your religious commitments.  What doors of perception might begin to open when we allow ourselves to look at religion – and our own lives – in this way?  What personal hypocrisies do we keep obscured to ourselves when we don’t?”

David Dark is an author who lives in Nashville and teaches currently at Belmont University.  I have taught his essay, “Attention Collection” (from which this excerpt is drawn) in my college classroom for years.  In it, he argues that we are what we DO as much as what we say.  Further, when we get honest about this, we discover that we oftener sit vigil to the god of Mammon than we do the “good” that, as our narrative journey through Lent continues, we will sooner crucify than bother to keep alive by resisting the forces of self-interest, bullying, and general indifference.

Soon, we will approach the holy days of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.  On the first of these, Jesus pleaded with his friends to “stay awake” with him.  To companion him, and to witness the miscarriage of justice that involved his unwarranted arrest and the tragic events that would follow.

There has never been a time in history when it’s been easy to keep vigil for goodness, and we are living in the midst of perilous times today.  The returns-on-investment for goodness are notoriously poor.  The sleazy hospital operator who rakes in profits for his yachts ends up with more cookies than the hard-working internist trying to save the lives of his indigent patients.  Ditto the educational consultants rather than the underpaid school teachers.  The list goes on.

But rather than point fingers, which is so so easy to do, let’s step into our own private hypocrisies for a minute..  By what moral calculus do I splurge on a pricey lotion when I just might consider taking the time to donate my eyeglass frames to a charity that will recycle them?  There are so many grey areas, in which we make daily micro-choices that enable us to stay on the side of being “good people,” because — who can fret over every little decision, right?

But without getting neurotic about it, we can consider for a brief moment our general mindset.  Those of us writing and reading this are privileged beyond imagining.  Do we take this for granted, allowing our unexamined and largely undeserved entitlement to justify each and every self-gratification?  Or do we occasionally stop and wonder if there isn’t some tweaking we ought to be doing, around what we worship.  What we let ourselves get away with.  And how we just might want to change.  A little.

“Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are,” John Ruskin once wrote.

Open your wallets, review your PayPal accounts, look back at your Venmo.  Where have you invested your time, treasure, trust and energies – the last, most importantly.  And how does this sit with you?

Stay awake, Jesus said, before he was killed.