Giving up Consumerism for Lent
Throughout most of my life, lent has always looked the same. I give up television, desserts, and usually only for the first day or two, hot showers. I have been determined to make this lent different but struggled to find a way until the topic of consumerism fell on my ears. In its most simplified form, I would say that consumerism is the ideology that enables and leads us to instant gratification, seeking the material object for the sake of itself, rather than for the love of God and neighbor. Have you ever stopped to think about how you are interacting with creation? Are you aware of the mission of man to sanctify and glorify all of creation and to bring it back to God? In a fantastic work entitled The One Thing is Three, Fr. Michael Gaitley MIC writes: "God created man to be the free and conscious savior of creation. Indeed, man's vocation was to bring the creatures of earth back to God, because they couldn't do it on their own. Yes, these creatu
