The Gospel of Self-Indulgence

A few weeks ago, I drove through the neighborhood where I lived when I first started divinity school. A block from my old apartment was a large chain convenience store, which is still there. And I remembered that I used to buy a lot of my food there!

That’s right: I dined on such delicacies as cereal, raisins, spaghetti, snack bars, and pretty much anything else that you can buy at a convenience store! Friends, this was not because I was financially limited; I could have gone to a grocery store.

It was due to negligence in the self-care department. I thought I was too busy to buy and eat nutritious food–even though I suffered winter colds for months on end. I made time for schoolwork, job obligations, spending time with friends and volunteering at church — but not for self-care.

I didn’t understand that self-care is a religious issue.

On the one hand, many mass media outlets promote a gospel of self-indulgence. You may have heard of the Prosperity Gospel, the school of belief that God wants us to be rich, to have material goods far beyond our needs, to be positively drenched in financial excess. The Self-Indulgence Gospel is similar.

At their worst, proponents of self-indulgence tell us our highest calling is to get constant massages, food-rubs, expensive meals, exotic vacations, unnecessary home goods, and all other manner of excessive pampering — all in the guise of self-love and spirituality.

This gospel of self-indulgence is ultimately unfulfilling. It is spirituality emptied of belief, obligation, relationship and other critical ingredients in a meaningful life.

Yet too many of us go to the other extreme: self-negation.

In this view, conscious or subconscious, God has more important things to worry about than whether or not we are taking good care of ourselves. God is concerned with war, poverty, global warming and other big problems of the world. We don’t have a spiritual obligation to take care of ourselves — to do so might even be decadent in light of the world’s tumult. This is an over-reaction to the messages of excess and self-indulgence in commercial culture.

I advocate for a spiritual middle ground, with an emphasis on self-awareness and self-care. Awareness means having the wisdom to know what we really need, and care is taking action to make sure our needs are met.

Why self-care? Appropriate self-care nurtures our sense of safety and comfort, replenishes our energy for taking on life’s challenges, and gives us more good feeling to invest in our relationships with family, friends, fellow congregants, and the larger world. Our bodies and souls are blessings. And they are our best tools for serving one another and the sacred. Let’s take good care of them.

Update 12/14/07 - In the comments, John 672 draws a parallel with the teachings of Buddhism:

Your post confronting the issue of self indulgence and self neglect reminds me of the story a Buddha - how he went from being a pampered prince, to nearly starving himself to death to find enlightenment. He, too, settled on a middle way…