The world is being weaned right now. Weaned off of consumerism, weaned off of unprecedented liberties and freedoms, weaned off of the addictive illusion of control, weaned off of busyness. That’s an awful lot of weaning, and the weaning process is not always easy.

I remember when we were making our first poor attempts at weaning our firstborn son.  We were on a summer project with college students living in a musty hotel room as a family of three, yet we decided it was the right time to wean our breastfed son. He went on what we infamously call “the milk crawl,” much like Gandhi’s nonviolent salt march. He refused to take formula. We tried to put the formula power into applesauce, yogurt, and even ice cream to get him to get the nutrients he needed.  After a few days of the hunger strike, we landed on a compromise: whole milk. And thus the weaning fiasco concluded.

Weaned From
We would do well to remember that we are not the first society that needed to be weaned off of worldliness. In fact, hundreds of years ago, William Wordsworth identified such a need in the English society in which he was raised in his poem, “The World is Too Much With Us.”

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Busyness, hurried living, consumerism and greed, dissipated passions and lack of wonder. The same insufficient sources of sustenance they sought to feed themselves then, we have been seeking to sustain us in our era.

COVID, with the new order (some might say disorder) it has recently ushered in, has begun a worldwide weaning. To be certain, many of us are refusing to graduate into more mature levels of sustenance, shifting our consumerism from physical shopping carts to online shopping carts and diverting our illusions of control into smaller projects like our homes or hall closets. To be honest, I have done all  of these things in different moments of the past seven weeks; however, I am learning to repent when I find myself craving the milk of the ways of the world. I want to be weaned well so that I might find myself like the Psalmist described himself in Psalm 131.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I  do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul,  like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time and forevermore! Psalm 131:1-3. 

Weaned To
Weaning implies a shift from what has been one’s steady source of sustenance and a shift toward a new source of sustenance. While we may not have had a say in the weaning process initiated by an invisible virus, we do have a say in our shift towards a new source.

For the believer in Christ, to be weaned off the world and old habits opens up the invitation to feed on fear and worry or to feed more deeply on the Word of God. In his providence, our good father will use this time of upheaval to mature his children. He can wield a pandemic in his hands as a tool by which to wean us from dependence on earthly and visible things that he might train us into mature, settled dependence upon himself.

This process might be bumpy and we may even revert back to old habits.  No one promised weaning would be wonderful or enjoyable. But the believer has meat to eat that the world does not understand or see. We are invited to feast on the bread of life. We have offered to us the better manna from heaven to which the white, flakey stuff from the wilderness provision pointed (see Exodus 16 & John 6:35-40).

Jesus said to them,  “I  am the bread of life;  whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). 

The Greek verb come in v. 35 is present progressive which implies continuing ongoing action. The one comes and keep coming to me will be fed, will be satisfied, will be sustained.

Oh, that we might be weaned well from the world and to the abundant sustenance of Christ.

*Photo by Mehrshad Rajabi on Unsplash