Getting to the Point: economics

Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

On Wednesdays I am going through the chapters of my new book Idol Thoughts, to discuss some of the basic ideas therein, hopefully in service of persuading a few of youse guys to part with a few pennies to buy a copy.

We are on chapter six now, which explores the thought of avarice. We have talked about gluttony and lust already; now with avarice something new is introduced into our minds. Gluttony and lust are both disordered expressions of immediate physical urges. They are matters of the body, primarily, and only secondarily are ‘thoughts’ about reality, as we make the fatal move of thinking that our true and vital happiness lies in the immediate satisfaction of physical cravings.

Avarice begins the great journey inward to more strictly intellectual projects, while still having an immediate physical expression. Where gluttony and lust, being of the body, are both matters of the immediate moment, of the urgent ‘now’, avarice asks the fatal question: but what about… tomorrow? Will I have what I need for my life… tomorrow?

Happiness as material security—this is the fatal mistake of avarice. It is not a matter of never making plans for the future, or not being responsible and prudent in one’s financial affairs. Dickens’ Mr. Micawber who lurches with his family from one financial crisis to another is not a picture of Christian virtue.

Where avarice goes wrong is that it locates our security for the future in our material wealth, and that it identifies happiness with that material security. The miser clutching his treasure to himself, the greedy tycoon never satisfied with his wealth but always grabbing for more, Smaug the Dragon on his bed of gold coins—these are the common pictures of avarice.

But we have to be careful not to leave it there, in its grossest and most obvious manifestations. Most of us do not sleep on a bed of gold coins (nor would we find it particularly comfortable, not being dragons). We are not thereby assured of freedom from greed.

It really boils down to a question of security. Where do we place our security? In things, and making sure we have enough things to last us? That seems… unwise somehow. Things are flammable, you know. Or is our security elsewhere? Say, in the heart of God?

It’s all about the future, and as Christians we have to take the long view about that particular subject. Our future as we understand it is going to be considerably more than the eighty or ninety years we may hope for, and if our one wealth is what we own… well, I don’t think They receive that currency There.

Money and goods are important in securing our future, though—the Gospels are clear on that point. But the security lies not in hoarding but in sharing, not in piling up but in clearing out, not in taking but in giving. It is impossible to read the Gospels thoroughly and not get it that almsgiving, sharing our treasure with the poor, is of the essence in deciding our eternal fate. I could quote a half dozen passages to you on precisely that point, but really if you don’t already know that to be so, you need to crack open your bible and get reading, because it’s all over the place, directly in the words and preaching of Jesus Christ.

And this is the real damage done by avarice—it chokes off our generosity to the poor. And by doing so, by making it very hard for us to give alms, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, it actually makes our future profoundly insecure, imperils our real future happiness. We are meant to be people oriented towards the future, but that concern for tomorrow rightly understood makes us intensely involved with alleviating the misery of today, serving the needs of our brothers and sisters today.

In the book, I give a whole series of Gospel passages to meditate on to counter the lie of avarice—it is a core theme in the Scriptures.

And avarice is a core sin in humanity, one that causes so much misery in this world, so much needless suffering of the poor and the abandoned. If every believing Christian took to heart what Our Lord says about these matters and gave what they could, shared what they had, so many tragic and harsh situations would simply not be so, so many evils would be averted.

But to do that we need to believe that Our Father in heaven loves us and is caring for us and that our whole life is nothing else but to live in His presence and share in His love, and that is where prayer and meditation on the Word of God comes in.

I have quite a bit more to say on the subject in the book, but will leave it to you to discover it there.

Monday, September 14, 2015

All About The Money

Hear this, all peoples!

Give ear, all inhabitants of the world,

both low and high, rich and poor together!

My mouth shall speak wisdom;

the meditation of my heart shall be understanding.

I will incline my ear to a proverb;

I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre.

Why should I fear in times of trouble,

when the iniquity of those who cheat me surrounds me,

those who trust in their wealth and boast of the abundance of their riches?

Truly no man can ransom another, or give to God the price of his life,

for the ransom of their life is costly and can never suffice,

that he should live on forever and never see the pit.

For he sees that even the wise die; the fool and the stupid alike must perish

and leave their wealth to others.

Their graves are their homes forever, their dwelling places to all generations,

though they called lands by their own names.

Man in his pomp will not remain; he is like the beasts that perish.

This is the path of those who have foolish confidence;

yet after them people approve of their boasts.

Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol; death shall be their shepherd,

and the upright shall rule over them in the morning.

Their form shall be consumed in Sheol, with no place to dwell.

But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.

Be not afraid when a man becomes rich, when the glory of his house increases.

For when he dies he will carry nothing away; his glory will not go down after him.

For though, while he lives, he counts himself blessed

—and though you get praise when you do well for yourself—

his soul will go to the generation of his fathers, who will never again see light.

Man in his pomp yet without understanding is like the beasts that perish.

Psalm 49

Reflection – Well, this is a psalm for our times, truly. I have become convinced over the years that as much as our society is obsessed with sex and eroticism, it is equally obsessed with wealth and the privileges that come with that. There is an almost creepy obsequiousness given to the wealthy elites of our world, while to be poor is to be a ‘loser’, a ‘nobody’.

This is at least part of the explanation for the bizarre appeal of Donald Trump right now – he is just so very, very rich—so hey, he must be qualified to be president, right? And this same worship of money, wealth, power so easily slips into Christianity—the prosperity Gospel is a perversion of faith, in which faith in Jesus manifests itself in becoming successful in worldly terms.

That is a heresy, of course, in the strict sense of the terms, a selective reading of the faith. Prosperity Gospel Christians select the Scripture verses that suggest that point of view, while ignoring the vast number of verses, like Psalm 49, that contradict it.

The truth of Psalm 49 and so many other key passages (the camel through the eye of the needle, the first beatitude, ‘foxes have holes’, and so forth) is that earthly riches have nothing whatsoever to do with virtue, with God’s favour, with anything at all really, that is worth running after and bothering about.

It is not that money is evil, but rather that it is not especially good. It is neither wealth nor poverty that wins us a share in the kingdom of heaven, but faith, hope, and love, and our whole energy as Christian men and women should be ordered towards those and not the size of our bank account, car, house.

I say this fully aware (having lived in North American society all my life) that there is a genuine idolatry of money in our world, an obsessive valuing of it that is fierce and beyond reason. There is real need in our day for young men and women to embrace voluntary poverty in the venerable path of consecrated life, and a real need for all Christians in whatever state of life to shake off the pernicious nonsense of money-worship, ‘the Lord is my financier’ approach to religion.

Jesus does promise to make us rich beyond our imagining—rich in love, rich in grace, rich in joy and peace and beauty. And yes, the kingdom of heaven is such that all have all they need and all rejoice in receiving and giving all from all for all to all. But the path to that kingdom of plenty and wealth is the path of total love and generosity and careless detachment in this life from anything that would distract us from the real business of life which is loving.

Psalm 49 is one among many scriptures that help us in this regard, so let us pray it, and the others as well, especially we poor greedy North Americans who honestly believe that money can make us happy and that being rich really counts for something in this world. May we repent of that foolishness, and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, amen.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Where Life Gets Cold and Hard

Arise — go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.

Little — be always little! Be simple, poor, childlike.

Preach the Gospel with your life — without compromise! Listen to the Spirit. He will lead you.

Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.

Love... love... love, never counting the cost.

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always, fast.

Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbour’s feet. Go without fear into the depth of men’s hearts. I shall be with you.

Pray always. I will be your rest.

The Little Mandate of Madonna House

Go into the marketplace and stay with Me. This line of the mandate can at times cause a blank stare of incomprehension upon first hearing (or second, or third for that matter). Go into the… what? The where? Why?

In the original context of Catherine’s reception of the Mandate, it meant a very simple thing: she was to go back into the slums and live among the people she was serving. She was not to be some kind of professional do-gooder punching in and punching out a time clock, doing good works from 9 to 5, five days a week.

No, she was to live with the people she served, and so she did, in Toronto, Harlem, Chicago. It was this whole business of immersion into people’s lives, of presence where people are, being with them, being involved with them without that professional kind of distance coming into it so much.

But of course as years went by and the apostolate changed and shifted in mysterious and The marketplace is a symbol of that place where people live, but not the place where people love. Markets are places of buying and selling, where goods are evaluated and priced, bargained for and consumed, rejected or accepted as a cheap rip-off or a good deal. All of which is fine, when it is a car or a cucumber, an apple or, well, an Apple.

Not so great when it is human beings bought and sold, human integrity, human lives weighed in the balance and found worthy of ‘use’ or useless. You are worth so much of my time and energy… or not, as the case may be.

Marketplaces are fine places for moving goods and services around efficiently and in a cost-effective way. Not such great places to live in as the complete expression of our humanity. And in our fallen broken world, this is too much the case, too often, don’t you think? We buy and sell… affection, friendship, time, sex, respect and so many other personal goods. The currency may not be money (it usually isn’t) but it is cold hard cash regardless.

Cold and hard, and the more the marketplace is our world, the colder and harder it gets. And so MH strives to go into these places where human beings are, where human beings live, where life can get very cold and hard and make it a bit warmer, a bit more loving, a bit less acquisitive.

Catherine would much later speak about this line of the Mandate in its depths, and said:

What’s the marketplace? Is that the secular city? Is that the factual marketplace?... that is to say the urban inner city or is it the suburbia where all the supermarkets are? Or is it as we were invited to West Pakistan, a desert, factually a sandy desert? No. It’s simply the soul of man. The marketplace is the soul of man. The marketplace is the soul of man where man trades his soul either to God or to the Devil, or to the in-between. [It is a place of a] sort of indifference, complacency, where he sells hot wares and cold wares, which God tolerates, especially the cold. But fortunately or unfortunately we have to deal also with the tepid and that supermarket of the spiritual world, country, place, whatever you call it.

Going into the marketplace and staying with Jesus there means being acutely alive to every little movement of un-love, of buying and selling in the human soul (starting with our own soul, of course), of every reduction of person to thing, of every cooling and hardening trend in our own human lives and hearts and in the lives and hearts of those we are involved with.

And staying with Jesus in that (I’ll cover the last part of this paragraph next week). That is, living out our communion with Christ in such a way, such a proximity to ‘the marketplace’ in all the senses it can be understood, that it draws others to enter into it.

When guests leave MH after a long time, they often give a little thank you speech in the dining room. More often than not, they say something along the lines of “I have learned how to love here.” We don’t set out to teach people how to love; on any given day we may feel pretty incompetent to do so!

But it seems like something mysteriously gets transmitted—at least, that’s what they tell us, over and over again. Our job is to stay with whoever God sends us. His job is to take it from there and radiate love into all the buying and selling of our poor broken humanity. And that’s what that line of the Mandate means, as far as I understand it.