Sunday, November 30, 2008

Putting Our Own House in Order

Our Story to Write

I WAS WALKING ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend's memory, and he told how the old-time people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as "sitting till bedtime." After supper, when they weren't too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other story. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, "They had everything but money."
Wendell Berry The Work of Local Culture

I begin this blog with a Wendell Berry excerpt about his friend’s lament. Berry, a radical agrarian localist, has made his life about the small beautiful circle that is his land and town. He has made it his imagination’s service to build powerful metaphors in which to carry the stories of his neighbors and family. He has committed himself to preserving the fragile discussion between creation and economics. He has made his home & village his bully pulpit.

As I have watched the New Adam community grow and change it has been interesting to watch the power of the home in this emerging enclave. From Eric Brown’s dinners to Dave & Angela Carlson’s holiday pageants and celebrations, it is clear that our stories come alive when they are housed. These nonfiction plays are offered a sacred place when we gather together and listen and share and create a larger story.

As I have pondered and ruminated over the current financial struggles of our nation and world I continue to go back to Berry for vision and solace. He is a renaissance man and his engagement of land, labor, and literature represent to me the kind of mentor for which my soul longs. I, as many men, long for leadership that is rooted in a place, rooted in a heartfelt commitment to be truly human with a people.

As New Adam and Samson have begun to offer a context for our personal stories to be told, we are now beginning to see that our personal lives are indeed a tapestry of narratives that create a world be it small and fledgling. E.F Schumacher’s famous work Small is Beautiful was written about economics but it is evident from authors like Schumacher and Berry and now writers like Michael Pollen (The Botany of Desire), that local is reality. Trans local and global are concepts but they are unable to contain and sustain the deepest parts of our humanity. We are world citizens after we are neighbors.

That is why this current crisis in confidence regarding economies is actually a good thing. For the first time in my life time we are beginning to question the power of the expert to oversee and steward our lives for us. Powerful corporate forces and global conglomerates are experiencing meltdown and in some ways this is due to their actual non existence on the local level. Except for political power they do not exist. You cannot have relationship with a company or global enterprise. When I say they do not exist I mean this on an ontological level. Obviously they exist but their inability to be truly human means their conversation with me is always forced, larger and more abstract than my real life is, and finally unable to see and know the impact of their behavior on me and my family. How many of you have a local banker. How many could go to a bank in their town and ask for help from a person who you knew and who knew you. These days are gone.

As money is continuing to go out to support and sustain the financial sector, it appears that many are bracing themselves for some tough times ahead. Many are beginning to sense that they must get their own house in order and one of the primary ways to do that is to take back the power of the local. How might the New Adam community take back that power to write our own story together?

Get out of Debt

One of the reasons many of us do not share our personal stories when it comes to finances is that we are ashamed of the predicaments into which we have gotten ourselves. We realize now the lack of wisdom in many of our purchases and business ventures. Our speculation was often only submitted to those who had little negative feedback and leveraging was the way we got what we thought we needed sooner than later. It has become evident that many mortgage and loan companies, for example, were more than predatory in this most recent debacle of international borrowing. Because they did not really know our “real life situation” they hedged their bets as best they could but in truth hoped the house of cards did not crumble in their life time. Much like corporate polluters, they hoped the barium and lead burial grounds were never found in this lifetime. Oops!

It is clear now that the debt load of many Americans may put them in debtor’s prison for their entire life time. Scripture is revealing in this area but most of us do not or did not want to hear that kind of cautionary wisdom and discretion. We were living within our means as defined by consumer culture not biblical culture. Most of the companies willing to loan us money had little knowledge of our true estate. Most bought into the ever increasing worth of homes phenomenon and believed that borrowers would use those inflated prices to pay off their commitments if worse came to worse. The conversation as to whether one should borrow or not is never local as most of the companies from which we borrow and buy view personal liability statistically and not literally. The impact of you defaulting on a loan plays little into their ability to exist. They view your relationship statistically and feel comfortable in the downside possibilities based on prior economic cycles. However, much like the existence of a black swan or 9/11, it is not what can be predicted that changes everything. It is what seems irreconcilable and chaotic that can alter the landscape of a world, a nation, or a family in a brief moment in time. It is clear that smart and savvy CEO's went beyond statistical caution and much of the world is close to going under due to their caprice.

Getting out of debt will mean rearranging many of our dreams and taking money’s we deemed for leisure, pleasure, the future or just technological up selling to now go to the hidden world of debt repayment. I say hidden because this means our consumption must on some level cease or be greatly curtailed. This is always hard as paying off debts means using “hard dollar cash” or real money for what we have already experienced and in some cases even used up. Credit card money is on some levels not real. Real money is money one earns and has power over how they are going to use that money. Most of us do not even realize the fine print on many credit card applications. We are truly the servant to the lender.

We must make debt an issue of great discernment and be willing to see the American dream as a counter narrative to the biblical mandates given to us by our Lord. As Michael Hudson has said, “No economy can keep up with the burden of debts growing at exponential rates faster than the economy itself is growing.” For many of us, our debt reduction is happening at such a slow rate we are giving away our retirements and children’s college funds. Flat out, we have no more to spend. Our coffers are dry.

See Our Money as “Our” Money

To return to the local is to understand the impact of being unable to help others when they need it. When we are so highly leveraged we cannot allow anyone of need into our space. We must keep them at bay and stand in Pharisaical judgment over their current neediness. In truth, we may be weeks or months away from the same predicament and our stern reproof is that hypocritical tendency to judge the self we see in others more harshly. This is not a problem like drinking. It is more like a food addiction. Just like we must eat so must we work and earn a living. Therefore, what we do with money and what money does to us matters.

For most of us, money has been a powerful force for either avoiding or shoring up our wounded selves. The power and the prestige that comes through the accumulation of things was our sign to the world that “we are doing just fine thank you.” In the game of life we are the winners. In the game of life we are the survivors. We know this game and have figured out how to procure and sustain our stuff in times of down turn and recession. In fact, in most cases we are rewarded for our opulence and wealth regardless of how we got it or sustain it. This is the Achilles heel in American Christianity where we obsess about gay marriage, communism, pornography, divorce, and totally ignore the dark side of absentee fathers, working mothers, latch key children, premature death due to over exhaustion, and the mono personality of the type A working boss we all put on our boards and seek direction for the paying off of our mega church complexes. We have difficulty seeing all this as a malady as we are still not convinced of the down side of greed.

Truly Usher in the Sabbath Rest

Our obsessive work lives reveal our deeper ruminations of how we truly believe the world works. We are capitalists and technologists before we are Christians. We are desiring to usher in democracy and liberty to nations so they too can have the opportunity to buy our stuff and compete with us for goods. We are sharing in a Kingdom but it is not the Kingdom of God.

To move to the idea that money is not owned merely by one person is to see ourselves as a people and to see land, production, food, power, government, and family as entities that swim in the same waters. These groupings and ventures of life are not separated through some theoretical definition of observation. They co-mingle and when we attempt to sever them from one another we get thalidomide cities and deformed families. We are not meant to be so separate that one family can suffer such need while another goes through life with wasteful abundance. When these two families attend the same church the absurdity of that scenario is even more heightened.

If we are to move into a Sabbath rest and truly experience that grace God has given us in and through His Son, we must begin to submit these parts of our lives. This of course is difficult as much of modern American Christianity is actually going in the opposite direction. Much of our discipleship is so highly personal that the impact of our behavior on anyone but our nuclear family is never even addressed. This is my problem with the deification of the family by many specialists in the para church organizations. I have noticed that one of the central concepts our men in New Adam must embrace is the isolation that the cocooned nuclear family is under through TV viewing, Mcmansions that have all the amenities for the family to use alone, and the underlying message for families to keep up with the Joneses. These are powerful formative messages sent to us at every level of our middle class lives.

We have allowed discipleship to be so personal that men are praying without discernment and knowledge. No one is speaking into our lives. We are infants often talking to a concept of God that is highly sentimentalized and nostalgic. We want God the good old dad that offers up whatever we want. When He does not, we stand estranged from Him much like our earthly fathers.

By taking discipleship out of a place (a town, a city, a state, a country, and a world) we make spirituality about only the inner life as it relates to psychological needs. For real community to take place we must have a place where the redemption and kingdom can be seen in all levels of human activity.

Ironically, the attention many evangelicals have given to the political realm has usually involved single issues and has not asked politicians to build stronger communities. Many involved in political debates in the evangelical subculture are familiar with the voting records of senators and representatives as well as Supreme Court judges but do not know the mayors or school board presidents, PTA leadership or farm subsidy representatives in their local areas.


We are not writing our stories with the people in which we live. More to come.

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