Words Half Heard: Are You Rich?

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

(e.e. cummings)

Last Sunday, sitting in my yard, I saw a Pileated Woodpecker, a beautiful Hooded Warbler, two Hermit Thrush. A Tufted Titmouse hopped around the stumps I use for side tables, then landed briefly on my head: a bucket list moment I didn't even plan.

A young friend asked me once, with incredible seriousness: are you rich?

It depends how you define rich, I answered.

By the standards of Main Line Pennsylvania, where I live, no, I’m not rich.

My husband and I are nowhere near the $450,000 that would put us in the top 1% of U.S. household income (or the $155,000 for the top 10%).

But apparently we have enough annual income to qualify in the global 1%: the cutoff for that is $52,000.

So yes, by most standards, except those of my immediate community, I am rich, rich in ways my great-grandparents would not have imagined.

A recent report described the sharply differing life expectancies for the wealthy and poor in America:

for men born in 1920, there was a six-year difference in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of earners and the bottom 10 percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had more than doubled, to 14 years. For women, the gap grew to 13 years, from 4.7 years.

For most of the factors that contribute to that gap, including quality health care, clean air and water, access to a reasonably-priced healthy food supply, I fall on the side of the wealthy.

Yes, I’m rich.

But my wealth goes far beyond that: I have Internet access that puts the world at my fingertips, even in my green backyard, and allows communication with friends and family continents away.

I grew up in a state (New York) that believed in educating all its children well and provided funding for college for anyone who cared to go: I can read, write, think, analyze, dream in ways not available to those who grew up with inadequate education.

I am phenomenally wealthy in family and friends: I know people who know people. If I need help, advise, backup, resources, there are friends I can ask, family I can call.

Today is May Day: a day marked in many places with celebration of spring festivals and Maypoles.

It’s also International Workers Day, begun to commemorate and continue the effort of the Haymarket affair of May 4, 1886.

Never heard of it?

You’re not the only one.

Hundreds of thousands of American workers went on strike on May 1, 1886 to demand “an eight hour day with no cut in pay.”

In Chicago, strikes and rallies continued in the following days. On May 4, a rally in support of the eight hour work day escalated into violence when a home-made pipe bomb was thrown into the path of heavily-armed police. Shots were fired wildly in the dark leaving seven police officers and four strikers dead.

Eight men were arrested. Five were sentenced to death. One man committed suicide in his cell; four were hanged. The remaining three were sentenced to life in prison, but pardoned just years later by a governor who described them as victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge.”

We don’t learn much in school about the workers’ movements that bubbled through American and international politics from the earliest days of the industrial revolution.

We forget the great hardship experienced by mill workers, men and women in production lines, coal miners, farm hands.

We often look disparagingly on unions: corrupt, coercive, unresponsive to workers’ needs.

But how much of our current wealth is the fruit of men and women who marched, rallied, stood in picket lines?

Not just wealth in money, but other benefits: eight hour work weeks, disability pay, minimum wage, safe working conditions.

If we knew our history better, we’d know that when workers are ignored, inequality grows. Desperation spurs agitation, which spins toward violence, until a course correction affirms the rights of workers and financial reward is shared more evenly.

That’s a ridiculously simplified version of a neglected piece of history.

And a nod to my immigrant grandfather, Carl Consensus Capra, who saw the damage done to unprotected workers and did what he could to run a union shop.

I am wealthy, in part, because of the work of my grandfather and many more like him.

An Elizabeth Warren video clip went viral several years ago reminding us all that whatever wealth we have is a gift, no matter how much we claim credit:

There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Many of the roads I drive were once routes used by First Nation traders, pushed out of their Delaware homelands. Uwchlan Township, where I live, was founded by Welsh farmers, who bought the land from William Penn. The church where I worshipped this morning was born from a vision shared by a Rosemont pastor and a handful of Paoli families who met to worship in Paoli Inn.

I am blessed, daily, to enjoy the riches handed me by unknown others: roads, buildings, institutions.

I am able to vote because of generations of women who kept that dream alive: writing, marching, rallying, even facing prison time.

In worship this morning I was reminded: my greatest wealth is the grace I receive through Christ’s death and resurrection, mediated through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the testimony of faithful witnesses, the spiritual heritage of a prayerful grandmother. Even there, Elizabeth Warren's words apply: my faith is not something I made myself, earned myself, gave myself.

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. (2 Corinthians 8:9)

I’m sometimes troubled that I should enjoy such wealth when so many others have so little.

I don’t know why I’ve been blessed to live in a time and place where so much is taken for granted, or why I live in such comfort when so many live as refugees, driven from their homes by hunger, war, persecution.

I do know that riches can vanish through folly, greed, or recurrent injustice.

Money can be misspent or swept away by fraudulent economies.

Democracy can be swallowed into tyranny.

Family, friends, even faith are fragile, easily damaged by deception or neglect.

The best safeguard I know for wealth of every kind is gratitude, generosity, and the grace that pays it forward: that remembers all we have is gift and looks for ways to make the gift available to others.

The one who supplies seed for planting and bread for eating will supply and multiply your seed and will increase your crop, which is righteousness. You will be made rich in every way so that you can be generous in every way. Such generosity produces thanksgiving to God through us.

So yes, I'm rich. And thankful.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Are You Rich?