What I'd Give: Living into Love

My goal this Epiphany season is to dig into a topic I’ve been thinking of lately: the important gifts that aren’t ours to give.

“What I’d give you if I could.”

My plan for this week’s topic was “Awareness of Love.” God’s love. So deep and wide and high and long that we need his grace to grasp even a tiny hint of it.

But this week my head has been full of something different, a project that has grabbed and shaken me and is busily filling my calendar, inbox and brain.

If you had asked me when I left youth ministry five years ago if I’d be getting involved in PA politics, I would definitely have laughed.

And if you’d asked me a year ago if redistricting would be my top priority I would most likely have said “no.”

But I’ve learned along the way that love leads in strange directions.

Love for the beauty and brokenness of creation me led me down a path of “shale gas fractivism.”

Concern for loved ones struggling with food led me deep into research on poorly-tested, poorly-regulated, poorly-understood innovations in our daily diet. 

Love for a group of kids I spent time with in Philly during my youth ministry days led to a dive into our dysfunctional criminal justice system, and advocacy on the inexcusable inequities in our school funding system.

http://reimaginerpe.org/18-2/sekala

And all of those trails led me back to our dysfunctional political environment, the broken systems that hold it in place, and the ripples of dysfunction fueled by misplaced anger and misguided decisions.

I was tempted to set aside the topic of love and focus instead on partisan redistricting and our new Fair Districts PA coalition.

But I find myself back at the text I meant to start with: Ephesians 3:  

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

For years I had that passage posted inside my kitchen cabinet door, where I could pray it, for myself and those I love, at odd moments in my day: waiting for water to boil, or listening for the ding of the microwave oven.

How do we become so rooted and established in Christ’s love that it becomes the controlling reality of each day?

How do we live so deeply in that reality that it becomes visible to all who know us?

Paul’s prayer makes clear: knowledge of God’s love is a gift, one that we can’t give, although we can fervently ask it. God can strengthen us from the inside out, give us power to grasp something far beyond our grasping.

And yet, I wonder if there are ways we can hasten that work, or position ourselves to embrace love more fully.

This morning, turning again to Paul’s prayer in Ephesians, I read the parts of the chapter before it: “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles . . .  I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power.”

In a way, Paul’s experience of God’s love seems closely connected to his willingness to serve it, his willingness to set aside his own privilege and priorities to become both prisoner and servant.

St. Paul in Ephesus: earliest known depiction

In 2 Corinthians, he phrased it this way:  “ For the love of Christ compels /guides / rules / controls us.”

Which comes first: ability to grasp God’s love, or willingness to set our own agendas aside and live as servants compelled and ruled by love?

And what is most likely to keep others from seeing and knowing and embracing that love: their lack of interest, or our own unwillingness to serve that love more fully?

I posted before about prayer ministry in our church: the practice of listening to the needs of others, then placing a hand gently on the person’s shoulder or hand, and praying on the other person’s behalf.  That was a formative part of my youth ministry experience, and my husband and I still serve in that way once a month during our worship service.

That simple willingness to intercede for someone else has taught me much about God’s love, deepened my willingness to serve it, but also expanded my grasp of its magnitude.

When we serve, we stand in a front corner of the church, an awkward spot, and wait as people walk to the front to take communion, then pass us on their way back to their seats.

The whole thing feels awkward: standing there, waiting as people walk by. Yet, as someone chooses to walk toward us, I often feel a warm welcome welling up inside me. And then, as we pray, I am often almost overcome by a sense of love pouring through me.

Sometimes it’s so strong I find myself shaking. Often I find myself fighting back tears. Whatever the need, concern, request, the prayer often is surrounded by a shattering experience of love: God’s love flowing through me, God’s peace, joy, forgiveness, mercy, healing enveloping me and the person I pray for. Sometimes it’s clear the person feels it, receives it.  Sometimes it’s clear only hints of it get through. Always I know that love, flowing through me, is far greater than I, or the other person, can grasp.

Often I go back to my pew with a deeper burden for the need of the world, a fuller vision of God’s love, and a sobering sense of gratitude: I have been given far more than I deserve. I am willing to be shaped and directed by that love.

I see the link between love and service most clearly when I pray, but it leaps out at me at other times: when a friend calls and asks “do you have time to help me?” The first thought is always: “Now? Are you kidding?” But love intervenes, and my day and its rearrangement become part of ongoing prayer.

The same is true in other ways: this political involvement I find myself pursuing. It’s costly in time and energy and brain-space. It’s leading me far from any comfort zone, into challenging arenas where I need God’s wisdom for every next step.

I am a servant of love.

That sounds lofty, overly grand.

Maybe a little ridiculous.

Yet, I've learned that my awareness of God's love is intrinsically tied to my willingness to serve, to live into that love.

So I throw my calendar open. Set my ragtag gifts at God’s disposal. 

Acknowledge and marvel at his love for the kids in underfunded schools, the prisoners locked in solitary confinement, the teachers maligned by profit-driven maneuvers, the legislators buffeted by intractable political agendas.

I pray that his love rebuilds broken lives from the inside out, melts through disillusioned hearts, shines so brightly that it silences the voices of condemnation and judgment that dare to speak for God.

I pray that God’s people will live so deeply in this love that churches awaken, oppressive systems change, communities are restored.

And I pray, that you, and I 

being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

St. Paul Writing His Epistles; att. Valentin de Boulogne, 17th century, France

During this Epiphany season (from the beginning of January until the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, February 10) I’ll be blogging about those things I would give if I could.

January 3: What I'd Give You

What Matters

I’ve spent much time this past year sifting through my life, examining old goals, retelling old stories, wondering what matters.

I’ve stumbled into some new initiatives, and have found myself investing time in ways I would not have imagined a year ago. Still wondering: what matters?

The events of the fall and early winter, Hurricane Sandy, the shootings in Newtown, even the election and then the endless hype about the Mayan calendar and end of the world, and the fiscal cliff and end of the economy, have made the question ever more insistent: what matters?

The Money Lenders, Marinus van Reymerswaele,
Netherlands, 1540

Scouting out memento ornaments for our Christmas Eve celebration, I found myself wondering: does this really matter?

Considering cheeses for a holiday cheese plate, the question came again: does this matter?

Reframe it: if I knew this was the last week I’d have to spend with my family, would I be spending my time buying one last present?

Or listening to arguments about the fiscal cliff?

But is that the best way to judge what matters?

Can we google it? Check wikipedia?

Apparently, “new” matters. New car, new phone, new computer, new outfits.

Or growth: did the economy grow?  Is the GDP up, or down?

Rights? My right to own a gun? To ensure my money is spent on things I agree with, and nothing I object to? My right to live, love, learn in any way I want?

Our family went last night to see Steven Spielburg’s Lincoln. There on the screen, Daniel Day Lewis enacted Lincoln’s struggle with the same concern.

Did public acclaim matter more than political momentum? When held in the balance, which was more important: attempts to preserve the union, desires to see slavery ended, prayers for peace, insistence on the possibility of a enduring democracy?

And how balance personal with public: his son Robbie’s desire to join the army, his wife’s grief at the loss of their son Willie, the attempt to maintain integrity while in the midst of political maneuvering, the weight of exhaustion and longing for rest.

Even the lesser characters of the film showed the weighing of what matters: principle against pragmatism, fear of an unknown future against guilt over an intimately known injustice, ambition against love of a sibling lost in battle, public approval against private pangs of conscience.

What matters?

One of the books I gave as a gift this Christmas was What Matters: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. It’s by Wendell Berry, with a forward by Herman E. Daly, professor of economics at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

In the forward, Daly calls attention to what he considers a deep, destructive confusion in our understanding of what matters, a confusion embedded in our use, or perhaps misuse, of the word “economy”:

Aristotle distinguished“oikonomia” from “chrematistics.” Oikonomia is the science or art of efficiently producing, distributing, and maintaining concrete use values for the household and community over the long run. Chrematistics is the art of maximizing the accumulation by individuals of abstract exchange value in the form of money in the short run. Although our word “economics” is derived from oikonomia, its present meaning is much closer to chrematistics. . . . 

Where today do we find chrematistics masquerading as economics? Certainly in the recent Wall Street fiasco—“selling a bet on a debt [as] an asset” as Wendell succinctly put it. It is amazing that people who have recently engaged in this disastrous stupidity on such a massive scale still have any credibility at all! Yet belief in “free markets” as the philosopher’s stone that alchemically transmutes the dross of chrematistics into the gold of oikonomia remains strong.

Other examples of chrematistics at work include monopoly pricing, tax evasion, subsidies, rent seeking, forced mobility of labor, cheap labor from union busting and illegal immigration, off-shoring, mergers, hostile takeovers, usury, and bullying litigation—not to mention the airlines’ successful shifting on to their customers the labor previously done by former travel agents, check-in clerks, and baggage handlers. Externalizing environmental costs—shifting the cost of depletion and pollution from the producer to the general public, the future, and other species—is probably the most common and most disastrous chrematistic maneuver. The unaccounted costs range from irksome noise, to mountaintop removal and filling up of valleys with toxic tailings, to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, to global climate change and species extinction.

Several pages later, in the first essay of the book, “Money versus Goods,” Berry approaches this question from a different angle:

 “A proper economy . .  would designate certain things as priceless. This would not be, as now, the “pricelessness” of things that are extremely rare or expensive, but would refer to things of absolute value, beyond and above any price that could be set upon them by any market.

This past year, I've been looking for ways to stand against "chrematistics" as Daly describes it: processes that place high value on profit, and no value on things like healthy food, well-managed land, functioning families. At the same time, it occurs to me I've been trying to move toward "priceless" things: relationships, beauty, ideas, community.

In our chrematistic economy, the things of greatest value are often the things most easily devalued: the care of a parent for a tiny child. What's the dollar value on that? And if it doesn't pay, shouldn't mothers and fathers hurry back to work?

A golden sunset over a quiet lake. Can that be privatized? And if not, surely there's an appropriate fee?

My plan in the weeks ahead is to spend more time sorting through what matters, why, and what the implications should be as we arrange our lives and advocate for an economy that reflects real value.

But as we start the new year, I’d like to hear from others. One of the things that matters to me- a lot - is conversation. Shared ideas. Listening to voices other than my own.

Money Changer and His Wife, Marinus van Reymerswaele,
Netherlands, 1549

So - how do you decide what matters?

How does your daily schedule reflect what matters?

How does your budget reflect what matters?

And what would it look like to live in a “proper economy” that prioritizes “absolute value” and "priceless" things, that refuses to commodify the things that matter most?

• This is the first of a series for the new year: "What Matters"
  
  • What Matters
  • Learning Compassion
  • Traveling Toward Hope and Freedom
  • Seeking Justice
  • Choosing Life

  Your thoughts and experiences in this are welcome. Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments. 

Some Trust in Chariots

Google “dangerous defense cuts” and you might find yourself believing our nation is on the very brink of military disaster. If the Budget Control Act passed last summer goes into effect this fall, about $500 billion, or $55 billion a year over nine years, will be cut from the defense budget, on top of the $487 billion in cuts already planned.

Leave aside the fact that the defense budget itself won’t be cut at all – it just won’t grow quite as fast as originally planned. (Confusing? That may be the point). And leave aside questions of who would be responsible if those agreed-on “cuts” do take place.  

And set on hold the questions about just war, rights of nations to defend themselves, the role of the Christian in advocating peace, and just what Jesus might have meant when he said “Blesssed are the peacemakers”.

Consider, instead, this simple graph from SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a globally recognized think tank on armed conflict and disarmament:

Supporters of ever-higher defense spending find the graph offensive. Chinese soldiers aren’t paid as much as American soldiers. And if we’re going to be a superpower, we need to spend like one, right?

But how much are we spending? The official 2012 defense budget is $530 billion, but according to a recent Atlantic article, almost half the money spent on defense is squirreled away in other places: spending on nuclear weapons development ($18.5 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the cost of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, veterans’ medical care, military aid to allies, interest on the military’s portion of national debt. The estimated total:  $986.1 billion in 2011.

The numbers make my eyes glaze over. But it’s impossible to talk about our national priorities without getting into numbers. Like the percent of GDP spent on defense (the graph to the left offers those numbers).

I’m reminded of the saying “Figures lie and liars figure.” You can twist the numbers any way you want.

But some numbers don’t get much air time. Like $11 billion – the amount written off as “lost” in Iraq in 2007.

Or $60 billion: the amount “lost” in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. 

When you think about it, though, money not officially “lost” is often lost in other ways:

Billions spent on updating an aging nuclear arsenal that retired military officers say  should have been dramatically reduced decades ago.

Billions spent on weapons that don’t make it into production, or prove too expensive to build or maintain.

Billions spent to keep men and women stationed on over 1000 military bases in over 130 countries, many on bases left over from World War 2 and the Cold War. (Do we really need  200 base sites in Germany? 108 in Japan? 82 in South Korea?)

Billions given in military aid to repressive governments, so they can buy our guns and keep their citizens in line.

In a world where one out of six people lack access to safe drinking water, where 2.4 million children die each year from preventable diseases despite the availability of effective vaccines, who decides where our dollars are spent? And who benefits from those decisions?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."  (Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953)

Eisenhower, a five star Army general and Supreme Commander of the Allied forces during World War II began his time as president deeply concerned about military spending. In his farewell speech eight years later he warned of the continuing danger of military influence:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. ” (Farewell Address to the Nation  January 17, 1961)  

Is our current American citizenry alert and knowledgeable enough to ensure that security and liberty prosper?

The more I read, the more doubtful I become. We repeat what we’re told, without wondering whose words we’re repeating.

Right now we’re being told that cuts to defense will endanger jobs and threaten our security.

Whose jobs? How many?

Are those jobs more important than those we’ve lost already?

And do all those billions spent really make us safer?

Columnist Robert Koehler, considering cuts to mail delivery service, notes:

"The proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, mental health services, environmental cleanup, National Parks programs and even, yeah, Saturday mail delivery are miniscule compared to the unmet social needs we haven't yet begun to address in this country, in education, renewable energy and so much more. But we're spending with reckless abandon to arm ourselves and our allies and provoke our enemies, and sometimes arm them as well, creating the sort of world no one (almost no one) wants: a world of endless war. . . .

"'National defense' is perhaps the most cynical -- and effective -- lie in human history, commanding the quaking allegiance of the populace over and over again, justifying virtually any activity, devouring the planet's resources, and ever failing to deliver the promised peace, indeed, delivering only the conditions for the next war. Few things in today's world are more unsettling than the fact that "national defense" still owns the country's politics, its budget -- and the minds of far too many of its citizens."

FCNL: Where Do Our Income Tax Dollars Go?

Is he right?

Does “national defense” own the country’s politics, its budget, the minds of citizens?

How many key staffers are recent employees of major defense contractors? How many hold stock in those corporations? How many expect to return to those companies after their time on Capital Hill?

Which legislators have received money from defense contractors? How much? With what expectation?

Why do legislators committed to a balanced budget cry foul at any hint of cuts in military spending?

Why is there such hot opposition to an international arms control treaty, an attempt to curb the flow of guns to countries where genocide and human rights violations are taking place?

In 2001, just weeks after the tragedies of 9/11, Wendell Berry warned against a false hope in violent retribution. In Thoughts in the Presence of Fear, he reflected on the false promise of military expenditure:

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual “war to end war?”

XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

The discussion about national security, defense budgets, arms control, the safety of our nation, will continue, with more and more heat, less and less wisdom, through the months ahead.

What do I take from this?

• As I’ve noted before: industry money controls the conversation, shapes legislation, and drowns out the legitimate concerns of citizens.
• Politicians who say “it’s dangerous to cut defense” without clear discussion of numbers and possible options are not being honest with the American people.
• Christians who promote ever-increasing investment in defense need to rethink their loyalties, the source of their safety, and the uncompromising witness for peace of faithful believers across the centuries.
• As an agent of peace, and a citizen of the most powerful nation on the planet, I have a moral obligation to be alert, knowledgeable, and articulate about the dangers we equate security with dollars spent on guns.

This is part of an continuing series about faith and politics: What's Your Platform?

More than ever, I welcome your thoughts about which issues to consider, as well as your insight, comments, and questions.  Look for the "__ comments" link below to leave your comments.