View the study sheet here. Recording here.
As we stumble toward mid-term elections, voters have identified the most pressing issue to be the rising cost of living. The “affordability” issue.
The two main political parties agree that this is a major issue but disagree on both its cause and its solutions.
The Democratic Party attributes the affordability crisis to corporate monopolies, lack of government intervention in essential markets, profiteering, and the unbridled power of certain industries. The party’s solutions focus on stricter regulation of corporate profits, expanding access to childcare, rolling back high tariff rates, and greater government intervention in the health care and prescription drug industries in particular.
The Republican Party identifies the primary sources of the crisis as excessive federal spending, high taxes and increased regulations. It advocates reducing government spending generally, eliminating social programs that discourage participation in the labor force, getting rid of policies and regulations that constrain domestic oil and gas production, and removing laws and regulations that restrict the construction of new housing.
Both parties agree that the cost of core necessities, such as housing, healthcare, education, and childcare, has outpaced wage growth. Even more, both parties acknowledge that consumer sentiment on the economy is sour. People feel worse about their personal situation than they did just a couple of years ago. They need to work harder to maintain their standard of living. That sentiment of economic pressure and decline has been captured in several recent polls.
There was poll last month on another topic that did not capture the same level of attention as the ones on the affordability crisis. For the past quarter century Gallup has been tracking how Americans view the overall state of moral values in the U.S. In its survey, Gallup found that a record-high 56% of Americans rate moral values in the U.S. as “poor,” up 12 percentage points from last year. And 80% say moral values are “getting worse,” up 14 points.
Entering into the midterms, Americans are feeling a crisis about both the material and moral dimensions of national life. Would an improvement in the former provide a corresponding uplift in the latter?
In 2000 two prominent social scientists independently published books that explore what happens when a society prioritizes wealth accumulation at the expense of the expansion of communal connections.
David Myers is a Professor of Psychology at Hope College. As a social psychologist his particular focus is personal well-being, intuition, and group behavior. In The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty, he explores the contradiction between America’s unprecedented material wealth at the beginning of the 21st century and its surging rates of depression, broken relationships, and social decay. He argues that radical individualism and materialism are root causes of that spiritual erosion.
Robert Putnam is Professor of Public Policy, Emeritus at Harvard University. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, he documents the decline in civic engagement, trust and community involvement – which he collectively terms “social capital” – in the U.S. as a result of changes in the nation’s economy. Those changes elevated expansion of wealth at the cost of decreased connections by Americans to family, friends, neighbors, and civic institutions.
The book of Numbers begins with a sense of great hope and expectation…and the appearance of a strongly bonded and organized community. The people are ready to renew their march to the promised land, a journey that should take just a few days. Awaiting them is land on which to settle, grow crops, raise herds, and develop trade routes. And then the people speak. It is the first time since the book of Exodus that the community itself has spoken. And their words are those of complaint. As a consequence, a journey of a few days becomes one of another thirty-eight years.
IThe exact nature of the complaint, its source, is not initially clear. The Hebrew for the verb “complain” in the portion is in its reflexive form, as if the people were stirring something up in themselves in the absence of any external cause.
The Hebrew used to described the complainers reveals their inner character at this moment. The word often translated as “riffraff” is based on the Hebrew verb “to gather, to harvest,” which also produces the noun “storehouse.” These are people who have sufficient stores for survival…and more. They are inclined to store up, to hoard. They have what they need…and for them it is still not enough.
An English translation describes them as having a “gluttonous craving.” The Hebrew is even clearer: “they desire desire.” Their true hunger is to hunger for more.
When they finally identify the nature of their complaint, they state: “There is nothing at all!” The Hebrew again reveals their inner state, for its reads; “There is no everything!” That’s what they yearn for: everything!
The medieval commentator Rashi describes their behavior as a “pretext,” hiding the real reason for their objections. This notion of pretext is one that rabbinic tradition adopts both in commentaries and sometimes in translations of the text itself; one example being, “The people sought a pretext…”
What is the expressed yearning “to have everything” a pretext for? What desire lies underneath that conscious craving? It is, Rashi observes, to separate from God: from the One who provides manna daily, enough food that requires no hoarding; the One who possesses nothing and is in all; the One who occupies no space and is everywhere; the One who withdraws that other life forms might emerge; the One who urges the never-ending pursuit of justice in which no favor for either rich or poor is shown.
Those just emerging from the trauma that was Egypt have a hunger that cannot yet imagine saying “enough.” Among them only Moses was ever witness to a fire that did not consume what nourished its flames.
Jan Richardson is an ordained minister in The United Methodist Church. She is also an artist. Pictured here is her work In Every Chamber of the Heart. Richardson cites Psalm 111 and its powerful call to overcome one’s destructive urges and embrace the “inexhaustible sweetness and purity” that dwells within us. Her work celebrates that God “is about the work of helping us live into completeness, not just for ourselves but for and with one another.”
There is gold at the heart’s center in her painting, but it is not the currency of empires, not the hoarded treasure of the selfish, the cruel, the frightened fragmented soul.
It is the radiance of the sovereign soul who knows that love is not possession but union.
To be drawn into the wilderness is to enter into an experience that helps us to transform hunger into gratitude, fear into awe, desperation into peace. The prophet Hosea describes the entrance into the wilderness and the revelation that it offers as an act of seduction: “Therefore I will seduce her and lead her into the wilderness, and I will speak comfortingly to her heart.”
The transformation from frightened fragmented self into sovereign self capable of living the promise is achieved less through dogma or law than by words whispered to the heart, as lover’s do.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday June 4 as we explore hidden desires, conscious cravings.
In Every Chamber of the Heart by Jan Richardson
