AD CLERUM - June 2007 |
Dear Friends
I was at a function recently where almost half the cars in the parking lot outside where luxury vehicles and where a few would have seen little, if any, change on R 1million. That got me thinking about the debate that has raged in our newspapers recently over the affluent lifestyles and 'conspicuous consumption' of some of our people, particularly amongst those who were previously disadvantaged. Many have written in to condemn such extravagance as being inappropriate if not immoral in a country where so many still live below the poverty datum line. Others have defended it equally strongly, arguing that such people show that it is possible to break out of the cycle of poverty and thus serve as important role models for the community.
Leaving aside such obvious questions as the huge ecological footprint of extravagant lifestyles and whether the economic pie can ever provide such levels of affluence for more than a privileged few, or even the question as to why many who now argue against such extravagances have in the past been largely silent in the face of equally inappropriate and excesses by other sectors of our population, there are deeper spiritual realities at play here that are all too often overlooked or ignored in the fierceness of debate.
Jesus himself warns us about the love of money, and it is, I think, significant that Jesus spoke more about money than any subject other than the Kingdom of God. Since then our spiritual tradition has consistently warned of the seductive power of possessions and the spiritual dangers contained therein. Evagrius believed that the 'love of things' was a pattern of thinking that so clouds the mind that it becomes impossible to think clearly and to recognise the realities of God. Centuries later, St Francis turned his back on a life of immense wealth and in his teaching so insisted that poverty was central to authentic gospel living that the order he founded with St Clare was known as the Poor Clares, and St Clare for the rest of her life fought the ecclesiastical hierarchy, petitioning at least three popes for what she called the 'privilege of poverty.'
Clare's insistence on the 'privilege of poverty' is neither an ascetical excess nor a rejection of the things of the world. Nor is it saying that money and the uses to which it is put is necessarily tainted or bad. A recent edition of Time magazine carried a section entitled 'Power Givers' which detailed some quite extraordinary acts of generosity ($31 billion by Warren Buffet in 2006). Rather the insistence on the 'privilege of poverty' is rooted in what the anthropologist, Renée Girard, calls 'mimetic desire'. Humans are imitative or 'mimetic' by nature (one has only to watch a small child to see this) and our desires are shaped through imitation. Sin, he says, is the disordered desire of a people created to imitate God, but whose desires have shifted away from God to the self in ways that place us in opposition to God and others. Desire generates desire and, depending where our desires are focussed, will have the effect of either drawing us back to God in imitation of God or away from God in imitation of the world. Clare's insistence on the 'privilege of poverty' is thus an expression of mimetic desire - a longing to be like Jesus. Prayer then becomes an expression of our desires and the place where we sort out our desires and are, in turn, sorted out by our desires. And that brings us back to where we started - with words of Jesus. Jesus said, 'The love of money is the root of all evil.' He also said, 'Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also ... Seek first the kingdom of God ...'
Underlying the debate about conspicuous consumption, therefore, is the deeper question of the desires that drive us, and it is those desires which shape our actions and our lifestyles that Richard Rolheiser insists are the true indicators of what is at the heart of our spirituality. If that is true then the debate is not so much about extravagance as it is about the gods we serve.
In a hard hitting paper entitled 'Will the Churches Learn to Think Again in the 21st Century?' John Cobb Jr. questions whether churches even recognise let alone understand how profoundly mammon has become the god of western culture and the extent to which the churches both in their thinking and in their manner of operation are held captive to it. He goes on to say that unless the church recovers its calling to be first and foremost a people of God it will never be able to speak prophetically, to speak God's truth to power. Brueggeman, whom I quoted last month, said; 'If we will not let the gospel use us to create a new world, then all we can do is service the old.' Cobb goes further, he says in effect, 'If we will not let the gospel liberate us, we will forever remain captive to the old, and in the service of false Gods.'
If this is true, then we ourselves need liberation from the economic seductions of the false gods of this age so that we can preach boldly about life 'in Christ.' We need to be entering the debate on conspicuous consumption, not in support of either side, but to say with Jesus, 'You cannot serve God and mammon.' Seriously! 'You cannot serve God and mammon.' In the midst of growing affluence let us be a people who 'seek first (and only) the kingdom of God.' Let us be a people who like Clare and Francis recognize that the 'privilege of poverty' is indeed privilege for the sake of the gospel, and more than that, it is gift, pure gift.
May we live as icons of Christ rather than images of the world
+ Brian