How Much Is Enough? October 14, 2012

How Much is Enough? 

October 14, 2012  

Kathryn Anderson, Wilf Bean

Kathryn:

It is very good to be with you this morning, all the way from Nova Scotia. When Tim Scorer asked us to speak on the theme of “How Much is Enough”, we replied positively, thinking that the Sunday after Thanksgiving is indeed a good time to reflect on “how much is enough?” We will focus on the Proverbs verses. I will read them again now:

⁷ Two things I ask of you;
   do not deny them to me before I die:
⁸ Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
   give me neither poverty nor riches;
   feed me with the food that I need,
⁹ or I shall be full, and deny you,
   and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’
or I shall be poor, and steal,
   and profane the name of my God.

To be honest, I was not aware of this verse before this past month. Yet it is so succinct and clear. I am always stunned when I hear Scripture that speaks so directly and powerfully to our reality today. Clearly Hebrew society was struggling with what is enough, as we are today, although the stakes may be even higher today than in those days. The writer was challenging those who had begun to create a society where some had too little and some had too much, and reminding them that neither poverty nor an excess of material goods was a faithful response. This verse sums up the heart of Biblical teaching about wealth and poverty. Seek neither poverty nor wealth. Seek only enough for one’s needs. For if I am wealthy, I will feel full materially, yet I will deny the very heart of the universe, the Creator of Life and of love. Or if I am poor, I may be forced to steal, to act without integrity and harm others in order to obtain what I need, thus profaning the Creator and giver of life.

Although I have lived in Nova Scotia for the past 24 years, my awareness of the reality of wealth and poverty started here in Vancouver. I taught Sunday School to Intermediates at St. Andrew’s-Wesley while I was a Vancouver School of Theology student. In my early twenties I worked at First United Church, coordinating an inner-city summer day camp, as well as with the Strathcona Boys and Girls’ Club. It was in Strathcona that I began to reflect on poverty and wealth, and started to think that there just might be a connection between the poverty and vulnerability I was seeing all around me on the Downtown East Side and in the Raymur Housing Project and the wealth that I had grown up with, living in Kerrisdale. Both seemed to be accepted as normal. But since that time, neither wealth nor poverty have seemed normal or acceptable to me, perhaps especially because I was seeing the depths of poverty first-hand while at the same time coming to realize the radical nature of the Biblical challenge regarding “what is enough?”

Wilf:

Like the writer of Proverbs, our struggle with the moral question of “how much is enough” begins with the yearning to cut through the falsehood and lying all around us. Please, just tell us the truth of our situation, without spin, without manipulation! Particularly, can we break through the falsehood and lying which says that the more we consume, the better off we are. That happiness is always having more. That the only way forward is to exploit the planet more and more? That cutting back is the equivalent of returning to the middle ages.  Remove from us the falsehood and lying that tells us there are no limits to our material, economic, industrial growth, or to our right to exploit the planet, and each other.

 How do we work through to the deep inner core of truth that informs us how to live rightly?

The Proverbs writer goes on to say he or she wants enough so as not to live in poverty.  I think that is probably how most of us feel.  There is no joy, no spiritual gain in living in un-chosen poverty, and, I suspect, none of us wants to live in that condition. But how much do we need?

When asked how much is enough, perhaps many of us ironically feel like John D. Rockefeller.  Reportedly, when asked “how much is enough”, he quickly replied “just 10 percent more!”

Yet, we live on a finite planet. The United Nation tells us that at the present time we are using the carrying capacity of one and one-half planet earths and as our impact increases, our unsustainability becomes even greater.

We cannot all have 10 percent more.

On our planet, over half live in poverty, at least one of every five persons is severely malnourished, the rest of us live our lives in relative comfort. So in fact, many of us are already using way beyond our equitable share of the earth’s resources.

But the question of “how much is enough” is not just an individual question of how much each can use within the carrying capacity of the planet.

It is a question of who we are; what we seek, who we are as both material and spiritual beings.  What, for us makes us whole, feel satisfied in our own lives, what do we yearn for to give our lives deeper meaning -- and these are spiritual question. 

Sometimes we may feel this yearning to consume, conquer and exploit more, always 10% more, is deep within our genes as human beings. We are genetically wired to want more.  Well, I have good news. Throughout history there are many peoples on this earth, often indigenous or tribal peoples, who have lived within sustainable limits, and also found deep meaning in their lives. I know. I remember an example when I was in my early 20s and had just arrived, very fresh and naïve from the South, to live in a small inuit village in the Central Arctic.

I arrived in June and later that summer the annual barge arrived with the main supplies for the year. One young inuit hunter that I had come to know, had ordered and prepaid for a skidoo the winter before through the Hudson’s Bay company store, and a day or two after the barge left, he picked up his new skidoo from the manager. 

He asked if I wanted to come to see it.  I certainly did! Being who I was, in the south I had been strongly conditioned to see cars, motorcycles and other possessions as an important part of my identity. This sleek, shiny, powerful new skidoo really impressed me and as we talked, I shared my excitement over his wonderful new machine. 

I was surprised the next morning, however, when he came over and put the keys to the skidoo on my kitchen table. “It’s yours”, he said.  What?  I said, confused. “It’s yours” he repeated. “You obviously want it more than I do – it means more to you – so my wife and I talked it over and we think you should have it.”

I was totally unprepared for this, and don’t really recall how in my embarrassment, I somehow managed not to accept this free skidoo. But I do know that my whole understanding of the world was deeply challenged – by a people whose relationships with each other and with the land were far more important than private accumulation or ownership. Material possessions were important only for their capacity to contribute to the common good. An individual’s status was not at all from the material possessions one owned or acquired, but from their capacity to contribute to the well-being and sustainability of the whole community. 

My young, unschooled, inuit hunter friend knew much about the difference between needs and wants, and what is essential in life. I have since met many folk like him, in various parts of the world, and, without wanting to romanticize indigenous peoples, I know from these relations that people can truly live joyful and deeply meaningful lives without always needing 10% more!  Their lives are not lives of deprivation, but of a fullness that comes from knowing “How much is enough?”

Kathryn:

As I mentioned earlier, my journey of experiencing the reality of poverty, of not having enough for one’s needs and the needs of one’s family, began just a few blocks from here. However, that journey took another turn when I became involved with human rights solidarity with Guatemala in the mid-eighties. That journey also started in Vancouver when the World Council of Churches met here in 1983. I met refugees fleeing genocide in Guatemala. They changed my life. Some of them were dancers and singers. A few  months later they turned up in Montreal where I was living to share their story there. I met their friends, refugees in Montreal. I began to discover the reality of the worst genocide in the history of Latin America only a few hours to the South, yet a reality hidden from most Canadians. I joined their solidarity group and traveled in 1986 to Guatemala, to study Spanish and to learn more about the devastation that had caused them to come to Canada.

To put it simply, since that trip to Guatemala, there has not been a week go by when I do not at some point think about the question of “how much is enough?” for me personally, for Wilf and me as a couple, and for our world, so that no one has to live in destructive poverty and no one has excessive wealth. I know that nothing I have done in my life makes me more deserving and in fact I know that I am simply not capable of the hard work that many of them carry out day after day. Yet I have so much unmerited privilege. I am constantly tempted by our society to believe that my satisfaction, my joy will be in having more and more, and I start to want more, to purchase more, to think about, even obsess about, having more, forgetting that, as my Guatemalan friends remind me and what the Proverbs text teaches all of us, that we are filled as human beings, not by material goods but by opening ourselves to the love at the very heart of life, the love found in relationships with the Creator, with one another and with the natural world. I believe the call of my Guatemalan friends is that we take responsibility for the privilege we have. One aspect of taking responsibility is not to accumulate more and more, nor to feel guilty yet do nothing. Rather we are called to share the resources we do have, whether with the local church, the Mission and Service Fund of the United Church or those organizations to whom we feel drawn to share with.

Equally, perhaps even more so, the Guatemalan experience and the Proverbs writer challenges what is enough for us collectively and questions what is normally accepted here in Canada. Over time I have developed relationships with Mayan and Salvadoran community groups, including United Church and KAIROS partners resisting mining developments by Canadian companies. In one case, aboriginal indigenous communities were never properly informed about the arrival of a Canadian company, Glamis Gold, on their traditional lands, much less consulted or their consent sought for a huge open-pit gold mine.  A few years later, Goldcorp bought Glamis.  The lack of formal consultation and consent processes continues to this day, even as the mine expands in the Department of San Marcos and another mine is being developed along the Guatemala/ El Salvador border. 

You might ask why these groups do not want these mines, when ostensibly it will bring more material wealth to their communities. While gold earns enormous profits for Canadian companies and its shareholders, including the United Church Pension Plan, very little profit stays in Guatemala. Meanwhile communities experience negative health, environmental and social impacts and long-term risks related to the huge amount of water used, including the drying up water sources, and the presence of a gigantic leaching pond with potential long-term impacts of heavy metals seeping into the water system over generations. Already some arsenic is showing up in testing downstream from the plant.

Interestingly these communities of resistance are made up of people who are poor and who are still seeking to have enough for their needs. For example, they want to be paid just wages when they migrate to the South Coast to pick coffee. Yet more than anything else they do not want the land to be destroyed, the health of the people affected, their culture broken, all for gold, perhaps the greatest symbol of excessive wealth in our society, as gold mining is not necessary to meet our needs. There is enough gold already available today, without mining, to meet any of the medical and technical needs for gold. In fact most gold is mined simply for adornment and to be put into storage as gold bars. As Sister Maudilia Lopez, a member of the Sisters and Brothers of Mother Earth Committee of the Catholic Parish of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, where a Goldcorp mine is located, asked us this past Easter: “What is the difference between killing people with a gun in one second and killing people slowly, psychologically, physically, spiritually, killing all that makes for life in the culture of a people?” After much consideration, including more than a few sleepless nights, I have come to realize that we as Christians are being deeply challenged regarding our seeking of wealth at the expense of our poorer sisters and brothers and the land to which they are so deeply connected.

Wilf

As I mentioned, one of the most formative times of my life was the ten years I spent working in Canada’s North. In the 1970s, in addition to several years in the Arctic, I worked with the Dene Nation, the First Nations peoples along the MacKenzie River through the period of an inquiry into a proposal to build an Arctic Gas Pipeline down the MacKenzie River Valley. 

Justice Thomas Berger held hearings in every community affected by the proposed pipeline. I attended many all day and almost all night hearings in small settlements along the river as the Dene spoke of their love of the land, their way of life, their concern that what was being proposed as “development” was not in fact going to benefit them. And I recall many non-native Northerners who agreed that there should be limits to this kind of “industrial development”. 

It was a time of speaking truth to power and slowly it became clear to almost all, that the impact of such a large mega-project would be destructive of both the land and the people at that time. It was a time when, as a society we began to hold a public dialogue about “What is enough?” Almost everyone in the North participated, as well as many from the South, including a strong church coalition known as “Project North”.  The inquiry remains to me a proof that we do know how to hold large, public, participatory, democratic discussions about “what is enough”, if we have the will to do so.

As you may know, supported by the strong voice of the First Nations Dene People, Justice Berger courageously ruled that there be a ten-year moratorium before any pipeline could be built.

In working with the Dene, I was profoundly challenged, both personally and spiritually. I became aware of a different understanding of what my life was about, of what is enough, of what it means to live well between poverty and riches. I came to recognize that the Dene concern for their land went far beyond financial concerns. That the vision of industrialized, resource exploitation called “development” was only one possibility – that there was in fact another vision which the Dene had for themselves in which development meant people would be renewed and transformed, their communities would become stronger, based on their culture and traditions, so that all may live sustainably within the northern web of life.

Finally, the writer in Proverbs asks what we would all ask “Feed me with the food that I need”

On this journey of seeking neither poverty nor excessive riches, how do we find the “food that we need?”

Josefina Martinez is a Guatemalan friend of ours. In her long life she has experienced the violence of the 1980s and later lost her husband to military repression. One morning, I woke up early and together we stood in a humble yard, amidst the tragic beauty of Guatemala, looking over a misty valley towards a volcano over which the morning sun was beginning to appear.  Almost to herself as much as to me, as the first rays of the sun glistened over the side of the volcano she whispered in Spanish “Every time I see the sun rise, I know we are a people who are blessed.”

I have not forgotten that experience.

Feed me with the food that I need! As we seek the food we need, we may realize that indeed, in many ways we have enough already, we as humans, are already blessed; what we do need more of is not material stuff, not more things, not more wealth, but the loving friends who help us become more fully human, who help us recognize we are connected to the greater Spirit of all Life. Perhaps what we do need more of is a vision of a world that lives in peace, justice and sustainability, a vision that invites us to become engaged in living this vision in our daily lives.

And so, in the end, How Much is Enough?

Perhaps ultimately this is a question to be lived out in our lives, a question to be answered not with words but with our actions and choices. A question to be lived recognizing that it is both an ancient question asked by Hebrew people many centuries ago, and also, for us, a question of critical urgency for our times.

May we carry with us the wisdom of the writer of Proverbs:

Remove far from me falsehood and lying;
   give me neither poverty nor riches;
  but feed me with the food that I need.