Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin March 3rd, 2010

I just have to clear the air about something before I go on to write any more posts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Paul’s letter to the Romans. Our adult Sunday school class is doing a study of Romans at the moment, but what has been running through my mind has less to do with the class and more to do with my bumbling, stumbling, sometimes less than simple or faithful life.

I am particularly struck with Paul’s self-revelation that:

“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” (Romans 7:18-20, NIV).

Oh, that’s me through and through! Often as I sit writing these posts I begin to feel hypocritical because they don’t often describe what goes on in my soul or my addled brain. And what goes on in there isn’t always so pure, giving, or simple as some of my posts might imply.

I have written a lot about the foundation of Christian simple living being love and compassion for God’s people and his creation. But I have not written enough about my own struggle trying to be loving and compassionate while at the same time, being far from the genuinely caring person I would like to be and should be.

I have always had a real problem with a low-grade selfishness and defensive anger. I’m pretty good at keeping them under wraps with other people (not to mention while writing blog posts), but they are always lurking around inside my head, twisting my feelings and perceptions. I tend to get frustrated and angry easily when things aren’t going my way, and all of these un-loving traits really put a damper on actually being the kind of person Jesus asks us to be. It is said that loving kindness is supposed to be our natural response to the love God shows for us. But for me it isn’t natural and too often isn’t there at all.

I feel like Paul even to his point of writing “Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.” Often my anger at myself and others occurs in an instant – so fast that it takes me by surprise, as if someone else were controlling me. Now, having some professional background in the mental health field, I know that isn’t the case, but it sure feels that way and I know exactly what Paul was writing about.

It can be very depressing because I work hard at trying to change these irrational feelings. I pray and meditate on it daily, and try to become more like what Christ asks of us. But it’s a long hard struggle and sometimes (OK, often) not successful. I feel like giving up.

There is now substantial brain research showing that far more of our behavior and feelings are genetic, chemical, and neurological than mental health professionals used to believe, so some of this comes with us into the world rather than it all being intra-psychic processes. Like substance abuse, these ‘innate’ emotions can make us feel like they’re totally out of our control.

Of course, both from a psychological and faith point of view, regardless of how in-born some of these traits might be, they still belong to us, and we have a responsibility to the rest of the world (as well as ourselves) to tame them and make the best of them. I believe that was inherent in Christ’s message.

So once in a while, I remember that I have made some changes over the years. I have become a little more compassionate and a little less reactive through meditation and prayer. It’s just that I’m not anywhere near where I should be, and I’m terrified that my blog posts make me out to be, what I might call, an intuitive lover: one who loves instinctively and well, and therefore lives a very joyful and naturally simple life.

After all, only someone who is really good at all this, and is well-practiced and disciplined in compassion and living simply would be in a position to write about it for the whole world, right?

Not in my case! I write, not because I’m so good at living this way, but because I think these things are desperately important, and that we should all be working on becoming compassionate Christian simple livers. I believe it’s what Christ expects of us, so we all have to do what we can – being on the journey together.

So I find some comfort in knowing that Paul had his moments too. I guess when you get right down to it though, I’m a neophyte at walking the compassionate talk, and at least a little bit hypocritical. I guess it’s another thing I’ll have to make the best of, because here it is, and it ain’t going away!

So I’ll press on, hoping that you will understand.

Thanks for reading.

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admin February 2nd, 2010

Once again I’ve found strong support for Christian Simple Living in the mainstream media! Not only that, but there’s some support there for believing that Christian Anarchy might help save us from ourselves. Of course the writer of this article probably didn’t recognize that rather obscure point.

Robert J. Samuelson, contributing editor of Newsweek and The Washington Post, wrote an article in the 2/8/10 edition of Newsweek entitled The Perils of Prosperity in which he argues that having our economy go bust every now and then is a very good thing. That’s because busts tend to make us aware of the riskiness of the financial world and its institutions which in turn makes us more cautious in our dreams for our financial future as well as in our actions.

But it is in his reasoning that simple living principles stand out.

I should say at the outset that some of my interpretations of his article are based on Christian Anarchy principles… and yes, I did promise in my last post that I would make having a discussion of Christian Anarchy my next project, so let this post be the opening salvo of that discussion!

Samuelson’s thesis is that all of us, not just the bankers, brokers, real estate agents, and the failure of government regulation, were responsible for this recession, and if we continue to delude ourselves with the thought that these “bad guys” really were the culprits, then we are simply setting the stage for the next big recession.

He says, very insightfully, that “Greed and shortsightedness didn’t suddenly burst forth; they are constants of human nature.” Ah yes, we are all fallen people! So if these nasty traits aren’t new, then what really did cause the recession?

Complacency! We were lulled into the ego-centric belief that the economy and financial system had become much safer than history actually demonstrated which encouraged all of us to take unreasonable risks while expecting much more personal wealth than was either sensible or supported by long term economic history. We only saw the short term economic story of the past 25 years during which the U.S. had the greatest run of prosperity in its history. With our myopic glasses on we imagined that our economic system was nearly perfect or invulnerable and that it would last virtually forever. This prosperity only led us to engage in more and more “self-defeating expectations and behaviors. The huge profits made in these decades by investors conditioned many to believe in the underlying benevolence of financial markets.”

Samuelson notes that modern democracies have made it their jobs to try to create as much prosperity as possible for everyone, i.e. they try to create “perpetual booms,” better known as perpetual motion machines or Ponzi schemes. How else is one to stay in office??

But the author concludes that “The cruel contradiction is that this promise itself may become a source of instability because the more it is attained, the more people begin acting in ways that ultimately invite its destruction…. The quest for ever-more and ever-better prosperity subverts itself.”

The connection to Christian simple living here is fairly obvious: More is not better, and the never-ending struggle for ‘more’ not only does not bring happiness, but rather too often brings disaster.

Here I would like to inject the notion of Christian Anarchy, and how Samuelson’s thesis supports it as part of our simple living practices.

First, does the term “Christian Anarchy” mean that Christian congregations should gather downtown and throw bombs?

Mmm… not quite.

The Greek term ‘anarchy’ has two parts: the prefix “an-” is the same as “un-” in English which means ‘not’ rather than ‘anti-‘ or ‘against’, and ‘archy’ means ‘ruler’ or ‘power’. It is generally applied to governments or other power-wielding organizations,  say like The Church. So broadly defined, anarchy would mean ‘un-power’ or “no power.”

The late Vernard Eller, a Church of the Brethren pastor and theologian who has written extensively on Christian Anarchy, used the term ‘Arky’ for short, and defines it as almost any government or other type of organization that “claims to be of primal value for society.” That would include governments of all types and most other organizations such as political parties, fraternal organizations, churches, schools, philosophies, and even the Woman’s Club! All of these make some claim to our allegiance and they all attempt to govern some part of our beliefs, values, or actions for the, ahem, “greater good.”

Here’s the hitch: for Christians the only real power is God, and all other powers are subservient to Him. So Christians owe their allegiance only to God and therefore cannot owe it to any other person or organization, especially if those organizations require you to believe or act in any way inconsistent with what God tells us to do or believe.

Why?

Because only God is entirely dependable and faithful to us. All other people and organizations are fallible (often very fallible) and frequently cannot be trusted, after all, as I mentioned above, we are all fallen people. Even the very best of us. Even those we have trusted for years and years. Sooner or later they all let us down in some way, and not infrequently, catastrophically. Even “The Church.” Think of all the ills perpetrated by various factions of “The Church” over the centuries – the torturing and killing; the collaborations with illegal and/or immoral people, clergy immorality, illegal or immoral financial dealings, etc.!

Thus, according to Eller, for followers of Christ “Anarchy (unarkyness)… is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of; nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys. And “Christian Anarchy”… is a Christianly motivated “unarkyness.” Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of All Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies…” (sic.)*

This is at once both a theological issue and a practical issue. Here, today, I’m focusing on the practical part because the Samuelson article is such a good example of what happens when we have faith in the world’s arkys – they mess with us!

This is pretty much what Samuelson tells us. We gave our allegiance to the brokers, real estate agents, bankers, and economists, naively believing that whatever they told us was right. We literally invested everything we had with these folks. We trusted a human ‘arky’ to do what human arkys can’t do, and which Jesus told us specifically not to do.

Truth-be-told, we did it because the promises they, and all the rest of consumer society told us, sounded soooo good, we just wanted to believe it – we just wanted to have it… all!

So we gave up any pretense of believing and acting on what Jesus taught us about what’s important in life –particularly that we should never put our trust in money or goods because they never serve us well. Rather we were taught to live simply and honestly and not to love money.

We gave our faith and allegiance to “the masters of the universe” and consumer society in general. We allowed them to lead us into this pit, then suffered as we crashed and burned together with The Masters of the Universe (although they are rich and don’t care).

A little Christian anarchy a few years back would have served us well.

More on Christian anarchy in the next post.

*Taken from Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers, Vernard Eller. Online book at http://www.hccentral.com/eller12/index.html

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admin January 15th, 2010

Obama, Niebuhr, “Just War Theory,” and simple living are all of a piece.

It’s time for me to comment a bit on political and world affairs.

I hesitate to go there because this arena has become so filled with hate and vitriol. I also believe that we can live as Christians regardless of what any government or political party does or doesn’t do. However our congregation’s adult Sunday school has been discussing President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech and his use of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Just War Theory in it. This got me thinking about the theory, foreign policy, Christian morality, and its relationship to Christian simple living.

Niebuhr, of course, was one of America’s preeminent protestant theologians in the 20th Century who taught for many years at Union Theological Seminary. He is known for his mentoring relationship with German minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, his writings on Just War Theory, and a number of critical books on other theological topics.

Niebuhr and others, most recently Barak Obama in his Nobel speech, claim that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi-style nonviolence never successfully stops wars or conflicts. They suggest that Gandhi or King could never have succeeded in stopping or preventing the Second World War by talking with Adolf Hitler, for instance.

The theory holds that war and conflict are permanent parts of human life because of original sin, i.e., we are ‘fallen’ imperfect people, and we will always be falling into conflict. Because we live in this sinful world, therefore, we will be forced to exercise power in order to prevent the world from collapsing into chaos, which would not be the Christian thing to do. Rather than merely trying to prevent war through ineffective nonviolent strategies, we should strive to make war as moral as possible by preventing more suffering than is necessary.

The fundamental principles for doing this are that:

• War must always be a last resort;
• Force must always be proportional to the threat (never more than an eye for an eye…);
• Civilians must be spared whenever possible.

So what in the world does this have to do with Christian simple living?

Christian simple living as I’ve defined it, is based on Jesus’ teaching that we should above all else, love and care for others and not engage in war or other acts that are destructive to people. This is what I call “Kingdom thinking.” It is a kingdom where we put our egos in our back pockets and consider the welfare of our neighbors first, no matter how far away or how much we might disagree or argue with them.

Part of doing that is to live simply so that we don’t use up more than our share of things, or use our ‘wealth’ or its accumulation, to abuse, oppress, or injure others, or injure creation as a whole which would be destructive to everyone. Rather we are to use our resources and our energy to build-up others, i.e., the community and the nations, as a whole.

This is a holistic, far-sighted, and patient approach to life which I think is at considerable odds with Just War Theory.

I believe that the notion of the just war is based on the brain wiring we are all, unfortunately, born with. That is, we are biologically and emotionally pre-programmed to use fight-or-flight responses. If a threat of any kind arises, we automatically want to either fight back (go for the jugular) or flee from the threat. Neither of these, of course, leads to peace.

The fight-flight response pretty much prevents us from engaging in long-term, proactive prevention and peacemaking efforts – the kind of thing Jesus has been asking us to do. In fact, much of the peacemaking that does go on today is focused on stopping existing conflicts, and even though that is a step in the right direction, it is not based on long-range or holistic thinking. Reducing current conflicts means that we are still focused on the conflict rather than on preventing future conflicts in the first place.

Even phrasing this as prevention is off-target because the term ‘prevention’ by definition assumes there are anticipated conflicts that we want to avoid. This is still reactive rather than proactive. Being proactive, in this case, means creating the fundamental conditions that ensure peace, period. This would mean, among other things, creating healthy interpersonal, social, economic, and international conditions which optimize the quality of life for everyone. Prevention efforts usually focus on altering only those conditions which affect the current conflict. Although the ‘healthy conditions’ might be preventative, the thinking and psychology behind them and the strategies and tactics used to create them are just not the same thing as prevention.

Under such optimized living conditions, people would tend to feel more fairly treated, would have most basic needs met, and would have better tools and resources for dealing fairly with disagreements long before they became conflicts or wars. I say this having spent a great deal of my career in the health promotion and disease prevention business, particularly substance abuse prevention. So I’ve had some time to think about it.

Our knee-jerk fight-flight response usually kicks-in so quickly that we don’t often give ourselves the time to learn or practice being proactive. We don’t have the time to practice peace! We only have time for fighting the next war or, at best, intervening once a war is about to start. Long term Kingdom Thinking requires patience and understanding so it’s usually at best an afterthought for us – after we’ve counted all the bodies.

Here, then, is my biggest objection to Just War Theory: it enables us, or traps us in the fight-flight vicious circle, because it always leaves open a large opportunity to give up on learning, understanding, patience, and peace, and instead to reach for a gun – fast, because it has been humanity’s accepted way of dealing with things. It’s a huge loophole, which we most often make use of, that actually prevents us from ever learning to do it right.

So day-by-day we get further and further from the Kingdom, and more and more entrenched in the darkening vicious circle of fight-flight and war as our preferred way of life.

So what are Christian Simple Livers to do? Do we have a role to play here?

One of the just war issues is that nations and their governments are constitutionally incapable of keeping the peace through peaceful means. That was Niebuhr’s whole point. Fallen people and their governments can’t seem to do without war. And Obama was in total agreement.

Truth be told, if I were president, I would adopt the same Just War stance even in spite of my Christian beliefs and rantings about Kingdom Thinking.

The secular world of nations and governments is mired deeply in its conflictual DNA as a way of governing and surviving. Obama and Niebuhr might be right that even a Gandhi couldn’t have succeeded against a Hitler.

But I think that is exactly the point that Jesus was trying to make about the Church and the Kingdom. It isn’t for everyone! Perhaps it can never be for everyone. But it can happen – in the Church, if we take it seriously – we just never have. A community of believers can function in this way through care and concern for each other, even those with whom we have very strong disagreements. With faith we can learn to do it. It has been done before.

I do believe that people who are intent on it, and have faith in it, and have faith in God, can create a better community and a better society at least within the bounds of the church community. And it may well spill beyond the church community as it often has in the past. We just need a lot more genuine Christian community based on living simply, and still more spillage into the secular world. Let’s think in terms of millennia here, not just a few years. But even in a few millennia I don’t believe it will be for everyone, as Jesus said.

This is my vision for the foundations of Christian simple living: We are called apart to behave differently – to take a radically different path. We don’t need to avoid the world as the Amish do so as not to be dirtied by it, but to work with Jesus in creating the Kingdom, while being “in the world” but not a part of it. This is a mark of The Church. If we can learn to live simply, spare the earth, and act in just and compassionate ways with each other, we will have taken a few more steps toward Kingdom Thinking and keeping the peace. And we can continue taking more and more steps toward creating equitable and just foundations for a more peaceful world as we mature in Christian simple living.

Within The Church – within this (potentially) blossoming Kingdom, we don’t need Just War Theory – it would destroy us.

This approach is very much in line with what has become known as “Christian Anarchy” which I am a great fan of. I keep threatening to write a few posts on this and have yet to do it, so maybe that will be my next project.

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admin November 3rd, 2008

Campaigns, Governance, and Christian Simple Living

The election is tomorrow, and there may be many excellent reasons to vote for one presidential candidate over another, but I don’t believe it will matter which person wins as far as promoting simple living is concerned, and certainly not Christian simple living.

Neither presidential candidate, if elected, will primarily or consistently pursue policies that would move us substantially closer to “living simply as Christ intended.” I think of Christian simple living as coming a bit closer to The Kingdom: caring for, and loving other people, as well as our enemies, and seeing ourselves as a part of, as well as caring for, God’s creation, instead of just feathering our own beds and filling our houses with stuff we don’t need. This is not what any president is about.

Both candidates will make lots of campaign promises (some, in which they might fervently believe) which they hope will get them elected. And we should note that they are both firmly committed to increasing consumerism and the economic ‘prosperity’ they hope it will bring, as well as a blind faith in neo-classical economics. Both candidates are in support of the perpetual motion machine or pyramid scheme that we call our economy. This consumer economy which will always stay focused on how much ‘wealth’ we have (and raping God’s world to achieve it), rather than the real health of our families, communities, and churches.

This is not to say that neither of the candidates will put forth some policies that might promote an issue simple livers care about or feel is critical to Christian simple living. It also is not to say that one may not come a little closer than the other to our “simple values.” But either of these men, as have all past presidents of all political parties, will pursue government and political agendas which will sometimes be strongly at odds with what we value as simple livers or as Christians.

Both John McCain and Barak Obama are good and honorable men, but their primary concerns – their job, if elected – will be politics, power, and executive government leadership. The presidency is a secular job, and gaining and using political and military power is a secular occupation with a vastly different set of goals and methods than those we use in living a faith-based simple, sustainable, and just life in community. One of these men would be, after all, in charge of the entire country including all of its various faiths, beliefs, philosophies, races, and cultures, and what they all want and need – not just what we might desire. There will also be a certain amount of ego and political ideology involved.

So I’ll vote based on a whole bag full of political issues, but not with any hope that my candidate will move our world toward Christian simple living – it ain’t his job! No more than it was Ceasar’s or Pontius Pilot’s job. Jesus didn’t expect it, and neither should I.

But, it is his job to be sure that you and I can pursue our faith and our simple living as we choose, so we’d want to be sure that we vote for a candidate who fully understands and supports the establishment clause in the constitution so that we don’t get run over by something even approaching a state-supported religion. I don’t think that will be a problem for either Obama or McCain.

Take a page from the Christian Anarchy folks – the government is the government and it isn’t ever going to be God’s kingdom no matter how hard we may wish it.

Christian Anarchy – Oh My God!

I think that what I’ve written above can best be summed up through the lens of Christian Anarchy.

Sounds subversive doesn’t it? It really isn’t. But it does cut to the heart of how Christians, and Christian simple livers, can view the relationship between government and our faith lives.

Christian Anarchy is not some radical theology by some new upstart fringe movement. It has its roots in some of the 19th and 20th Century’s greatest and best-known theologians and writers including Jacques Ellul, Karl Barth, Søren Kierkegaard, J. C. and Christoph Blumhardt, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so it has some substantial support!

To keep it short, Christian anarchy (‘an,’ meaning un- or not- ; and archy meaning priority, primacy, principal, or prince) proposes that Christians, as well as Jews, according to the Bible, owe their ‘primary’ allegiance and obedience to God and Jesus, and not to any other power including a government or other secular authority or organization – including churches, schools, philosophies, social standards, advertising, or psychological and sociological theories – which may lay claim to our allegiance.

The reason Christians should be non-committal, skeptical, or disinterested toward conventional secular powers or ‘archy’s’ (in this case government and presidents) is that secular ‘archy’s’ are all human inventions, and as with all human inventions, they are fraught with huge faults (shortsightedness, lack of wisdom, self-centeredness and selfishness, lust for power and control, etc.) regardless of how good their hopes and stated intentions are. So allowing oneself to be guided by them as opposed to being led by God (the real archy) is in essence the kiss of death. We will be deserted by them or at least disappointed by them eventually.

It is only in following God and Christ that we have true leadership based on love, care, and justice. All the other archy’s are fatally flawed in this sense, and we should know that before we throw-in with them. Better yet, as the Anabaptists would say, be a non-conformist to the secular powers and culture. We need not oppose them per se, but we do need to be clear about who we follow and why – and it isn’t a president. We should be patriotic, and we can support a president or senator for any number of reasons, but we shouldn’t rely on them for continuous truth, love, consistency, justice, healing, or comfort, etc. – if we do, we will often be jilted.

Our true archy is Jesus who taught us to live simply, justly and lovingly, not because a president or Congress passed a law or promulgated a policy, or that a social movement’s research ‘indicated’ that we should, although any of these can, from time to time, be useful to society and us as a whole.

Withor without this government or any given president, we will still follow our real archy.

An excellent online book on Christian Anarchy is: Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers by Vernard Eller, http://www.hccentral.com/eller12/part1.html.

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admin December 20th, 2007

I have obsessed about, and railed against the commercialization of Christmas for as long as I can remember, but I’ve stopped doing it this year for two reasons:

1. The Christmas celebration is a latecomer. The church made December 25 the official date of Christ’s birth at least in part to coincide with the traditional and vastly older winter solstice celebrations. It was an attempt to ‘Christianize’ and tame those celebrations which had a tendency to get out of hand. So from a purely historical point of view, it is the Christian fervor for celebrating Christmas that for over 1,500 years has been trying to overtake secular celebrations rather than the other way around. People have always loved a winter celebration to chase away the dark, cold nights.

2. I saw a TV news report recently about an organization that was trying to force national and multi-national chain stores to use the greeting “Merry Christmas” in instead of the politically correct “have a happy holiday” in an attempt to “put Christ back into Christmas.” The program director was interviewed as part of the story, but he was so angry in his strong-arming righteousness that he took Christ right out of Christmas in front of millions of viewers. The interview convinced me that our theological correctness might be making us the Grinch who not only stole Christmas, but actually made it’s real meaning unrecognizable.

So I’ve become convinced that our real job as Christians at Christmas time, is not to try to tear down or block millennia of emotional desires to party at the darkest time of the year, but rather to make our own faith and practice deeper and more meaningful. It is where our hearts are that matters, and we have enough difficulty managing even that, much less forcing all of secular culture to play by our rules, no matter how worthy they might be.

We don’t have to stop everyone else from Christmas binge shopping or thinking the holiday is all about getting a lot of stuff. But we do have to stop ourselves, as practicing Christians, from doing that same thing. And we are responsible for nurturing a deeper, more faithful Christian celebration within the Christian community.

If we attend to living our lives as Jesus taught (a hard enough job), some of those folks who are addicted to consumer culture as we once were (and maybe still are), may want to join us, because it is not only a deep faith that shows in how we live, but also because we are not busy condemning others at the same time.

I guess it boils down to my no longer wanting to spend the Christmas season angry at consumer culture instead of celebrating Jesus’ birthday.

So let’s live it up and celebrate the festival of Jesus’ birth as only Christians can. Let’s put that light up on the table so others can see it and perhaps join us because it’s a better way. It may be a better way to spend our time.

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