The Myth of Scarcity, Part 1

The Quaker writer Parker Palmer, writes in his book, Let Your Life Speak, of nature’s lessons of abundance.

There's a miracle story about loaves and fishes. It's the only miracle story that appears in all four gospels. It, too, is a lesson about abundance.

Today, The Liberal Pulpit puts the ancient (Mark 6: 30-42) and contemporary into dialog with each other. We interweave Parker Palmer (indented) and the Gospel of Mark (italics). Note the convergence: what Palmer tells ("trust its supply and pass it around"), Jesus shows.

Nature normally takes us through a reliable cycle of scarcity and abundance in which times of deprivation foreshadow an eventual return to the bountiful fields. This fact of nature is in sharp contrast to human nature, which seems to regard perpetual scarcity as the law of life. Daily I am astonished at how readily I believe that something I need is in short supply. If I hoard possessions, it is because I believe that there are not enough to go around. If I struggle with others over power, it is because I believe that power is limited. If I become jealous in relationships, it is because I believe that when you get too much love, I will be short-changed. The irony, often tragic, is that by embracing the scarcity assumption, we create the very scarcities we fear.

   The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all that they had done and taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves. Now many saw them going and recognized them, and they hurried there on foot from all the towns and arrived ahead of them. As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
   When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.”
   But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.”

If I hoard material goods, others will have too little and I will never have enough. If I fight my way up the ladder of power, others will be defeated, and I will never feel secure. If I get jealous of someone I love, I am likely to drive that person away. We create scarcity by fearfully accepting it as law and by competing with others for resources as if we were stranded in the Sahara at the last oasis.

   They said to him, “Are we to go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread, and give it to them to eat?”
   And he said to them, “How many loaves have you? Go and see.”
   When they had found out, they said, “Five, and two fish.” Then he ordered them to get all the people to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups of hundreds and of fifties. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all.

In the human world, abundance does not happen automatically. It is created when we have the sense to choose community, to come together to celebrate and share our common store. Whether the scarce resource is money or love or power or words, the true law of life is that we generate more of whatever seems scarce by trusting its supply and passing it around. Authentic abundance does not lie in secured stockpiles of food or cash or influence or affection but in belonging to a community where we can give those goods to others who need them -- and receive them from others when we are in need. Here is a summertime truth: abundance is a communal act, the joint creation of an incredibly complex ecology in which each part functions on behalf of the whole, and in return, is sustained by the whole.

   And all ate and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. Those who had eaten the loaves numbered five thousand.

Community doesn’t just create abundance -- community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed.

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This is Part 1 of 5 of "The Myth of Scarcity"
Next: Part 2.

Redemption

“Redemption” is a popular word in sports discourse, in the context of which “redemption” seems to mean any success following after any failure. Since life is a continual process of little (and occasionally larger) failures interspersed with little (and occasionally larger) successes, “redemption,” in this sense is a very regular and recurring thing.

"Redemption" is also frequently invoked in popular culture. Six films, starting in 1930, 12 albums from as many bands, and even more single songs, have been titled, “Redemption.”

We speak of redeeming our honor, or reputation – by doing something particularly exemplary or by clearing ourselves of a charge against us. We speak of redeeming a coupon – by exchanging it for a product. You redeem your mortgage by paying it off, redeem your obligations by carrying them out, and redeem your possessions by recovering them.

“Redemption” comes from the Latin, rudimere, "to buy back." We can see that root concept at work in the various current uses of the word. In particular, the original usage primarily meant buying back one’s freedom. Slaves who could manage to raise enough money could buy themselves and become free.

Redemption is about emancipation, regaining our native freedom.

In Jewish theological history, “redemption” centrally refers to God redeeming the Israelites from various exiles: God buys them back and restores them to freedom in their own land, the land promised to them. From this idea of deliverance from exile grew the Christian concept of deliverance from sin.

The questions for us, then, are:

• In what ways do we find ourselves exiled from the inheritance of joy and belonging that is our birthright? 
• To what do we find ourselves in bondage? 
• What is the price to pay for liberation, for return into our own, for realizing ourselves? 

Every reader will have a different way to answer that question. Maybe we feel stuck in a dead-end job. Or in an abusive relationship. Maybe we are entrapped by the detritus of our own material success – bound by our “stuff” and consumed by desires to protect it, maintain it, simply keep up with it all, or, God forbid, get more of it. We may thus be in exile from the life of simplicity and freedom.

One of the key distinctions in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) is between “demand” and “request.” The NVC way is to make requests, not demands. The difference has nothing to do with how politely it is expressed. A demand need not carry implicit or explicit threat. The difference between demand and request has to do with how you’ll feel if the answer is “no.” If you can calmly accept not getting what you were requesting, then it was a true request. If you are, at any level, upset by a “no” answer, then you had some “demand energy” in your asking.

Wherever your demand energy is, that’s what you’re having a hard time letting go of.

Whatever you’re having a hard time letting go of, that’s what you’re in bondage to.

The path of redemption, of liberation, is the discipline of freeing yourself from the chains of your own demands.

A Natural and Religious History of Compassion, Part 5

We began this series with Psalm 137, so let us return there and read those words anew.

By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down and there we wept
     when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth,
     saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
     if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
     how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back
     what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

The Psalm expresses the Israelite anguish during the Babylonian captivity, and ends with a bitter vision of violent recrimination.

Giving vent to pain does not heal the wound; it only expresses the pain. So the story-tellers among that oppressed people brought forth from the imaginations of their better selves another sort of story, a salve for smoldering hatred -- a story that called the people not to pay back violence and death, but to pay forward compassion -- a story not of pain that makes more pain, but a story of hospitality that engenders healing and wholeness. Compassion to strangers is the way that we encounter the holy. That's the story the Israelites in their captivity put into the foundation of the narrative that defines the Jewish people, hence the Christians, hence the Moslems – and us.

Yes, Jews, Christians, and Moslems, are still fighting – though modern warfare kills a smaller percent of us than early human warfare did. Religion’s ancient use for war runs deep and is not easily replaced by its new use for peace across tribal lines. Religion hasn’t finished outgrowing and transcending its original tribal function.

But it’s getting there.

The Israelite story-tellers, in the midst of their captivity, homelessness, and pain, found a way to remember others’ pain, too. Somehow they found a way to make stories to move their hearts from pain toward compassion, to care for the stranger. What they illustrated in their story of Abraham's hospitality to visiting strangers, they codified in principle, for Deuteronomy was also substantially created in Babylonian captivity:

“You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deut 10:19)

The stories that emerged in the Babylonian captivity have not ended the violence that oppresses our planet. Those stories do show us what is possible. The violence can be ended.

Our spiritual hardware is built into us. It's what we have and what we are. It was made as a sword -- a device to bind us together for cohesive war fighting. It's up to us to beat that sword into a plowshare, cultivate fields of care, and sew the nourishing knowledge that we are one. It is up to us to find the ways to connect, to cultivate compassion for enemies, to train ourselves in nonviolence, to recognize that violence is any thought, word, or deed that treats a being like an object or diminishes a being’s sense of value or security. Thus we stand in the Abrahamic tradition of hope and possibility, stand with the radical vision of some captive Israelite story-tellers.

What they dreamed be ours to do.

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This is part 5 of 5 of "A Natural and Religious History of Compassion"
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Beginning: Part 1.

A Natural and Religious History of Compassion, Part 4

We have religion because we had war. The religious impulse was built into early hominids as a method for loyalty to “us” and enmity to “them.” Yet slowly that impulse transcended itself. The circuitry of loyalty to tribe began evolving toward loyalty to life.

Anthropological evidence shows compassion’s slow progress. Among early humans,

“About 75 percent [of pre-state societies] went to war at least once every 2 years ...whereas the modern nation state goes to war about once a generation.”

Enslavement was not practiced, and prisoners were not taken:

“Captured warriors were killed on the spot. Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley estimates that a typical tribal society lost about 0.5 of its population in combat each year, far more than the toll suffered by most modern states.” (Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct, 49)

Another study estimates that 13-15 percent of all deaths among foragers were due to warfare. Compare that to the percentage of deaths due to warfare in the United States and Europe during the twentieth century, the epoch of two world wars: less than 1 percent of male deaths. (Samuel Bowles cited by Wade 72)

We have, for millennia now, very slowly been becoming a less violent, more magnanimous and compassionate species.

Somehow the mechanism for tribal warfare became available for peace. Tribal bonding opened a hole in itself through which it found its own greatest fulfillment, irony of ironies, in compassion to the stranger. The Israelites of the Babylonian captivity illustrated this in their stories about Abraham. The ancient Greeks also illustrated it.

In Homer’s epic, The Iliad, the Trojan, Hector, killed the Greek, Patroclus, Achilles’ dearest friend. Achilles, mad with rage, found a way to isolate Hector in battle. Achilles killed Hector, mutilated the body, and refused to give it to the family for burial, which meant Hector’s soul would never know rest.

But then one night, Hector's father, old King Priam of Troy, came into enemy territory into the Greek camp in disguise, and he made his way to Achilles' tent. He took off his disguise. Everyone was shocked.

The old, old man came forward and pulled at Achilles feet to plead for the body of his son. He embraced Achilles' knees, and he wept.

Achilles – “man-slaughtering Achilles,” Homer calls him -- Achilles who has killed not only Hector, but many other of Priam’s sons – looked at the old man and thought of his own father. Achilles, too, began to weep.

“Then the weeping stops, and Achilles goes for Hector's body. He carries it and lays it very gently and tenderly in the arms of the old man. The two men look at each other and each recognizes the other as divine. It's when we can go beyond the hatred, the enmity that knocks us into so much grief and pain and violence, it's then that we become god like. That is the end of the religious quest.” (Karen Armstrong)

Tomorrow they will be trying to kill each other again. For a moment, the recognition of shared pain creates compassion – literally “with-feeling.”

• com = "with"
• passion = "feeling"

In feeling with each other, they have a moment of that experience of connection, the kind of connection we were made for, the kind in which we become god-like because everything that the word God was ever supposed to mean – all the depth of sincerest devotion and the awe of infinite mystery and love – is right there: compassion outside our own tribe.

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This is part 4 of 5 of "A Natural and Religious History of Compassion"
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A Natural and Religious History of Compassion, Part 3

The literature of the Babylonian Captivity (6th-century BCE), reveals a growing compassion consciousness. It was a long time coming.

Religion began as an in-group v. out-group mechanism -- an adaptive strategy for group warfare. While religion facilitated cooperative endeavor within our own tribe, it engendered hostility rather than compassion for outsiders.

It seems to be the nature of social animals to form groups – that fight against other groups. A group that is able to work together enhances the spread of its genes by working together to conquer neighbors. Yes, conquering other tribes -- and preventing other tribes from conquering yours -- is the greatest original advantage of social cooperation. Ants, for example, are a social species. They're also territorial and fight pitched battles at their borders with neighboring groups.

When our ancestors were hunter-gathers, as hominids have been for the vast majority of their history, war was small-scale and frequent. Bands of males attacked other bands of males – as chimpanzees do today.

“Chimpanzees in fact occupy territories that are patrolled and defended by bands of males. Through raids and ambushes, they try to pick off the males of a neighboring group one by one until they are able to annex the group’s territory and females.” (Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct 48)

In this context of tribal warfare, tribes fared best when their members were highly committed, loyal, and willing to sacrifice themselves for the group.

Commitment and sacrifice are good for the group, but bad for individuals. A situation in which every one else was courageous and took risks to protect the group, while I could stay back, avoid the risks of fighting while reaping the benefits of keeping rival groups at bay, would be ideal for my genes. But if everyone followed that strategy, the group would be undefended and short-lived. So human groups put a lot of energy into keeping freeloading low and group commitment high. We monitor, condemn, and punish those who don’t do their part. Our survival depended on it.

Small groups used gossip to keep people in line, but once a group got past about 150 people, there were too many for gossip to keep up with. We needed another strategy. And that’s where religion comes in. Rituals and shared music, dancing and drumming, helped our ancestors rev up certain neuropeptides and hormones and neural pathways of group connectedness. We felt much more connected to the group. Public ritual and ceremony also allowed monitoring who wasn’t participating -- and therefore who wasn’t so reliably connected to the group.

Moreover, our sociable brains, highly attuned to other people – who to approve and disapprove of, and who is approving and disapproving of us – are primed to see the same thing in the natural world: that the sky and earth, too, are monitoring us with approval and disapproval. We told stories that reinforced the sense of person-like monitors, judges – and sometimes guides – in earth, sky, sun, moon, rivers, mountains, animals.

Religion – shared rituals, ceremonies, music, dance, and sacred stories – binds us together. Religion exists in every human culture because it is so good as a functional adaptation to bind our group together so we can compete successfully – violently – against other groups.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Religion started getting out of control. Not that it was ever exactly in anybody’s control. I mean: this device for commitment, connection, monitoring, and the useful illusion of being monitored, started spreading beyond its purpose. Slowly, the connection we had to our tribe also connected us to people outside our tribe, even to our enemies.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "A Natural and Religious History of Compassion"
Next: Part 4.
Previous: Part 2.
Beginning: Part 1.

A Natural and Religious History of Compassion, Part 2

In Part 1, The Liberal Pulpit mentioned the Babylonian Captivity of the 6th-century BCE and the literature that came out of it, including:

• Psalm 137, with its mournful, poignant sadness and bitter, violent hatred;
• the narrative arc of Abraham, with a powerful signal episode of hospitality -- an episode that pointed the captive Israelites away from vicious retribution and toward compassion.

Now, if you are thinking about Abraham, you might also be remembering another Abraham story. You might be thinking that old Abraham doesn’t seem very compassionate a few chapters later as he prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac.

"When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son." (Genesis 22: 9-10)

Not exactly a model of compassion, is it? If a man today said that God told him to kill his son, and he was preparing to do it, we’d call protective services, posthaste.

How does the binding of Isaac fit with the narrative project of 6th-century BCE captive Israelite story-tellers? How can this, too, be a part of the emerging place of compassion in the consciousness of the Hebrew people?

Glad you asked.

Genesis 22 tells listeners, "there is a meaning and a joy in a connection that isn’t just about you and your interests and your family."

The call of the divine is the call to hospitality outside the usual circle of loyalty, compassion to the stranger, a connection that stretches us. That’s where we encounter the holy. That point is made in Genesis 18, where Abraham met God by being hospitable to three strangers. Then the point is driven home in Genesis 22. The binding of Isaac story is saying: if you think that just taking care of your own is where it’s at, you’ve missed it. Other means really other.

Abraham’s willingness to cut off his own line, his greatest interest, represents in parable the dethroning of himself from the center of the world – a giving himself over to something bigger than himself – a connectedness beyond his own (his family's, his tribe's) interests.

Modern listeners can't help but think about Isaac's interests. But remember that for the peoples of the Ancient Near East, children had no interests of their own -- they were solely a part of their father's interests. Thus, the crucial part of the story is Abraham's willingness to give up himself. Isaac represents Abraham's last chance at the sort of immortality that progeny provide, for Ishmael had been sent away in the previous chapter (Genesis 21). Abraham stands ready to die without any "living on" in a son. He is ready to die utterly. Abraham is ready to die because, for him, life is not for serving Self. Life is for serving Other, represented here by God, the Holy Wholly Other.

Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, represents Abraham's de-centering of the ego-self. It is not a retreat from Abraham's compassion in Genesis 18, but is, instead, a surrender into service to the Other, and thus a vital aspect of the emerging compassion consciousness.

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This is part 2 of 5 of "A Natural and Religious History of Compassion"
Next: Part 3.
Previous: Part 1

A Natural and Religious History of Compassion, Part 1

By the rivers of Babylon — there we sat down and there we wept
     when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth,
     saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you,
     if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
     how they said, "Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!"
O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back
     what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!

-- Psalm 137 (NRSV)

The first two-thirds of this Psalm have a plaintive beauty. These lines have many times been set to music. The musical versions, however, usually leave out that vicious ending. To understand the Psalm's mix of sadness, loss, devotion, and bitter hatred, let's look to its context.

The Psalm was composed -- as was much of the Hebrew Bible -- in the 6th century BCE, during the period of exile known as the Babylonian Captivity. In 605 BCE, the Babylonians conquered Judah, and the Israelites were enslaved and taken far away to Babylon. Then, in 538 BCE, Babylon in turn fell to Persia, and Israelites began to return home to Judah. In between, the 70-year period of Babylonian exile was for the Israelites a time of deep reflection on the meaning of who they were and why God had abandoned them.

During the exile, the stories about King David were compiled, incorporating earlier fragments. The figure of David reflects an exiled people's deep yearning for a story of past glory. In the process of constructing that story, a detailed ancestry for David was concocted, going back to Moses, and going further back to Abraham, some eight or nine centuries before David.

The creation and telling of these stories gave hope to the Hebrew people in a time of despair, suffering, and defeat. The stories of Abraham, Moses, and David, fictional or not, told Israelites of a past time of freedom and power, and gave them hope for a better time to come -- for the stories told them God had promised to make the descendants of Abraham a great nation.

Those stories assembled and composed during the Babylonian Captivity told the Israelites that the path of the fulfillment of God's promise was a winding one that had taken them into captivity before, in Egypt. They had emerged from past captivity into a time of freedom and prosperity, and so could again. Without that story, composed in oppression and exile, the Israelites would be known as one more Ancient Near East tribe – along with the Jebusites, Ammonites, Aramites, Midianites, Moabites, Edomites, Huttites,...Etceterites. But with that story, the Israelites coalesced around it into the religion recognizable as Judaism.

Some of the writings of the Babylonian Captivity do express deep bitterness, anger, and violent hatred of the Babylonian captors. Perhaps the bitterness of their oppression makes the bitterness of their hearts understandable. In any case, what we see at the end of Psalm 137 is a glimpse of the violent hostility that some of the Hebrews had toward their captors.

But now comes the amazing part.

In the midst of that bitterness, some of the Hebrew story-tellers had the wisdom and the courage to perceive another way: a way of hospitality rather than bitter and violent anger. The stories they wove together told the Hebrew people not only of a past time of glory, but also called them to hospitality rather than to bitterness. These story-tellers among the enslaved Israelites of the Babylonian Captivity gave us the story of Abraham’s hospitality to strangers, his heart of compassion in the midst of risk.

Genesis, chapter 18:

“The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, ‘My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant.’”

Now, Abraham doesn’t recognize who these visitors are. Abraham's use of “my lord,” is a general term of respect. His running out to meet them and bowing down are the same generous hospitality he might show any human visitor. Abraham continues:

"‘Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refesh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant.’ So they said, ‘Do as you have said.’”

It was a patriarchal culture, so when Abraham decides to have guests, Sarah has to get to work – though Abraham is busy, too:

“And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, ‘Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.’ Abraham ran to the heard, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.”

In ancient times, a stranger often represented a threat. Yet Abraham rushes out to show kindness. He sets out his best offering. What he finds out, is that he is serving God.

Abraham's act of practical compassion leads to a holy encounter. As I read that story, it’s not that reaching out to needs greater than our own causes a magical being to reward us for it. Reaching out and connecting is the holy encounter. We touch the divine when we contact in compassion the other, the stranger. Whoever it is, that’s God.

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This is part 1 of 5 of "A Natural and Religious History of Compassion"
Next: Part 2