"Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, 'Who is the LORD?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God." (Proverbs 30:8-9)
People looking for work find their blood pressure closely attuned to each new, near daily prediction about the job market in 2011. Last Friday, Jeannine Aversa (from the Associated Press) gave a pretty representative and safe diagnosis, as you can see in the Austin Statesman. Aversa writes: "Stronger hiring this year should help wages grow more. But lavish pay raises and bonuses aren't expected for most workers because competition for jobs remains fierce, economists say.”
I cite this article as one representative peak into something that is always going on: struggling between visions of scarcity vs. abundance. When you’ve applied for 50 jobs and haven’t received a call back, you will inevitably begin to ask: Are there enough jobs for every able minded person in the country? Last time I wrote about how one prays from a position of both, exceptional affluence (from the vantage point of the global situation) and yet pressing need (in light of what the affluent person has yet to experience in their lifetime). For most in America, the new problems that might have surfaced for us in the last decade are new and frightening; on the other hand, they are (in light of the comprehensively-historical human situation) trifling.
Today I'd like to simply start a conversation about the ways in which seeing the world, and God's material providence, through the lenses of scarcity or sufficiency have a profound affect on how we move through life, understand our own possessions (material and abstract) rightly and treat other people (especially strangers). When you perceive all of your social interactions (and the stage of the local world in which those interactions take place) through the lens of scarcity, it dictates a lot of what you do. No annual holiday reveals anthropological horror more clearly than Black Friday shopping mobs in which normally socialized adults tear at other human beings like hyenas thrashing over Tickle Me Elmo’s and bargain priced Dell laptops. When you view your needs as dire, and the goods that satiate those needs to be scant, you might find yourself trampling and clawing through others that stand in your way.
Scarce writing space prohibits me from fully unpacking the theological lenses of scarcity and sufficiency (irony intended). But Walter Brueggemann does it pretty concisely in his paper-- “The Liturgy of Abundance, and the Myth of Scarcity.” “We who are now the richest nation are today's main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have to have more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity -- a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity. The conflict between the narratives of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting us at the turn of the millennium.”
I'd like to hear from you the local (or distant) reader. How have you wrestled with these two ways of seeing the world? How has your spiritual experience lead you to perceive material sufficiency in light of constant analytical diagnosis that suggests otherwise? Have you been forced to reconsider what constitutes "having enough?" If so, what did you learn? I'd also be interested to hear your commentary on this interview with William T. Cavanauh, on being Christian and struggling with consumption (here and here).
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