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More on Poverty and Economics

Can seeking Lady Poverty correctly balance our shared economic interests so that it is possible to make a living without losing your soul?  I don’t know, but I can begin with my own heart and my own choices and govern the market of my family and the economy of my home. This made me recognize that Rerum Novarum, whose critique of the free market and capitalism was reiterated by Paul VI in Quatressigmo Annum and John Paul II’s Centissium Annum (both titles refer to the original and were issued on the anniversary of Leo’s encyclical) was in actuality a call to the laity, amplified by the Second Vatican Council, to start thinking about this area again and try to bring economic activity under the leadership of the Gospel again. Each time a pope spoke about economics, he essentially would end by saying, “I’m only a member of the clergy: you lay people have to figure this out.”It was the new convert Chesterton who took up the gauntlet thrown down by Leo XIII, and together with Hilaire Belloc sketched out a new economic construct they christened distributism.  Distributism is a half-constructed tantalizing philosophy, considered unworkable by the learned economist and the seasoned businessman, sniffed at by the socialist as too trusting of evil property, snickered at by the libertarian as the product of papal interference. Yet those who have tried it and made it work on the small scale through cooperatives and independent business speak of it with affection, and try to add to the drawing, to render and shade its outlines a bit more. Often distributism is only a matter for thinkers and activists: it was another mother, a businesswoman, who suggested to me that the proper place to work on developing the philosophy that may or may not be someday still called distributism is the home. Teach your children to consider economic activity first in the light of their own soul, then the soul of their relatives and families, and scale outward accordingly as you go. This is the challenge I have gladly taken up.Furthermore, Brad Gregory’s work helped me see a surprising connection: according to him, Catholic economic theory was marooned in the sixteenth century with the advent of the Reformation, when society was still mostly agrarian. When Chesterton and Belloc and their fellow thinkers began to tackle economics, they began instinctively to tackle it by discussing farms and small business and craftsmen and advocating that large landowners “distribute” productive land back to the small farmer and small business owner in order to combat the monopoly-creating tendencies in capitalism. Given that the Industrial Revolution had passed, and the Information Age was just around the corner, critics of distributism jeered proponents as being … marooned in the agrarian economy of the sixteenth century. This helped me see that, Ent-like and disregarding of centuries, the Catholic Church was merely picking up where She had left off. Distributism was not an idealist yearning for an earlier age: it was a continuity. The main quibble with distributism (which I agree needs a new name), is the question, “Who would implement it? What government or market oligarchy would have the power to push it through?”  The answer to the question, “Who will implement this?” is, I now realize, “You and I.” For certainly, if enough people wanted to limit their incomes to only what they could live upon, that would indeed change the market. If enough people care for the destitute out of service of Christ, markets and even government programs would align to their wishes. For as we are told, the market is only that: wishes. If we were to all wish together, who knows what might happen?  We may create a system of checks and balances that allows for growth and goodness and checks tyranny and selfishness. But it all depends on our conversion of heart.Have we indeed delegated away too much? Having created the market economy, have we delegated away the very sense of our own free will in this regard?  How much more peril now faces us with the tyranny of technology, which similarly jeers at our free will, intimating that it is a behemoth too great to be tamed by the hand of any man?We need to regain an awareness of the power of God to change the world with all the faith of a David. We must live as though the Gospel were true, as if Christ mattered. We must be able to do business this way, considering Him as the master off on a journey who will require an account of all our doings when He returns. One thing I am convinced of is that culture recovery cannot happen without an embrace of poverty. It is the grounded virtue, the one that must be run into the ground to stabilize the entire circuit of virtue. Why?It is usually overlooked how vital weakness is to Christianity, particularly when it comes to economics. Human nature tends to value strength. Catholicism, as in all things, affirms this natural impulse but also challenges it. Christ did not come as the Superman but as a servant. He came not as all powerful but as a dependent fetus, dependent upon a human being for His nourishment and care. The casting down of princes from thrones prophesied in our Lady’s Magnificat has been accomplished on the archetypal as well as the spiritual level by the incarnation. We will, none of us, ever be the same again.Poverty should be the mark of the follower of Christ and reverence for the poor because He chose poverty. How this will work in the age of the laity will need more minds and decisions than mine, yet it is crucial. So, what must we do? Well, we must act as though we have morals, though the rules of the game dictate otherwise, because souls are at stake: our souls. The gladiator games were not halted because some gladiators were baptized Christians who slew their foes just as competently, or with greater dispatch than any others. It stopped by gladiators becoming Christian and refusing to play by the rules, and getting killed for their obstinacy, and spectators realizing that it wasn’t so fun to watch this any longer. It was too human.It must be possible to live the Gospel. That is what makes me think that there must be a way to remake our economic system so that the Gospel may enter in to it. It must be possible to live the Gospel, as sinful and fallen as we are. If even a remnant can live out the calling of Lady Poverty, would that be enough to right the balance? We cannot expect that all will follow Christ, nor that all who do will embrace Lady Poverty. But even if a tenth of a tenth do it, that may be enough.I believe only two percent of the population needs to be doing something before it becomes common in society. A good distillation of culture is small groups may be all we need. When a tiny sliver are doing it well with intensity, a larger among of people may be doing it badly but at least attempting, and beyond that lie many who may never do it but who will accept the principle of the thing, and others who do it without knowing why it needs to be done, but doing it for other motives. And so, a society is changed.So, if enough of us sought after Lady Poverty, that might be enough.Although this recommendation might seem revolutionary and extreme, it is a true revolution – a turning of the wheel – in the sense of returning to the past, returning to the medieval realization that the accumulation of wealth could be catastrophic for the soul, both your soul and the soul of others. This is one part of cultural recovery which is an idea so old that it looks new, but that with reflection, anyone can see is at least as new as St. Francis. In reality, it is as old as the Gospels. It is the part of the Gospels that our age has never gotten quite right or rightly understood. I can begin to try to get it right.

The Economics of the Heart: Distributism from the Roots Up

G.K. Chesterton was instrumental in my youthful rediscovery of my Catholic faith, but I did not encounter his ideas on economics (which I was warned were silly, impractical, and a mere distraction from his fiction and social commentary) until later. Around the same time, my dearly loved sister married a young man who had been trained at the Acton Institute, a bastion of free-market philosophy. So, my introduction to “Catholic economics” was a two-pronged education whose precepts were frequently in conflict with one another. I would absorb some truism from Chesterton and Belloc that rang in my soul with resounding truthfulness which I would eagerly share with my loving brother-in-law, who patiently explained why this truth was wrong, or at least wrong-headed, or true in the books but not in the market… and his explanations sounded true as well.I thus realized that the relationship between the Gospel and economic theory and reality was complex or muddled, to say the least. And I wondered how it could be that the Gospel taught one thing, but markets worked in contradictory ways that proved the Gospel just couldn’t be lived practically in the balance sheet – and furthermore, that this staggering contradiction was accepted by nearly every good Catholic I knew. Their mild equanimity towards the inherent contradiction of the Gospel and economics was shocking, given that most of them would have brooked no paradox between the Bible and say, the Sexual Revolution.Distributists are either confused with communists or socialists, as Dorothy Day presciently noted (“Feed the poor and you’re called a saint. Ask why they are poor, and you’re called a communist,” was her ironic observation) or dismissed out of hand as utopian whose ideas will lead down the same blood-bathed road of those ideologies. Most Catholics, I discovered, would rather live with the contradiction.

I furthermore discovered that adherents of distributism had their own explanation for the contradiction: their intellectual opponents were so consumed with greed that they could not recognize the sinfulness of free market capitalism. I was disinclined to think that this could be true. Most of the proponents of capitalism I knew were generous, gave profusely to charity with their checkbooks and with their time.  They supported soup kitchens, funded Third-World business initiatives, volunteered time at crisis pregnancy centers, and organized disaster relief.  I am still inclined to discount greed, but I will fault an inability of those who realized the discrepancy between the Gospel and economics to explain themselves better. 
This is not been entirely unwarranted, because the problem is staggeringly complex and chaotic, and is an inheritance of a problem that has been insoluble since the Reformation. I am grateful to Brad Gregory for pointing out where the problem lies in his essay on “Manufacturing the Goods Life” in his pivotal book The Unintended Reformation (Belknap/Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 2012, pp. 235-297). To paraphrase, Reformation theology posited that faith in Christ, not the life of virtue, was all that was necessary for salvation, causing Catholic and Protestant merchants alike to throw off with relief concerns of practicing generosity and working for the common good and avoiding greed and avarice in their business practices just as the international market economy exploded: “…the market and inherited Christian morality were increasingly divorced, which removed the ethical restraints inhibiting the eventual formation of a full-blown capitalist and consumerist society…. Antagonists between Christian moral communities liberated market practices from traditional Christian morality and produced a market society.” (p. 272) Gregory blames the Venetian merchants and the Flemish Protestants for jettisoning morality in favor of removing restraints on the piling of riches. The Protestants of the time firmly believed that cultivating the life of virtue was a serious way of taking away the work of Christ. No more talk of working out your salvation with fear and trembling, as St. Paul said to the Philippians, but merely standing firm in faith in Christ, putting aside all vain works. So, when building up a market, one need not --- should not --- have any concern about acting virtuous. That was all vanity and the traditions of men. And their counterparts the Catholic Venetian merchants (who should have known better) were only too ready to act like atheists as Machiavelli recommended. From this dubious ecumenical partnership blossomed forth the foundations of the modern economy and the international market, and soon even Christians who wanted to shun greed found that they could not do so but were forced to play the same game everyone else was playing: the game of the market, governed by the laws of economics, not the laws of God.
Additionally, the doctrinal crisis of the Reformation meant that the best and brightest minds in Catholic theology were now preoccupied with the crucial needs of apologetics and abandoned the thorny problems of economics, so that Catholic thinking on economics was marooned in the fourteenth century, until Pope Leo XIII called for Catholics to revisit the area in his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum, with additional pontiffs publishing periodic anniversary iterations of that encyclical that essentially wrote, “What he said.”
Each time, the pope told the laity that while capitalism had brought about good in terms of wealth – and while communism had a correct critique of its defects – the outlook of both philosophies was fundamentally flawed, in that they saw economic activity in a moral vacuum. Capitalism conceived of economics as a machine artificially apart from the considerations of man whose ways were not our ways and whose concerns were not our concerns. We were to take the role of the clockmaker God and allow the market to do as it wished with our populations, and to marvel at its creation of wealth. But both free market capitalism and its reaction, communism, assume that life consists only of the material, and this is the false assumption the popes rightly attacked. And the market is not a machine that stands apart from humanity but is made up of human choices.
If human choices today make a market that is unjust, who unfairly piles wealth in the hands of a few and plants envy in the hearts of the many, can we change that market? Not by government programs or government disincentives but by changing our own hearts regarding money, and teaching our children to do likewise?

The Wolves of Want and the Wyrms of Wealth

In Eden, God had stored up all happiness for humans, giving them not only the Tree of Life but all other fruits in the world, save one. That condition upon which happiness hung was obedience to one command: do not eat from the one tree. But Adam and Eve failed the test of obedience, and so we struggle both to feed and clothe ourselves, but most of all, we struggle to obey. Fortunately, we have so great a Savior, Who was obedient unto death.
Obedience is a form of poverty. It is a lack: a lack of freedom. Compelled obedience is indeed a poverty, or so we believe instinctually. We love freedom and options, and free will makes such freedom to choose satisfying. A lack of freedom due to obedience runs counter to our humanness. And yet freely choosing to obey against the inclination of the moment is a deeper freedom, because it sets us free from that inclination of the moment. I value exercise, but at the moment my daily routine begins, I would rather sleep. Obedience to “I should” frees me from clamorous frenzy of “I would.” As I think of my buying habits, I think of how often the siren song of the impulse afflicts me. I spot something and am drawn to it as by hypnosis: once, early in my marriage, I saw at the discount store a stack of three hatboxes in the most alluring pattern, which I “fell in love with.” For days I was tormented by those hatboxes, which seemed so pretty and useful, but which I could not justify buying. I was young and used to being mistress of my own purse, and learning to think as a joint partner in a marriage was difficult for me. I did not buy them, but I remember how agonizing the compulsion was. I am truly not detached from the material delights of the eye. It was obedience to my husband’s request that the money be spent only on food and because I valued our joint decision-making. We were newly married, and our beautiful love was very fragile: who knows what damage that disobedience to our joint resolution might have done? And yet by obeying, I remained free of the hatboxes and free to pursue what I really wanted. In this way, the poverty of obedience set me free. The budget, jointly drawn up with one’s spouse or even, when the children are older, one’s family, is a joint promise of obedience, a monetary vow of poverty than can monasticize your finances by allowing God to be the divider and judge. When renewed in season, it is like the election of a new abbot, a new guide map through the woods.The maps of old had not only directions but also warnings: warnings against wolves in the forest or serpents in the deep. So, our budget warns us not only against the wolves of want but the dragons of abundance.We of the middle class have long ago fallen into the hands of the wolves of want, although our destitution has been nicely euphonized as debt. There are Davids out there to help us learn how the slingshot the Goliath of consumer debt, and we indeed need them. But when it comes to consumer debt, one can see how the wolves of want and the dragons of abundant wealth work hand in hand. The dragon promises to deliver us wealth—for the moment—and he does! But then the wolves close in to decimate our credit score. But at times the dragons work alone. And as we work hard to keep the wolves from the door, we need to also keep the dragons from our dreams.  These are the dragons of catastrophic wealth.Catastrophic wealth means an overabundance too great to meet our established needs which demands entry not just to our homes but our hearts.  Are we on guard against this dragon?  Dragons are not good for children. One problem of the rich is how to guard the souls of their children who are used to wealth, for whom material goods are an entitlement. Think of the rich young man who, confronted with Christ and eternal riches, went away sad. The holds that goods have upon a soul are more clutching and insidious than the drill and tentacles of a virus. Christ warns us against them. Camels go through needles more easily than wealth is detached from the human heart.  We should not let the specter of naked, hungry children blind us to the evil of sated, cold-hearted indifference of the well-heeled. We are warned that bringing a soul to Christ is near to impossible under those conditions. Fear wealth for your children. It is the invisible dragon who wishes to swallow your children so that they cannot imagine life outside of its warm and comfortable bowels.  Do not be envious for its gaping maw and slithering tunnel. “So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich towards God.”The only way to defeat the dragon is to send it away and in haste with superabundant generosity. Do not let it languish in storage boxes but send it away as quickly as it comes. Go into the highways and byways and give it away. Make friends for yourself with unrighteous mammon so that when you are turned out of this world into the cold of the grave, you will have those who will take you in and plead for your soul.Certainly, there are many of us who need to care about money because we do not make enough, or our habits of indulgence keep us continually in debt or impoverished. For us, a right relationship with money is no less crucial. Without it, our striving towards balance in our finances will lack something Christian about it: the secular part of our brain will continually dream of winning the lottery to solve all our problems. Here Lady Poverty is the friend who keeps your soul from hell: we may imagine in our immaturity that we could easily slay the dragon of catastrophic wealth if it descended upon us, but the Lady knows better. She keeps the dragon at bay for us. It might be good for us to pray that we may grow wiser regarding wealth, that we might be able to withstand the alluring promises of power, the falsity of wealth-based friendships, the suffering that comes with facing problems that money cannot solve. Poverty saves us from all these dragons, though she is unappreciated for her pains. The poverty of Our Lord is reverenced but still feared: we fail to see the great freedom He dwelled in. Knowing this, we can begin to pray that prayer, to draw near to Lady Poverty, to recognize her as the crucial component of growing closer to Christ.  It was Suzanne Fowler, who founded the apostolate of Light Weigh, who helped me see the connection between dragons and wolves when it comes to food. I struggle to have a right relationship to food, as many Americans do. She points out that when we feel hunger pangs, we don’t need to satiate them by wolfing down as much food as we can possibly hold. Stomach expansion and consequent health problems result. But if instead of either starving ourselves or gorging on overabundance, we merely slowly and thankfully enjoy one “fistful” of food, we will be satisfied. When it comes to food, we understand that there is such a thing as too much food. By analogy, we need to learn that there is such a thing as too much money.We will never truly be followers of Christ until we have faced the hidden dragon of wealth, small as a microscopic worm in the belly, yet large enough to keep whole nations in thrall. For if you love the wealth you own, you fear its loss, and that fear imprisons you and keeps you from truly trusting Christ and your Heavenly Father. Do we not know that He loves us? He will not let His children go hungry. He will provide if we truly need Him to. Call upon Him in our need and be content with what He gives us. Often it is so much more than we asked for.

The Rich Fool and His Storage Bins

In my quest for Lady Poverty, I turned to the Scripture, that treasure trove in worn covers with tissue-thin pages. What do we read there about wealth, and how has the Church interpreted it? This last is crucial since not every teaching about money is clear in the Scripture, and the balance – for as Chesterton pointed out, the Church is performing a balancing act perfectly poised – is everything for the understanding.
Money and sex are two sources of selfishness in marriage, and in the wider culture as well. My friend the radical iconographer is fond of saying that Christ spoke little about sex but very much about the rich. Our culture is obsessed with sex, forcing Mother Church to constantly turn her attention to it, but we would much rather not talk about money, because it’s far too important to the way we live. Thanks to disagreements and misunderstanding about sex, the Church has responded with the Theology of the Body. So perhaps it’s time for Catholics to turn our attention to the problem of money. I have spoken of how Christ began His public preaching by blessing Poverty in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel. Luke’s Gospel narrates the lesser-known “Sermon on the Plain,” which features a different version of the Beatitudes in chapter 6, verses 20-22. Here, Christ blesses the poor, and after his four blessings: blessing those who are poor, hungry, mourning, and persecuted, He lists four “woes.” “Woe to you who are rich, for you have had your consolation.
“Woe to you who are full now, for you shall hunger.
“Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.
“Woe to you when men speak well of you,
for such their fathers did to the false prophets.”
 (Luke 6: 24-26.)Note the nuance in our Savior’s words: he does not curse the rich, like the Marxist who considers the rich intrinsically evil. Christ only warns them of coming woe, “for you have already had your consolation.”Six chapters later, Christ tells his disciples the parable of the rich fool in the midst of a sermon given to his disciples “in the midst of the multitudes.” He begins by warning of the leaven of the Pharisees, namely, hiding sin, continues with a warning not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul, and to trust in the loving attention of God, who has numbered the very hairs of our head. He admonishes His followers to be brave in the face of persecution, and not to be anxious about what to say when put on trial. Then there is an interruption. One of the multitude interrupts this intense sermon with a purely worldly concern that must have struck the audience as frankly, off topic: “Teacher, bid my brother to divide the inheritance with me!” (Luke 12:13) Now, disputes among brothers in the Scriptures tend to have bloody and catastrophic consequences, recalling Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and so on.  So here our Savior is confronted with a perilous and possibly murderous situation: a question of inheritance voiced by an anonymous bystander. Jesus expresses skepticism that the man will listen to the advice given: “Man, who has made me a judge or divider over you?”  In the same way, many Christians who call our Savior Lord sometimes resist calling him Judge or Divider when it comes to the material possessions of this world.  So Christ does not judge the man’s claim and leaves the injustice unsolved. “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness, for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”He then tells a parable, which seems to be His tactic when He senses a straight answer will be rejected. “The land of a rich man brought forth plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build new ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease. Eat, drink, and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich towards God.” (Luke 12:16-21)It is not clear that the rich man ever put his plans into action: pulling down his barns, building new ones, storing his grain and goods, and then enjoying a life of ease. It might have been one night’s fantasy of the future, vanished in the morning over his cold corpse. God corrects the perspective of the rich fool: his goods are not his and were not given to be stored indefinitely in his barns but were meant for others.  The resulting sloth which the rich man entertained, led him into illusion, a fantasy shattered by his death (and one presumes, damnation) that very night.The rich fool’s mistake was twofold:1.      He forgot the poor when he was considering what to do with his abundance. 2.      He piled up wealth – hoarded, we might say –instead of giving it away.Had he solved his storage problem by sharing, perhaps with his brother, both would have been satisfied and he might not have died. If Christ or an outside judge or government official had demanded that he share his wealth, the wealth might have left his storage bins but remained stored in his heart, just as it was stored in the eyes of his envious brother. Hence, Wisdom being wiser than the government, Christ declines to command that the rich brother share his wealth.His parable might seem to agree with the questioner, who believes his problems are caused by the ungenerous nature of his brother. One senses the angst of the social justice warrior contemplating the rich capitalist. But Christ warns that redistribution of wealth is not an impossible socialist dream: on the contrary, redistribution of wealth is as inevitable as death. The piled-up wealth will then belong to someone else, possibly the angry brother. But the problem remains, a deadly problem. Take heed and beware! Pay attention!  Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions. If the questioner is about to be “rewarded” by the death of his inheriting brother, he is still rebuked for believing that lack of money is his crucial problem. The eyes and soul of the questioner are possessed by the abundance of his brother’s wealth and the corresponding lack in his own wealth. He demands that Christ be “fair” and give each an equivalent amount. But neither greed nor envy will be solved by mere equality.The parable reminds us that “ownership” is a legal fiction created for the ordering of society, transferable and destructible by the whim of the weather, governments, human will, and the Lord God.  To whom will all this piled-up wealth go?  Since we cannot keep them, only steward them, what is the purpose of goods?  Let me step from the parable to my little home.One sees the purpose in a large bag of oatmeal, more oatmeal than an adult could comfortably eat in any one sitting – when one is faced with the hungry faces of children. Watching a baby, barely eighteen months, toddle to a footstool, sit at the battered coffee table by the kitchen counter, clutching a tiny spoon, all eyes and empty stomach, see the lowered blue bowl of steaming brown-sugar-sweetened goodness set before them, patting their hands (still spoon clutching) in a hurried mumble of grateful prayer – and the focused concentration on putting the spoon into the oatmeal and – finally!—to the little mouth – that, my readers, is the purpose of oatmeal. That is why the Lord God created galaxies and planets and continents and governments and houses and factories and pottery and metal and oatmeal—for that moment where the hungry mouth is fed, and love is given, and the universe rejoices to see a baby’s hunger satisfied by good food. This is the purpose of goods, for the hungry to be fed, the naked clothed, the weeping comforted. Oatmeal by the ton stored in some cellar against some future catastrophe—is it an illusion? Is the wealth better spent being sent to the hungry mouths here and now?  What balance can be struck between prudence and selfishness, generosity and grandiose pride?  How much does one store up? How much should one give?  In order to do so, one must identify both the envious questioner and the rich fool in one’s own heart and put the problem in perspective before the Lord God. One might begin by inviting Christ to take the role deferred and be the judge and divider of our possessions. Much to the scandal of the socialist who swoons at for fascist power, Christ does not command. He waits to be invited, asking us not to remain bystanders in the multitude, but to put everything at His feet and follow Him.Christ follows this parable with the exhortation to be like the ravens who neither sow nor reap nor gather into storehouses or barns, but yet God feeds them! And how much more valuable are we to God! Worrying does not add an inch to our span of life, He reminds us. Those who worry, like the rich fool, forget Who truly measures our days. He reminds us the lilies are clothed with more glory than Solomon’s, even though the lilies are mere grass which is thrown into the oven in a day, and we of little faith should not fret about our clothing. “Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be of anxious mind. For all the nations of the world seek these things; and your Father knows you need them. Instead, seek His kingdom and these things will be yours as well. Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms, provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail. For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.” (Luke 12:22-34)I have a large family, and storage bins are a grubby necessity in my life, but this parable has given me pause when considering buying new ones. It has started me on a search for limits: for limits of a human size, parameters which can help perfect my soul. I keep my storage small, and when I outgrow it, I search for ways to give away what I have rather than expanding what I’m able to hold on to. This is not just minimalism or even convenience: the parable of the rich fool teaches me it’s about saving my soul. I will outline this further as we go on. But I merely want to point out the reverse of the parable: limits are a way of ensuring generosity and living lightly can keep us light of heart.

Simplicity vs. Poverty

The third mistaken identity of Lady Poverty is Simplicity, the simplicity of the Amish housewife at her bread bin, of the nun scrubbing the cloister floor, the monk baking bread. Simplicity dresses our childhood in unmuted hues: she decorates the shrine of previous ages of history, whose complexities are worn away by time. Simplicity is often confused with her counterfeit, Easiness, who flirts with our spouses and friends, and who drops filters over every new plan or possibility, opening hidden doors and carving out escape hatches. But true Simplicity can be recognized by the hard work she requires, as the Amish, the religious, our previous selves, and all our ancestors would loudly agree. She is blind to trends and oblivious to fashion: simplicity is not a romantic. Simplicity is the Benedictine serving tea to the wild-haired Franciscan bride, shaking her head over the latter’s muddy bare feet and dramatic adventures. Simplicity is fond of America and indulges our sentimentalism for it (she has long ago given up on Europe). Even her admirers agree she has no ear for music, a blurred eye for beauty, and is a little too indulgent with modern architecture. Allegory aside, why do we yearn for simplicity frequently, recurrently? To be simple is to be wholly one thing, all of one material or purpose. To be a unity, to live as a unity.Our world is fragmenting fast, and we panic and yearn to return to simplicity. Simplicity is our antidote, but it eludes us because we are not, by our lifestyle, simple. So long as we live by our desires, we must be polytheists.We are not all one thing, not even those of us who are Christians. We all multitask, juggle multiple personas and jobs, slicing our lives into thinner and thinner compartments. We thread together contradictions and avoid conflicts of interests, even our own interests. We maintain online or public personas which contradict our private lives. Our lives are often sacks of sewn-together chaos.Our purpose is not unified. What is my purpose? I am a Christian, a woman, a wife, a mother, a homemaker, an author, an editor, an artist. Can my life telescope down into one unit: follower of Christ? What if it could?And simplicity is a servant, but not a goal. Any search for simplicity will be futile until we decide what our way of life means. Civilization is more convenient than chaos, but order is not equivalent to meaning. Who decides what it all means?  The technocrats? The search engines? Democracy? The strong? The smart? The tribe?Yet we need simplicity, we need that one thing that we can center our lives around.  It needs to be real, not a mere ideal, touching our lives at all the edges, shaping us and helping us shape each other, nudge each other into shape, keep us touching reality. This one thing is really One Man, and we need to build a way of life that allows Him to touch us and shape us daily, hour by hour. Christ did not really talk about simplicity—but His followers did. Simplicity does not mean having one sofa, two chairs, a coffee table with one book and one decorative implement arranged on a sisal rug.  Simplicity means being all of one thing: it means being pure and whole.  A simple heart is a heart that’s all about one thing. I want, as Rich Mullins sang, to have Christ be that one thing: I want a simple heart, not a divided one. Trends and fads are fun, but they are not a recipe for simplicity, nor for peace. I don’t want to update my home: I want my home to be continually approaching one goal. That’s how simplicity in the home works: it’s all oriented towards one goal, despite the chaos and the cluttering.  Decluttering and ordering are not to achieve simplicity but to achieve that goal.So rather than simplicity, poverty. If we must have worldly goods –and homemaking is intrinsically connected to worldly goods—we need to order them and orient them so that they do not rule us, they do not woo us, they do not betray us.  Perhaps the best way to break their hold upon our hearts is to detach from them altogether and seek poverty first.Lord, show me Poverty
Whom You loved so dearly…What was this poverty Francis ached for? Why did he see her as a lady, the loveliest of ladies?  Perhaps because he was an artist and a poet and he saw what others could not: Lady Poverty is the only way to beauty.The artist must empty herself to create. The soul must empty herself to become like Christ.Poverty is, as I said, lack and want. It is the humiliation of not being able to buy the meal you want, of having to return the too-expensive purchase you cannot afford to keep. It is not enough. It is shame and ache and frayed nerves, chewed fingernails, the agitated search, the hollow knowledge of nothingness, the black-circled eyes, the averted face and lowered head, the broken safety net, the cold shoulder, the hidden tears, the agony of want. Each of us has experienced personal poverty. It need not be material. The having-nothingness. The naked surrender to hopelessness. The friend who doesn’t call, the invitation never extended, the hug or kind word yearned for and never received. We lack strength, energy, virtue, perseverance. We give up. We can’t. We surrender to our own brokenness. We are not kind enough, strong enough, patient enough, holy enough. Christ never quite breaks through our wooden souls. This is poverty. Seen this way, who can have Christ without having poverty? It is impossible. Without that internal daily emptying, Christ can never enter the packed closet of our inner soul. The graces we receive lie like stacked gift boxes, unopened. Poverty is emptying that closet. Poverty is being the blind man who says, “Lord, I want to see.”  To not have poverty is to be a Laodicean, claiming to be rich and well clothed, not seeing one’s wretched nakedness, not only blind but lukewarm. I was a Christian for decades before I could say with true sincerity, “What a wretched sinner I am.” Without poverty, our conversion withers on the vine, and the beauty we might have manifested withers.So, poverty must be interior. But the interior is not enough. Christ’s life, the life-wrecking, earth-shattering ideals of Christianity shrivel into hypocrisies if they remain abstractions. There must be an incarnation. Meat must be made of them, or they will fail. The kingdom of heaven needs real doors, real windows, real soldiers and servants that come among you.Which is why Francis was not content with poverty in spirit, as our uneasy pastors are so hasty to assure us. He wanted poverty in body as well. So, he gave it all away, save for one habit, to live with his Lady.As a young housewife, I beheld Francis’s radicalism in awe and perplexity. I am not an acetic. I frankly love the body and all earthly pleasures and find them congenial companions. I gloried in my bridal gifts and set about outfitting my first household, a little attic apartment, with pride. I dreamed of transforming it into a princess’s castle, with soft coverlets on the bed, fetching outfits, carefully-contrived artwork, colorful pottery, and shining glass windows. The Middle Ages represents for me my archetype, my gaze into hidden beauty. But yet, there was Francis, beckoning.Who was this Lady Poverty? What was so beautiful about her that Francis, son of a clothing merchant, certainly the best industry to be in if you loved beauty, and in Italy! During the High Middle Ages! – could leave all the fashion and pomp behind for her rags and nakedness.I hesitated, but I began to pray this prayer, which has never become rote and which never fails to move me, a crie de couer.I can find no peace…Merciful Jesus, have pity …You Lord it was who first aroused love…Please grant….I yearn….I earnestly pray…For Jesus, You were very poor…

Minimalism vs. Poverty

In discussing Poverty, it is important to differentiate her from her similarly-appointed fellows, namely minimalism, destitution, and simplicity.Nowadays, minimalism is the fad and trend, but in reality, the impulse to minimalism is about as old as materialism, and I believe the two are related. Materialism expansively says, “Take whatever you like!” while Minimalism says, with a hint of a wrinkled nose, “Of course, it would be gauche, it would be uncouth, it would be so off-trend to take it all. You only want a slim fraction of it; you want to curate a collection of the Few Very Best. One mustn’t look greedy.” But yet, the apparent generosity of Materialism and the apparent ascetism of Minimalism are both a sham. Both are in thrall to money, and hence neither can ever satisfy. A whole industry has been built up around these two heiresses, an industry ostensibly geared to generate minimalism, which inevitably results in more storage units. Every season we are exhorted to simplify, simplify, simplify by getting rid of stuff, but the very next buying cycle, we are encouraged to update, splurge, redecorate, and restock, thus creating glut--- thus the cycle continues and expands.  Minimalism is in many ways driving the discretionary consumer economy these days, and so it will continue, as long as the dragons of catastrophic wealth keep us captive.The ideal of simplicity, especially solitary simplicity, periodically affects the American mind like a virus that is activated by the cancer of materialism. Not a few Americans have cast off all obligations and set off for the wilderness, only to return to write a book or start a speaking tour. Only in America, heavy with the bounty of good harvests and ample forests, could such forays be indulged in. “The world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth observed, and not only the Catholic Hopkins agrees that, “all is seared, bleared, smeared with trade, and shares man’s smell.” But casting it all off, only to drift back, unconverted, may cure the fever but not the tumor. Minimalism is not poverty, although it might resemble it in its superficialities. Minimalism is something. Poverty is a nothing. Poverty means recognizing that someday, all the carefully curated treasures will be so much rubbish in someone else’s storage shed, yard sale, estate auction, or landfill detritus, and the hands that clutch them, the brow that creases, and the mind that pulses with anxiety will be skeletal, the skull empty of it all. Since we cannot keep it, ultimately, we hold it loosely, stewarding it until the Master calls, in the form of a beggar, an annoying relative, a friend in need, strangers in distress.The poverty Christ blessed is not destitution. I hope I can be specific here, for it is difficult. He bade us not worry about what to eat, drink, or wear, saying that our Heavenly Father would provide for us. Those who lack food, water, and clothing are truly destitute, and we should help them immediately. That is the call of the Gospel. When we lack these necessities—and there are times our family has lacked them—we are urged to call out to God, addressing Him lovingly as our Heavenly Father, and asking Him to provide for us. Then we must beg the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and our ears to hear Him, so that we can recognize His daily provision. If we are to live from day to day without these necessities, we must calm our hearts and look to Him expectantly. “Has anyone trusted in the Lord and been disappointed? Or cried out to Him and been ignored?” asks Sirach in his second chapter. Again, sometimes the stealthy hand of God is visible only in hindsight: the Scriptures teach us we must constantly look back upon our own spiritual history to catch Him in the act. When you are in desperate need, look back at your previous times of need and discern His provision. You will be surprised how often you will find He was there, caressing you, when you thought you wept in an empty room.

Why Poverty? Some reasonable questions

What is poverty? I pondered this as I worked with the poor in New York City in the company of Franciscan friars for one year after college. In working with the American poor, I discovered that poverty is not merely the lack of stuff: it’s the lack of any safety nets. If you are poor, you are living from one moment to the next, with nothing to rely upon in the future. There is no bank account, no relations to call upon for help, no government programs, no friends for comfort, if you are truly poor.  Day to day life is a struggle, and any trial or suffering can cause a collapse, since there are no resources to draw on. In America, as Mother Teresa observed, our poor are not those who lack material needs, but those who are lonely. This was definitely true of the poor in the American cities, whose problem was not that they lacked food but that they lacked family and friends. The plight of the single mothers and their neglected children was often the absence of a husband.  The first wealth that any of us has is love: spouse, children, mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, extended family. Lack of that is a poverty.  Lack of love is a poverty.Why should we ask for poverty?  Do we want to be unloved by family and friends?Poverty means having no safety net. Poverty means being ineligible for the government program, not qualifying for medical intervention, being overlooked by the professional charity. It means having just the wrong sort of problems that put you between the buckets.Why should we ask for poverty? Do we want to be deprived of resources and help?Poverty means not knowing where to turn. It means having the inexplicable illness, the symptoms no one can understand, the addiction that does not respond to treatment, the disease no one can cure. It means being subject to death and loss and desolation. Why would we ask for something like that?  Do we want to be alone with only ourselves and our problems?Here is why we would: All safety nets are illusions. In the end, they are not what saves us. The love of a family can’t cure cancer. The government program can’t save your soul.  A loving spouse or the best new medication or the most perfect diet can’t cure a self-destructive impulse.  There is only one who saves us in the end, and His name is the One Who Saves.THAT is poverty: the recognition that all our resources, both monetary and human, in the end, can’t buy us happiness or peace of mind.  Everything and everyone will fall short.  Recognizing that is the first step towards being poor in spirit and being free from everything that would hold us back from Him.So why should poverty be the foundation for home economy?  v  To free us from fear of poverty and make us aware of the real enemy.Loss of money, home, and even the love of our children are not as terrible as the loss of our soul.  Recognize the real enemy: ourselves.  A follower of St. Francis whose name escapes me—St. Giles, I think—startled me by his observation that we spend so much time fearing starvation, kidnapping, terrorism, earthquakes, robbers, and various other things—but none of these things can harm our souls. However, we ourselves can send ourselves to Hell by hatred, greed, and addictions, and yet we are quite comfortable with ourselves and don’t spend much time putting ourselves on guard against ourselves. Why is that? He advises: fear the real enemy, “the one who can cast you into Hell,” and forget these little fears, for nothing else can separate us from the love of God.v  To make our hearts truly simple. If Love is our goal, even the most complicated of family obligations and daily routines will eventually help to simplify our hearts. And nothing, neither Legos nor American Girl Doll catalogs nor holiday menu planning nor overgrown August gardens nor wedding guest lists nor dust mites can separate us from the love of God. v  To free us from enslavement to our goods, from having to care for them, guard them, worry about them. Modern life conspires towards making productive people exhausted: why spend mental energy worrying about the material excessively? Material things can work a spell upon us which we are subject to, on account of our fallen nature. So potent is this spell that Buddha imagined that freeing oneself from it would enable one to ascend to Nirvana. Material things were made for our use, but too often we are used by them. This must not be.  v  To make us daringly generous and courageous.  We are afraid to be generous, afraid to give when it hurts. We fear those who are poor and fear how they might abuse our charity. Fear of what tomorrow might bring keeps us from sharing when we see a need.  Poverty can help us give freely away, even from what we legitimately need and could hold onto. It is the courage to say, “My true treasure is the Lord,” and give away fully, like the widow in the temple praised by Christ. She had legitimate reasons to hold onto those two coins, but in her bravery and generosity, she was able to give the Lord her all.v  To help bring about a good and just society. Our economic system does need reform: so much waste is generated and so many people are left behind. Often, we do not have the margin to be habitually generous, and fear of losing our resources causes us to hold onto things we might be called upon to surrender for some great good we don’t yet see. The wealth of ancient Egypt might have seemed to be in the Nile or in the Egyptian people, but it was also in their gold mines. When the gold mines ran out, their civilization collapsed. Should American civilization also run out, what might come about in its wake? Can we look beyond the moment of our own homes and children and grandchildren to the future of our culture, should we face actual poverty? What foundation can we best build upon for the future of Christ’s Church? I have no utopian dreams, but I do see an injustice we can help to rebalance by putting our own house in order and entrusting the rest to the Holy Spirit to work out.To live in freedom, in joy and with generosity: using goods, not being used by them: this is my goal.  So, I want to begin this work on home economy by a foundation of poverty. Because it is poetic and can be practical, and may help us make a good beginning, and a better ending.

The Search for Lady Poverty

Most everyone is familiar with St. Francis, that most gregarious and universal of Catholic saints, who exploded into a too-tired Christian culture with the force of a bomb, a weapon of mass construction. If you know a little bit more about him, you will know that his odyssey into sanctity began with an obsession with a lady no one had met, the Lady Poverty. All artistic depictions of her fail, and of the many mysterious and prophetic things that Frenchie Bernadone said and did, this was by far the most mysterious. He directed all the passions and longings of a lover towards her, extolling her loveliness and seeking her amorously. Like the medieval courtly lovers who sought only to worship a lady espoused by another, he adored her as the chosen spouse of Christ. Few among Francis’s followers seemed to share his mad passion, and it was the article of his order first abandoned by his more conventional followers, but the love affair remains prophetic even today.Much as Christians still yearn for the days of the newborn Church of Acts, where all goods in joyful innocence were shared in common, so the poverty of Francis still haunts those of us who consider following the King. Poverty was indeed who Christ as a babe embraced and her setting-up-house was the early Church, but since then she has hidden in her cenacle, emerging only when she is needed and no one else will come. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, recalling the grinding poverty of the Russian concentration camp he endured, had the character of Nerzhin in his novel The First Circle say, recalling the prison food they were given, Can you say you ate it? No. It was like holy Communion, you took it like the sacraments... You ate it slowly, from the tip of a wooden spoon, entirely absorbed in the process of eating, in thinking about eating – and it spread through your body like nectar… Can you compare that with the way people wolf down steaks?... It’s not a matter of how much of it, but of the way you eat. It’s the same with happiness – it doesn’t depend on the actual number of blessings we manage to snatch from life, but only on our attitude towards them. (quoted by Joseph Pearce in Solzhenitsyn: Soul in Exile, p. 111)Doubtless she comes to minister to the Christian in need and embraces them if they will accept her, making lack sweet and rags into garments of lilies finer than the robes of Solomon. And like Christ, her profile most readily emerges only in the memory, as in Nerzhin’s retrospection. My own young daughter, looking back at our family’s times of need, observed, “It’s so much more fun to be poor than rich because you appreciate things more!” She then announced her intention of raising her own children poor because she wanted them to be enriched by this treasure.So who is this elusive Lady and why should we care? I have long wondered since I happened upon the fragmentary prayer that opens this journal. For over two decade I have pondered it and prayed to come to know her better. I feel compelled to share this haunting in hopes that it will provide a way out of the tangled overgrown wilderness we find ourselves in and lead us to a better grasp of the Christ who loved her.  Lord, show me Poverty
Whom You loved so dearly.
Merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
I am full of yearning for my Lady Poverty.
I can find no peace without Her.
You, Lord, it was, who first aroused love for her in my heart.
Grant me the privilege of possessing her.
I yearn to be enriched by this treasure.
I earnestly desire that it might belong to me and mine forever.
For Jesus, You were very poor,
And I want to call nothing under heaven mine,
But only to live on what others may give me.This prayer of St. Francis—an actual one, unlike his famous “Make me an instrument of peace” prayer, whose historical lineage is more muddy--struck me as fundamentally disorienting. Was the man mad? Why this obsession with poverty?Francis was middle-class (as am I) and his upbringing had been devoted to the production and acquisition of material comforts. But his drive for poverty was more than just reaction against his parents (though that does seem to be an element!).  The medievals loved allegory—personifying the abstract and making an idea into a person you could relate to—even fall in love with—so his expression of a troubadour’s love for a deprived economic state is thoroughly medieval—and just as unsettling now as it was then.

Why Begin With Poverty?

Lord, show me Poverty
Whom You loved so dearly.
Merciful Jesus, have pity on me.
I am full of yearning for my Lady Poverty.
I can find no peace without Her.
You, Lord, it was, who first aroused love for her in my heart.
Grant me the privilege of possessing her.
I yearn to be enriched by this treasure.
I earnestly desire that it might belong to me and mine forever.
For Jesus, You were very poor,
And I want to call nothing under heaven mine,
But only to live on what others may give me.
The first sentence Christ uttered in the first sermon He gave in the first gospel was a sentence that smashes prisons: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This is how He began, and so, writing this journal, I feel I must begin this book series on housekeeping by examining the crucial role of poverty.

First, because Christ praised poverty, and as He saved my soul, I feel inclined to pay attention to those things He praised, particularly if I don’t understand them. According to two Gospels, He praised both actual poverty (St. Luke’s) and being poor in spirit (St. Matthew’s), which is even more perplexing. His followers went on to continue to bless poverty and develop some crucial Church doctrines that have important economic ramifications, such as the Universal Destination of All Goods. And as mentioned, St. Francis, the medieval allegorist that he was, personified Poverty as a beautiful Lady and loved her with a passion. It was Francis’s devotion to poverty that drew my attention to it, as I shall explain.

Secondly, because often housekeeping involves poverty, or at any rate, fear of poverty. Money management is typically studied frantically by those who have made mistakes and need to gain better control over their finances: at any rate, that’s when I start studying it, when my account balances are in the negative.

Thirdly, because I live in what economists used to call a First-World country and the main problem of housekeeping is not scarcity but abundance: glut and clutter are our everyday menaces. In America, if you do nothing, “stuff” will accumulate around you like mold on white bread and eventually overwhelm you. This is because this country is rich and generous, and people love to give. And here, the problem of riches taking over our hearts—or at any rate, too much of our time and attention—is a serious problem. The Scripture warns that the love of money is the root of all evil, and money is the temptress ever-wooing to be let into the heart. I do not want to fall in love with money—and I don’t want my children to either.

Although we fear poverty, we are more in danger of centering our home and our lives around its opposite: maintenance of our wealth or our stuff. Why should our greatest fear be our starting place for home economy? Well, if you are afraid of something, you generally have to pay attention to it. That’s one reason to discuss it. But Christ’s blessing upon poverty intersects that fear to make me wonder if that very object of our anxiety could be our salvation in the end.

This is also because – and here is my final reason for writing this book – our understanding of economics is an ongoing problem, one that Mother Church has called upon lay people to address, time after time after time. In a further chapter, I will give a short history of the Church’s teachings on the economy, explaining why this problem is crucial for us to take apart and figure out at this juncture in history. Solving that problem has remained on the Church’s “Honey Do” list since the advent of the market economy, and someone has to do something about it. I am going to try my hand at it, probably badly, at least so that others can become aware of it.

Beginning Culture Recovery

Several years ago, I experienced a sharp longing for a more unified life. I was in the throes of welcoming new technology into my home, hoping it would help harness the countless needs of my business and growing family, but instead of the promised simplicity and streamlining, I began to feel my life fragmenting. Every woman wears many hats, but my differing identities began to clash and shatter, and I no longer felt whole. I found the maintenance of a virtual online identity was far more interesting than my non-electronic one, and the real-life self began to wither. Since that real-life self was the one who wrote novels and mothered children and was married to my husband, I grew alarmed. These journals, which I began in 2016 and begin publishing today, are the fruit of my self-diagnosis. Not only was I fragmented, but I discovered our culture was fragmented, and those fragments had begun to polarize at a disturbing clip. I began questioning how I could knit them back together, picturing the exercise as lashing so many barrels from a shattering shipwreck together, like the Swiss Family Robinson. It is our culture which is shattering in the sea, and I am asking myself what can be saved from the wreckage. As a castaway myself, I am not concerned here with grand plans for politics or pop culture or national revival but with the country of my own heart and the landscape of my own mind, and the children the Lord has given me, for we are signs and portents in Israel. This process I have dubbed the Culture Recovery Project, and these Journals are my questing manuals. I hope they prove useful for any other castaways and refugees who find themselves on a similar journey.

Let’s begin with money. No one likes to be told what to do with their money. It cuts at the heart of our human selfishness, and money in a marriage may not be the root of all evil but it is frequently the source of many fights. Money is inescapable in this modern American society where I have lived all my life, and like a permeable gas, it seeps through the crevices of any membrane of piety or apostolic work. Every apostolate must be framed as a business proposal, every cultural endeavor must be squeezed into the box of financial cost, as though that were the most decisive issue. As the Second Vatican Council observed, “many people, especially in economically advanced areas, seem, as it were, to be ruled by economics, so that almost their entire personal and social life is permeated with a certain way of thinking.” (Constitution on the Modern World)

This “economic way of thinking” can build you a house, even a mansion, but it is a house with no doors or windows for escape. No matter how hard you search for a crack away from its material omnipotence, you cannot escape its benevolence, its standards, its evaluation. This is the world we wanted: a comfortable and comforting world, with material relief always within our reach, and we seem to have gotten our wish, but it has turned out to be the wish of Midas. It is us we have made into a golden statue, unable to think or imagine apart from its standard. A world that can be objectified, philosophically or scientifically, can be price-tagged, and the grime and the gum of the price tag has turned out to be the greater annoyance. It can never be fully removed from our thoughts.

But yet Christ calls us, and we who desire to follow Him long to step away from the tax table of our invested concerns, as did the apostle and Gospel-writer Matthew, and follow Him on this tremendous adventure. Is it even possible?

Right now, I live with my husband and assorted children on a homestead at the foot of the Massanutten ridge of western Virginia, and we struggle to make ends meet, having embarked on an artistic apostolic life some twenty-five years ago when we married. There is a bit of Dicken’s Micawber family in us: we are jolly, enjoy being generous, and find the battle to live within our means a constant discipline, with misery lurking behind the next medical or automobile emergency. We will probably always struggle. Yet somewhere along the way, I met Lady Poverty, that great love of St. Francis, and I called out to her. And the peace and freedom that came along with her welcome was unexpected and tantalizing. It is about my friendship with her that I write this first of journals.