Court
jesters, cartoonists, or comic strip writers have a way of saying things that
undercut our culture in a way other truth-tellers cannot. Comics
or satirists are very often people who can say, before anyone else, that the
Emperor or the Empire has no clothes. George
Carlin has always been one of those people who cuts through our culture like a
hot knife through butter. Upon Carlin’s
death, Chaplain Mike Spencer wrote that George Carlin was Shakespeare’s
prototypical fool. In King Lear, once
the king assented to the fool through his laughter, the king could not help but
assent to the truth the fool wove into the laughter. The king then calls upon the fool as the only
one who can tell him painful truths.[1]
In one of
his routines, Carlin had me laughing hilariously, nodding my head as the
uncomfortable truths skewered my hypocrisy.
I doubt that anyone else could have helped me to hear how I am enslaved
by my own materialism. George Carlin’s
routine, “Stuff.”
Actually [a house] is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's
all, a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in
life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table,
everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your
stuff, that'll be his stuff over there. That's all you need in life, a little
place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If
you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk
around all the time.
A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when
you're taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody's got a
little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your
house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn't want somebody to come by and take some of
your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap
you're saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That's what your house is, a
place to keep your stuff while you go out and get...more stuff!
Sometimes you gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for your stuff
anymore. Did you ever notice when you go to somebody else's house, you never
quite feel a hundred percent at home? You know why? No room for your stuff.
Somebody else's stuff is all over the darn place! And if you stay overnight,
unexpectedly, they give you a little bedroom to sleep in. Bedroom they haven't
used in about eleven years. Someone died in it, eleven years ago. And they
haven't moved any of his stuff! Right next to the bed there's usually a dresser
or a bureau of some kind, and there's NO ROOM for your stuff on it.[2]
I would continue
Carlin’s lampooning to suggest that we buy a house where we keep our stuff and
then, once we get really good stuff, we have to buy security stuff to protect
the stuff in the house.
Several
years ago, one of my prized possessions was a car stereo/CD player Tracy had
bought me for my birthday. Oooooh, I had
waited for that thing. And there it
was, in my car, pounding a backbeat of the songs I loved, fancy enough that it
played my podcasts. Not only was it
stolen once while our car was parked alongside our street, next to our house,
but after I replaced the one with the insurance money we used to protect and
secure it, the second one was stolen with our car parked in our driveway, right
outside our house. Drat! I didn’t have to worry about the car once I
put the original radio back in it. My
garden variety AM/FM radio was apparently not something that could be easily
fenced out in the community.
Grrrrrr.
Now one would have thought I had learned, but when that
car stereo was stolen a second time, I actually thought about getting a
security system for my car. That’s
right. I would get a car security system
for my then 1992 Saturn SL 1 with 250,000 miles. This prized car--a car I started with a
screwdriver because the key had gotten stuck in the ignition. But it was my stuff, my shiny stuff. And all I wanted was some nice stuff. Thoughts about getting a security system to
protect my screwdriver-started Saturn revealed a little too much of who I am in
the world.
I
hate moving. I absolutely hate it. Tracy will tell you that I shouldn’t hate it
all that much because she has done most of the work whenever we have moved. Moving cannot only be hard work but an
incredibly painful experience.
Because accumulating and hanging onto our “stuff” doesn’t
always begin with being caught up in materialism. “Stuff” can be connected to the historical
repository of memories, keepsakes, the values we all share as families. We sometimes worry that if we do not take it
all with us, we will lose a part of ourselves.
And we may be right. To set down
our set of “stuff” may be a declaration for a point of departure, who we will
be in the future and what values dictate our action.
We start out deciding, based on our values, what
accumulated stuff we will purchase, borrow, or keep and too often end up with
our accumulated stuff deciding our values for us. All of us are caught up in it. Moving, or as George Carlin indicates later
in his routine, even going on vacation push us to make decisions about what of
our “stuff” we will really need. “You
start to feel ok,” Carlin needles us, “because, after all, you do have some of
your stuff with you.”[3] Our stuff provides the comfort, defines what
is home, so that we are oriented in the universe, defended from the chaos that
might ensue if we did not have our “stuff.”
Dr. King cited “materialism” as one of the three great
evils of the American empire that is woven into our national story. To buy, accumulate, hoard and fill our hands
with “stuff,” even if it disfigures us, even if it creates incredible harm, is
supposedly what we celebrate on this Independence Day. We are being regularly told that we should have
the freedom to fill our hands, fill our homes not recognizing that this materialism
is destroying our true selves and our true home.
In many ways, choices or values we have about our “stuff”
indicate whether we think the universe is friendly or unfriendly. Very often our accumulation of stuff
indicates that our quality of life depends on it, that our children will suffer
without it, and that we must defend ourselves from the harsh and wicked world
that threatens to rob or violate us. Or
perhaps we need just enough “stuff” not to be thought of us as a hermit,
spinster, or wacko. Though we talk about
the dangers of peer pressure for our children, we feel more “civilized” caving
into peer pressure as adults.
For if we saw the universe as friendly, our grip on our
“stuff” might not be as tight. How we
value ourselves might not have so much to do with the next needful thing we
purchase. But we are being told over and
over again that we are on our own, all alone, needing protection against an
ever-increasingly cold and cruel world.
Batten down the hatches, circle the wagons to protect all of our
“stuff.” And the materialism taught to us day and night
by the wider culture comes to define us, courses through our bloodstream.
 |
| Milada Veragrova |
The story is told of an old woman brought to a psychiatric center. She was wild, swinging at everything in sight, and scaring everyone so much that the doctors had to take everything from her. But there was one, small coin she gripped in her fist and would not give up. In fact, it took two men to pry open that squeezed hand. It was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more and be nothing more. That was her fear.
That is very often our fear. We are forever invited by God to open our
tightly clenched fist and to give up the thing that possesses us. But who really wants to do that? We hold fast to what is familiar, even if we
aren’t proud of it. We clutch onto
prosperity, competition, violence, warfare, and death so tightly that it becomes
all we know, the only spiritual practice we have learned.
I know I am caught in this narrative, how I am tied up in
legitimizing myself, protecting myself, shamed into having just enough
“stuff.” In our culture, what we have
normalized has become downright crazy. Just
think about lawn care. Instead of
growing food, each of us has to have a set of tools, a set of supplies, a lawn
mower, a trimmer, a hedger, a broadcaster, a weed whacker, etcetera, etcetera,
etcetera, to keep the pristine green.
And it is a good bet every person on our block thinks they have to have
one of those too. So, of course, if I am
going to have all that stuff, spend money on it, even though I know California
is going through a terrible drought, and water is becoming a more and more scarce
resource, I now have to spend all this time watering my lawn to justify buying my
other stuff.
In relating what it means to live life within a
Benedictine order, Sister Joan Chittister writes, “It is so easy to make
cosmetic changes in the name of religion.
It is so easy to make up rules and keep them so that we can feel good
about doing something measurable in the spiritual life.”[4] But we have to want to grow. And sometimes that means, in a culture of
plenty, disciplining ourselves so that we can open up our hands and are free to
receive from others and with the “stuff” we do have in right proportion. “What [Benedict] cared about,” Chittister
wrote, is that we control them rather than allowing them to control us.”[5]
Greek Cynics, contemporaries of Jesus, needled the Roman
Empire by understanding the universe and Father Zeus as friendly and
loving. Beggars, Cynics depended on the
giving of others. Travelers or migrants,
they carried little with them. Some of
the more extreme Cynics walked naked or dressed in a barrel through city
streets—relying on the providence and goodness of Father Zeus, helping others
to see that the Emperor and the Empire wore no clothes. Jesus grew up and lived in an area that may
have been strongly influenced by such Greek Cynics.[6]
In keeping with the values of the Greek Cynics, Jesus
sends the twelve apostles out to exorcise the demon of the Roman Empire. They are not to take anything on the road
that might weigh them down: no bread, no
knapsack, no spending money. Carry only
one shirt. Go out by twos. Depend on the hospitality of others. In fact, if people do not grant you
hospitality, symbolized primarily by washing your feet as you enter their home,
shake the accumulated road dust, that did not get washed off, as a witness
against their inhospitality. Pack
light. Have a buddy to protect you from
the danger that is out there in the world and to provide accountability and
mutuality. Depend on the hospitality of
others.
Rarely do we hear the Christian mission related with such
interdependence, such mutuality, such humility.
Even in the midst of the violence and warfare of the Roman Empire, Jesus
invites the disciples to know the universe as friendly, loving, and
hospitable. If Jesus had sent them out
burdened down with all kinds of stuff, imagine all the histrionics the apostles
would go through to protect their possessions, to remain self-sufficient. Instead, the apostles are sent out not with
an extra days’ supply of bread but with no bread at all.
Many a devotional book will relate that if our hands are
full, spiritually, we will not be able to receive the gifts God has intended
for us. Jesus sends the apostles out
empty handed, materially, so that they may be free to receive the gifts, the
goodness, the kindness, the hospitality God intends to give them through other
people. In renouncing their material
possessions, they are free to receive from the hands of others.
The
good news is, if we can imagine it, if we can walk out into the world with someone
to walk with, pack lightly, and depend on the hospitality of others we would
find the universe as a much more friendly place and God’s
goodness waiting to find us.
Too often
we even judge our church with the values set by other churches—the biggest
budget and the most members and the most up-to-date stuff. It is the logic of the gospel--that
Christians striving to be faithful are very often trying to find ways to be
downwardly mobile. As that happens, the
goodness of life begins to flow toward us.
Beyond
even people of faith, what we are finding is, that even as the world gets
scarier, a community movement is breaking out all over the world. While
I was in Billings, I was amazed by the number of young people who sought
intentional community and service as Americorps VISTA volunteers or Jesuit
Volunteers. Now many of those same young people continue
to live in intentional community in Minneapolis, are leaders of Planned
Parenthood in New England, are leading out LGBTQ+ spirituality groups in Catholic
Churches in Philadelphia, do justice work in Ann Arbor or Chicago, or are even
beginning their call to ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ after
graduating from seminary. For these
young adults, it is as if, once they chose to be downwardly mobile, they were
opened to the incredible possibilities God had for them. Many of us are learning that God created the
pillars of the universe in such a way that sharing and hospitality help to
build the foundation of the house we live in so that our neighborhoods,
communities, and schools might thrive.
The
Empire of God, the Beloved Community, is built by solidarity with others,
packing light, and depending on the hospitality of others. For Jesus and the community around him, that
was not some naïve religious notion . . . that was about survival. In a world that depends on knowing ourselves
as interdependent to survive, we must continue to see the pillars God has given
us, the frame people around us are building, and put in the necessary community
spaces that will allow us to receive the goodness and hospitality of God found
not only in ourselves but in God’s good earth and in the hearts of neighbors
who may not even look like us.
May
we be wise and courageous enough to walk out into the world with open hands. Amen.
[1] “Thank you George Carlin,”
Internet Monk, http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/a-christian-says-thank-you-george-carlin
[3] George Carlin
[4] Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insights for the Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1997), p. 120.
[5] Ibid, p. 121.
[6] See F. Gerald Downing, Jesus and the Threat of Freedom (London: SCM Press, 1987).
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