Economic Recovery 1 and 2
I just watched President Obama's Indiana speech and town hall meeting from my hotel room in San Diego. I was watching on MSNBC, with Chris Matthews hosting and Pat Buchanan commenting. Pat (predictably) panned the speech, saying that people in Elkhart make RV's, and Obama's speech failed to explain how we'd get Americans to buy RV's again. His comment, it seems to me, perfectly epitomizes an adventure in missing the point, and perfectly articulates two kinds of economic recovery.
For many people, economic recovery means "getting back to where we were a few months or years ago." That means recovering our consumptive, greedy, unrestrained, undisciplined, irresponsible, and ecologically and socially unsustainable way of life.
I'd like to suggest another kind of recovery ... drawing from the world of addiction. When an addict gets into recovery, he doesn't want to go back and recover the "high" he had before, or even to recover the conditions he had before he began using drugs and alcohol. Instead, he wants to move forward to a new way of life - a wiser way of life that takes into account his experience of addiction. He realizes that his addiction to drugs was a symptom of other deeper issues and diseases in his life ... unresolved pain or anger, the need to anesthetize painful emotions, lack of creativity in finding ways to feel happy and alive, unaddressed relational and spiritual deficits, lack of self-awareness, and so on.
Similarly, I'd like to suggest whenever we hear the word "recovery," we as a nation see it not as a call to get back our old addictive high, but rather as a call to face our corporate and personal addictions, including the following:
1. Our addiction to carbon. Fossil fuels are an addictive substance. They give us speed ... quick energy ... serving as a kind of cultural amphetamine. Meanwhile, they toxify our environment and throw the ecosystem in which we live into dangerous imbalance.
2. Our addiction to weapons. Weapons are one of the most addictive substances possible. They give us a feeling of well-being and security, removing our feeling of fear and anxiety, much like a barbiturate. But like a drug, they make us lazy and slow - lazy and slow in the much more important work of relationship-building, justice, and peace-making, lazy in seeking the common good. And they plunge us into an addictive cycle, because if everyone in the world is getting more and more weapons, we aren't safer ... especially when increasing numbers of those weapons are nuclear, biological, and chemical.
3. Our addiction to fear. Religious leaders, media leaders, and political leaders have all discovered that you can raise quick votes, dollars, and members through the hallucinogenic stimulant of fear. By making straights afraid of gays, conservatives afraid of progressives, Christians and Jews afraid of Muslims, citizens afraid of immigrants, and vice versa, these leaders get a quick organizational high - crack for their unity and morale. But the more fear you pump into your system, the more fear you have, and pretty soon, you go from being stimulated to paranoid, seeing things that aren't there and missing things that are. And soon after that, you move from paranoia to paralysis, leaving you in greater danger than ever.
4. Our addiction to stuff. Jesus said that a person's life doesn't consist in the abundance of her possessions. An economy that measures growth by the number of durable goods (resources) extracted from the environment and turned into non-durable goods that are bought, used, and then thrown away into a landfill ... that economy "succeeds" by turning goods into trash, and calling it success. That's not success. We need to imagine moving beyond an extractive, consumptive economy to a sustainable economy, and beyond a sustainable economy to a regenerative economy. I believe that in God's world, if billions can be made destroying the planet and exploiting people addictively, trillions can be made caring for the planet wisely and caring for people justly.
5. Our addiction to a single bottom line. During the President's town hall meeting, a man from Indiana told how he started a solar-powered attic fan company, and how he chose not to ship manufacturing overseas, but instead, to provide good employment for his neighbors. That meant, he said, that he had a little less cash in his pocket ... but wouldn't you agree that being a good neighbor has a value that can't be measured in dollars? The single bottom line of financial profit is addictive, and like an addiction, it destroys families and communities. We need to rediscover a triple bottom line - financial sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability. So we need a recovery of family values, and we also need a recovery of community values, and neighborly values, and ethical business values.
6. Our addiction to easy answers. "Government is the problem." "Just throw money at the problem." We can't afford our addiction to these kinds of easy ideological slogans and facile reactive fantasies in a complex, real world. Ideology is, in many ways, a drug that substitutes the quick high of unthinking reaction for the hard work of acquiring wisdom.
So ... maybe we can sabotage our addictive tendencies by letting the word "recovery" have a meaning that wakes us up rather than drugs us into the comfortable, dreamy, half-awareness in which we have lived for too long. That's my hope and prayer. (For more on this, see my book Everything Must Change.)
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you gotta love ’em, cont’d.
I'm in San Diego, where it's POURING rain and chilly ... but have had great experiences at Point Loma Nazarene University, the Capps Center in Santa Barbara, and Missiongathering. On my youtube channel, I got this note this morning that I thought was worth passing on:
Hi I was just wondering if you have bean born again? What I mean is, have you ever gotten convicted of your sins, repented forgiven and did the Lord make you a new creacher?
It struck me that this person - who has great creative spelling abilities - was kind enough to phrase his/her concern as a question rather than a damnation. A step in the right direction!
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NPB and NPC …
This week I had the privilege of being part of the National Prayer Breakfast in DC. In addition to many valuable conversations with new and old friends, I was so impressed with speeches given by Tony Blair and President Obama. As I listened to them, I kept thinking about that special clarity that comes after a storm. I wondered if, after the storms of "culture wars" in which religion has so often been used as a weapon, we might be able to enter a time where faith motivates us to "justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit," as the Apostle Paul described the kingdom of God in Romans 14.
I believe it was Tony Blair who quoted a Muslim Hadith that said, "None of you truly believes until he wishes for others what he wishes for himself." Obviously, these words resonate with Paul's, when he said that knowledge puffs up but love builds up, or John's when he spoke about our inability to love the invisible God when we don't love visible people, or James when he talked about faith without works being dead ... and most of all, with Jesus' life and teaching at every turn.
Last night I flew to San Diego, where I'll be speaking for a number of groups (see my schedule for details) including the National Pastors Conference. This is always a great gathering of people ... Maybe I'll see some of you in the next few days.
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Songs for A Revolution of Hope
Brian's album of original music called Songs for a Revolution of Hope, Volume 1, is available to order or to download! You can check out the Songs for a Revolution of Hope website for more information on this project.
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you just gotta love ’em … cont’d
After posting on "christian hate mail" the other day, I got a lot of encouraging notes from friends. Several said they have also thought about the pain, insecurity, latent aggression, and inner turmoil that must be quietly seething in people who overflow with this kind of damnation rhetoric. Focusing on that condition of heart, these friends said, helps them feel compassion for critics instead of resentment. I agree.
I especially appreciated this note from a friend named Wayne:
Hey Brian, I hope all is well. I wanted to forward this message to you as an encouragement. It’s from an airline pilot named Roxanne. Since first reading Secret Message, I’ve turned hundreds onto it, and bought many dozens to give away, so you can trust that Roxanne’s message below is just one of many I’ve received just like it over the past few years. So keep on point Brian… and don’t forget how God is using you in exponential fashion. I’m grateful to be in that number....
This was the note he had received from Roxanne, someone with whom he had shared Secret Message of Jesus ...
...I read the Gospels, except Luke, which I haven't gotten to yet, over the last few days. I've read them so many times, studied them in bible study, heard them in church, blah, blah, blah. As I read them this time, the phrase that kept jumping out at me was "kingdom of God". What the heck does that mean? I intended to do some more research, online, you, etc. But the same as every other time I read them, I saw the same thing I had seen before and the words just didn't make sense other than some small insights that I could glean along the way. Last night I got home and "The Secret Message of Jesus" had arrived so I sat down and read it. I read until late last night and then spent the rest of the day today reading it. I have about 5 pages to go. I found myself crying thru much of it because I felt as though the lights had been turned on. FINALLY someone put the numbers on the puzzle so I could connect the dots. I have felt so much passion for God, but also felt like I had no outlet or "place" for it. I feel inspired, though I don't quite know what to do yet. I do know one thing. A few people in my life have expressed to me that the message they've heard just doesn't quite make sense, that the message they're hearing in church somehow doesn't ring true. I have a list of about 25 people so far that I want to read the book. What if we could make God's dream come true?
Then Roxanne emailed me and said ...
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