MONEY AND SOUL

Good afernoon. I’m so glad to be here. I have to say that I feel a little out of place up here. Not because of being from the East Coast—I always feel at home among Friends—but because anybody who knows me would agree that I’m a person of few words. I’m great at listening. I love editing, which mostly involves cutting out the parts that aren’t necessary. I’d rather ask questions than tell people things. My preferred presentation is three or four sentences that try to get to the heart of the matter. I don’t think I’ve ever talked for more than twelve minutes at a time. So here I am. Here we are together! We’ll see what happens. One thing we can be sure about is that you’ll be witnessing a record-breaking event.

Money! It’s such a big messy topic, with so many tentacles, and probably nobody’s favorite. As I thought about where to start, my mind went to a moment well into my adulthood when my friend, Nadine Hoover, challenged me to write my own statement of conscience. She had been spending a lot of time with young men who were struggling with the issue of conscientious objection. As they worked together on their statements of conscience, trying to articulate why they were choosing this path, she realized that this was a process we should all be engaged in. After all, conscience is not limited to people of a certain gender or a certain age.

Now this is a woman with a pretty forceful personality, and she is someone for whom I have a lot of respect. So when she told me I should do this, I knew that there wasn’t really another alternative. So there I was—I can’t remember if it was with a blank sheet of paper and a pen, or a blank screen on a computer, and the question: to what do I conscientiously object, and why?

It should have been a no-brainer. I came of age in the Vietnam War. I went to my first protest in DC when I was in ninth grade, the first of many. I supported the young Quaker men I knew who were agonizing over the draft. I remember when folks from the FBI came to a house where many of us were gathered, looking for resisters to arrest. We went together to court and jail.

But when I sat with the question, to what did I conscientiously object, it wasn’t war that rose to the top. I want to read a few sentences from that statement of conscience:

I believe that a culture of economic materialism damages the soul and damages the fabric of society. It sets up a false god, squanders our resources, threatens our earth, distracts our attention from real issues and needs, and separates us from each other and from our higher selves.

I closed with this paragraph:I could not participate in war. I could not imagine killing another human being. (Both the teachings of Jesus and the tenets of Quakerism are blindingly clear on this point.) But there is something about an economic system based on greed that seems

even more evil than war. That system of domination is so inhuman, so antithetical to love or life. Its internal requirement, to accumulate profit and gain power regardless of the cost to humanity or the earth, sets us on the path to total destruction. It is the greatest evil that I know, and everything in me—by brain, my heart, my conscience—cries out against it.

Childhood and testimoniesHow did I get to that point? What is the soil in which we grow? I think it can be instructive to look at the messages we got around money as children in light of our traditional Quaker testimonies. Some of those messages for me were very mixed.

When I was little, my father used to finish up the accounts at breakfast on Sunday morning. As I think about it now, he must have spent time on Saturday working on the numbers of the previous week, so he could bring any discrepancies he found to my mother on Sunday morning. This was often a tense time. If there was a twelve cent gap between what my mother had for spending and what she had accounted for, we’d all wrack our brains to help. Could she have missed some of those penny parking meters? On the surface, she was the one at fault, but something about it just didn’t feel right.

I guess you could have called that good stewardship on my father’s part, or integrity perhaps, but it ended up having a pretty negative impact on our family as a community.

Both my parents, as newly-minted Quakers, were very proud of their values, and easily fell into judging others who didn’t quite measure up. This was particularly true about money, where their choices were clearly better than those of everybody else. They were openly disdainful of people who spent money on luxury items. While I’m sure that disdain included the rich, what I remember most were their comments about those who could ill afford such poor choices. Was this an indication of integrity? Simplicity? What did it say about equality and community?

There were also some less ambiguous messages.

They really did understand something about simplicity, something about what it means to have enough. As a family we put no attention to proving anything through what we spent or what we owned. (I could make a long list of things we didn’t spend money on when I was little!) The focus was very much on non-material goals, and I found that nourishing. It rang true to me.

There were good messages around stewardship. What we had was valued and cared for. We reused, repaired and recycled and were glad to do so.

The community that our Quaker meeting offered was the best gift I got as a child. It provided a buffer against those traditional money values that surrounded us, as well as some leaven to the rigidities of my father.

When I think about peace, I remember some of our First Day school projects—assembling a miniature Korean house piece by piece as we raised money for a real one in Korea; fitting quarters into cards to go to the Heifer Project to buy farm animals for people far away. I remember collecting pennies for UNICEF. These helped build a sense of being good neighbors, connected to the rest of the world.

As I reflect on those childhood experiences around money, I see a pretty mixed bag, overall probably better than worse. They certainly had a lasting impact, both in the values that endure, and mixed messages that I continue to work to untangle.

Now mine was not the only childhood in this room. Each of us had our own experience of and messages around money. Some shaped us in ways that we may never have recognized. Some taught values that we have since consciously chosen as our own. Some we have fought against all our lives. Let’s take some time to turn to your neighbor and take turns sharing the money messages from your childhood.

[Listening pairs on money messages from our childhood]

Coming of ageSo you can see how our childhood shapes us. But we don’t stop there. My interest in money and economics grew in my young adult years. I was blessed to be part of Young Friends of North American, and then the Movement for a New Society, both communities that took right relationship seriously. I got to experience living lightly in community, and engaging in “bread labor” or part-time work that freed up time to pursue larger goals. We were all asking big questions about how the world worked, and how to do the right thing.

I remember the refrigerator question. Did I have right to a refrigerator? There was no reason in the present to give it up, and I wasn’t seriously considering it. But what if I came to the point where I felt that I couldn’t do without one? If I believed that I was entitled to a refrigerator, would that some day put me on the wrong side of a struggle about equality and right sharing? Would I find myself protecting my possessions from those who had none? I still think it’s a good question.

Claiming a right to the territory of economics

There are so many good questions—and I’m pretty passionate about encouraging people to claim the right to ask them. So I would like to invite you all more fully into the territory of economics.

On reflection, it’s not surprising that I claim a right to travel this territory. My father was an economist (hence his passion for accurate accounts). When I was nine or

ten, I remember helping him with his college multiple-choice exams. He would ask me his question, about which I knew nothing. I would offer an answer that made sense to a ten year old, and he would use that as one of the options—I felt like my mind was valued.

I also witnessed a remarkable journey of integrity on his part. For decades he taught classical economics. His text that helped send all six of us to college was called Money and Banking. But he gradually began to question the most basic assumptions of the theory on which it was built, on which he had based his working life. His last decades were spent as an outspoken critic, calling more and more of the most fundamental assumptions of classical economics into question.

I had my struggles with my father, but this was a big gift. I learned that I had a right to look around this territory, even without any formal training, a right to notice things that seemed inconsistent, a right to use the language, a right to ask questions.

I want everyone to feel that they have this right. Our world needs people of faith who are as outspoken about economics as they are about war and peace. Here’s a challenge I sometimes offer:

Generals, along with politicians, claim to be the experts about what will bring peace and security—and they advise us to leave the matter in their experienced and knowledgeable hands. Boldly, we say “No!” We say that their expertise is based in flawed assumptions, and can never get us to peace. Even though we’ve never known a world without war, we hold fast to our deepest beliefs, and say that killing people is wrong. We are confident, outspoken, tenacious, passionate and engaged.

In the same way, economists, along with politicians, claim to be the experts about what will bring prosperity, and advise us to leave the matter in their experienced and knowledgeable hands. Meekly, we have said, “Okay. It all seems really complicated and you sound as if you know what you’re talking about, so we cede that whole territory to you.” We can do better. We can say “No!” Their expertise is based on flawed assumptions that can never get the world to prosperity. Even though we’ve never known an economic system that works for everybody, we hold to our deepest beliefs—that greed is not the source of well-being, and that unbridled growth comes at the expense of the planet’s integrity. We are confident, outspoken, tenacious, passionate, and engaged.

I think we’re getting better. I think Occupy Wall Street, and the popularization of the concept of the 99% has helped. As wealth has become more concentrated at the top while more and more ordinary people struggle below, the traditional story line of ever-growing prosperity is becoming ever-more frayed.

So let’s occupy the economy together! And let’s start by seeing it as a human system, created by humans to promote human welfare. The meaning of the word is on our side. Eco is a derivation of the Greek oikos, meaning an extended family unit.

Nomos has to do with management. Thus, in its origins, economics meant the management of hearth and home.

It was only in the 1800’s that economists, desperate to make their new field a hard science, tried to shift its basis to irrefutable mathematical equations, eliminating from the field anything that couldn’t be measured. (My father spoke of this as “physics envy”.) We have been taken in by this effort, which has indeed been largely successful, but we don’t need to remain captive.

Theologian Walter Wink has been enormously helpful to me here. He sees Spirit at the core of every institution. These institutions, or Powers, are created with the sole purpose of serving the general welfare of people, and when they cease to do so, their spirituality becomes diseased. The task of the church is to identify these Powers, discern whether they contribute to the common good and if not, redeem them and call them back to their original ‘divine vocation’.

Let’s claim our right to do this, and bring our deepest faith values to the task. How has our economic system strayed from its divine vocation, and what do we want to call it back to?

Here are some of the questions that come to my mind:

What is true wealth? Is it the amount of money in our accounts? Is it the value of our infrastructure and what we produce, or our natural resources, or our fund of common knowledge, or our human capacity, or our spiritual depth? How can what we value be increased?

What needs to be equal? Probably not everything—but some things.

What does democracy have to do with economics? Who should decide, and where should control be located? There is probably no one answer for all situations, but it is a question that cries out to be asked.

How do you track well-being? What do you measure?I’ve never heard anybody talk about this more eloquently than Robert F. Kennedy, and he hits on a lot of the big issues here:

"The gross national product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them.

"And if the gross national product includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials....

"It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our compassion. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Economics stories

We have a right to think about these things, and care about them, and talk about them. We have a right to have expectations and take public stands. But how to get our minds around what can be done? Stories always help.

Here’s one. A Friend in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, was concerned about the lack of attention in FCNL’s policy statement to the dangers of unrestrained economic growth. He mobilized a group around him to fan out to all the Friends meetings we could access, urging them to weigh in on this issue in their feedback to FCNL. The process took several years, but FCNL made the change. A new sentence in their policy statement now says: “The biosphere is finite, and therefore international, national and local bodies must implement environmentally sustainable economic policies.” The FCNL staff are now empowered to speak up on this critical issue where they had been silenced before.

Then there is a story that some of you know better than I do, about a grassroots effort to establish a public bank in Santa Fe. I think it’s a story worth learning about.

And here’s one that I know that you probably don’t. It starts with a school nurse in the small old mining town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. She joined her local borough council mostly to challenge an “old boys” network, but became increasingly concerned about plans for the dumping of toxic sludge and coal fly ash in abandoned mines on the edge of town.  It was shocking to discover how little power her town had to protect its people from these faceless corporations.  With some support from a community rights organization, she proposed a Community Bill of Rights for her borough. It said that they had a right to act to protect their community from external harm.  That their human rights were inalienable and took precedence over property rights.  That nature has rights too.

This Bill of Rights passed a borough council vote (narrowly), the toxic sludge and fly ash corporations were told to stay away, and the world had its first example of legislation declaring that nature has rights.  Other municipalities were inspired to follow suit, some folks in Ecuador, then in the process of rewriting their Constitution took notice, and there is now language there saying that nature has the right to “integral respect for its existence”. Talk about making a difference!

Back to a story from Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in the summer of 2014, and a shift from the wider lens of the economy to a closer focus on money. We had gone through some very lean and painful years following the great 2008 recession, laying off over a third of our paid staff and slashing program expenses to the bone. After

several more years of tight fiscal controls, forced savings and austerity spending, finally, at annual sessions that summer, we heard the good news: Spending is stable; resources are up; income is showing a tendency to rise. If the stock market just continues to grow, we can anticipate more reassuring financial statements for years to come.

“If the stock market just continues to grow…” That phrase rang in the ears of several of us who were active in our Friends Economic Integrity Project. What a paradox! Our yearly meeting depend on growth in the stock market. Yet that growth is a driver of economic inequality and environmental destruction.

Several of us gathered at the end of these sessions to scratch our heads together. With our endowments so deeply dependent on these investments, and many of us counting as never before on investment for our retirement security, how could we challenge this system with integrity and effectiveness? To gather the will to make a transformative change, it seemed that we would have to break our dependence for security on financial speculation.

This dilemma is nested in a much larger one: How can we as individuals, families and communities make money decisions based on integrity when we are entangled in a system that fundamentally lacks it?

The story of Toward a Right Relationship with Finance

Those of us who gathered after sessions had way more questions than answers. But we knew they were important questions. And we were willing to learn.

So a group of four of us took on the writing project that would lead to this book, Toward a Right Relationship with Finance; Interest, Debt, Growth and Security. We were two Quakers from Philadelphia, one from California, and a Maryknoll living in Brazil (how cool is that!), three men led by me (and how cool is that!) all under the care of the Quaker Institute for the Future.

What a learning opportunity!

I got a much better picture of the radical shift in our economy in the 1970’s, from the strong New Deal and post WWII emphasis on serving the common good to one promoting private gain. I did have one fact about this shift under my belt, which I always use when I do my workshops on leadership and advocacy with child care workers. We talk about taxes as sources of revenue for socially beneficial goods and services, and I ask if anybody knows how much people paid in taxes in the 1950’s on income over $250,000. The guesses usually range from 5% to 20%. People are shocked when I share the real number: 91%. So back then, the idea was that $250,000 was enough, even for the rich (with inflation it might be a million now). After you got that much money, it was rightly ordered that most of everything over that go back to the common pool for common needs.

Yet that all started to change in the late 1970’s. With Reagan, those tax rates plummeted to 28%. Regulations on business, banking and finance were loosened. The private sector’s influence grew. The system we find ourselves in now hearkens back to the “laissez-faire” era of the Robber Barons and is sometimes known as “neo-liberal” economics.

There was more to be learned. I had known nothing about how our retirement system changed over that period of time. After WWII, retirement security based on a combination of Social Security and job pensions—both shared systems—was the norm (at least for white men). Since then, it has shifted steadily toward individual retirement accounts—and increased dependence on financial gambling.

I did a lot of research on where the savings could come from in the economy to create common resources for greater common security. The dominant story line is all about scarcity in the federal budget, but there are lots of possibilities.

Perhaps most of all, I learned about interest. It was illuminating to consider retirement options with the role of interest in mind. Currently most retirement plans depend on interest. But Social Security comes from the present earnings of younger workers; better health and income security could come from taxes, again from present earnings rather than interest.

I learned that all the major religions had strong historical prohibitions against usury and concern about debt—for good reason. In the present, the connection between interest and debt on the one hand, and growth and inequality on the other, is compelling. (Get ready for some heavy lifting here.)

Virtually all money is created when banks make interest-bearing loans. Taking on loans means taking on debt. So more money needs to be made in order to pay off the interest on that debt. Thus the requirement for economic growth is baked into the system. When there were great untapped resources—minerals, forests, topsoil—and

easy access to stored sunlight from the past in fossil fuels, such an expansive system could be a rough fit.

But it has no future on a spaceship, as Quaker economist Kenneth Boulding so eloquently pointed out.

Since producing more is linked to using more resources, Earth’s ecological systems are increasingly strained.

And since for lenders, getting interest gives them more, while for debtors, paying back interest leaves them with less, inequality steadily grows.

So how do we find our way through this land mine of ethical issues? I’m always helped by trying to name the questions:

First in my mind is a question about rights. Do we have a right to interest income that we haven’t earned through our own effort? It’s easy to fault

financial speculators who get obscenely wealthy making money off of money, but surely that’s different from ordinary people like us who are just trying to save for retirement? Or is it? Beneath that question lies a bigger one: Does having anything mean we have a right to it? (and that gets back to my dilemma about the refrigerator).

Second, there are questions about fairness. Sometimes a loan can be fair for both sides. But should it be easier for people with some assets to get more than for people with no assets to get some? Should people who have not yet begun their work life be in debt? When does debt become indebtedness?

Then there are questions about relationships and connection. What if my gain in economic security involves someone else’s loss? What does inequality—or even a focus on individual security—do to our sense of connection?

And then, of course, there is the big question of what really brings security. Can it come from laying away treasures on Earth?

Using a framework of the testimonies to reflect on money

So what do we do with all of this? How do we find our way, as investors and debtors and workers and citizens—as Friends—through this tangle of knotty issues? How do we best manage our money and best navigate the larger economic environment in which we swim? Once again, I return to the testimonies as a framework.

Integrity

We can’t make much progress without acknowledging the importance of integrity, and being honest about where it is lacking. Clearly it is massively lacking in our economy as it currently functions and, like the fish in the sea, we cannot exist outside of it. We are entangled. But while a goal of purity may be beyond our reach—and may lead us to spiritual dead ends if we try— that doesn’t mean we need be immobilized or silenced.

There’s always a next step that can be taken in the direction of aligning our practices more closely with our values. So I’m going to play the role of my strong-willed friend, Nadine, and suggest that all of us take on the discipline of writing our own statements of conscience.

What values do you claim in this area of money and economics? To what do you conscientiously object? On what basis? Even if there are things that you do not know or fully understand (and you’re in good company here!) you can start by looking for a solid place on which to stand. So pull out something to write on—or just organize your thinking in your mind—and take a few minutes to listen for what your conscience may have to say.

[Pause to work on statements of conscience in reference to money and the economy]

(I wish we had more time. Maybe in your meetings you could work on conscience statements together. Maybe you could post them on your bulletin boards.) Here’s how I tried to address some of the integrity challenges of being entangled in an unjust system in my own statement of conscience:

The more I make purchases from excess income, the more I need to be in contact with those who don’t have enough.

The more I choose products made from non-renewable resources, the more I need to experience the pieces of the earth they came from.

The more I hurt someone, the more I need to listen to their pain.(I have to note that I wasn’t thinking about investments back then.)

Simplicity

What about the other testimonies? It’s always easy for me to find solid ground among Friends around simplicity and it’s so important here. We’ve looked at how our economic and monetary system, as it currently functions, depends on continuous growth (which breeds inequality and environmental destruction). To create a growing market, more people need to be steadily convinced that they need more things. This requires people who are willing to be defined as consumers and vulnerable to being swayed by advertisers.

And here is a place where we as Friends know something about just saying no. We know something about choosing against the drumbeat of materialism, and for the non-material inputs that are more likely to meet real needs. Living out our testimony on simplicity with all the intention and power we can muster—and sharing the joy of that choice with others—is part of calling the economy back to its divine vocation of providing for human welfare on a finite earth.

Equality

What about equality? We’ve talked some about how our economy, when free of government intervention, steadily widens class differences. Add to this the role of racism, and the great transfers of wealth from communities of color to the white world, and we have a real mess. How on earth do we respond? We can begin by taking on personal and community practices around money that tend toward greater equality. And I have to stop here and give a shout out to your yearly meeting for all the work you are doing together on the issue of Pay as Led. What a testament to your commitment to equality (and community).

On the wider level, we can put our weight behind practices that pull down the accumulation of excessive wealth. The city of Portland, Oregon, for example, has just passed an ordinance that adds a tax to corporations whose CEOs make more than 100 times the average of their workers. (In 1965 the average was 20-to-1. By 2013 is was almost 300-to-1.) We can support bills to end preferential tax treatment for wealthy hedge fund managers. Then there is the idea of a financial transaction tax—which many people like to call Robin Hood Tax. This is a tiny bite out of each computerized transaction on the financial markets as a way to discourage making money from money without contributing anything to the real economy.

Similarly we can put our weight behind policies to pull people up out of oppressive debt. There are a daunting number of opportunities here: around payday lending practices, credit card fees, student debt, underwater mortgages, and probably more.

We can think even bigger, and support the idea of moving our whole money creation system out of the for-profit banking sector, as it currently functions in the Federal Reserve.

Finally, we can support the kind of government policies that helped create the post-war—mostly white—middle class. Once proud and hopeful, the prospects of this group have been steadily eroded by the resurgence of laissez-faire neoliberalism, with greater scarcity and insecurity bringing more in common with the poor and oppressed, and, at the same time, more fears that end up targeting those groups. Opportunities here include: efforts to raise the minimum wage; support for college education like that of the GI Bill; a revised personal income tax structure (could we ever get back to that 91 percent?); perhaps a guaranteed income, such as that proposed by both Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

Community

I think community may be the big one. How to we do money together—with simplicity and equality—when we come from so many different places, both in terms of economic means and assumptions around the money that we have or don’t have? Every community has to do their own work, but I can suggest a few traps and snares to watch out for:

An assumption of entitlement, and a blindness around class and race; Being tightfisted and losing opportunities to spend on things of real value; A judgmentalism that seems always to lead to separation.

Since our economic system depends on getting people to act individually and on the basis of greed, community is critical to our salvation. Any efforts to retain parts of the economic system in community, or return them to community are part of the solution.

I would imagine that most everyone here is familiar with examples of projects that support and resource the local economy. They are springing up everywhere—a very hopeful antidote to the withdrawal of resources from community that comes with financial speculation and global corporate control.

My hunch is that we are more likely to think of community-based ways of managing production and services than community-based ways of managing money—though there is that hardy and visionary group working on a local bank in Santa Fe. I’m sure they took as their model the Bank of North Dakota. This bank, the only state bank in the country, has done much to keep local resources from being drained out to big national and international banks and financial markets, and it helped the state ride out the national recession of 2008 with minimal economic dislocation.

But you don’t have to live in North Dakota to keep your liquid assets working for the community. Credit unions are a wonderful institution where debt and interest stay in the same closed local system. I was so happy to take my money out of the big bank in our city and put it all in our local credit union. If I borrow money there, I am borrowing from my neighbors. If I have money there in savings it is being used to support my neighbors. (I keep wishing I had the time and energy to organize local members to run for places on the credit union board, to make the concept of community-ownership a little more real—but that’s another story…) Thinking particularly about investments, we can all revisit our choices, with the goal of aligning our practices more closely with our testimonies. If our money is in speculative financial markets, we can choose greater social responsibility and screen out a variety of negative investments. Assuming that many Friends have already done this, a next level would be to actively choose for the type of positive production we are interested in supporting. A growing number of investment portfolios can help with this. There are also more and more options for ordinary people to invest locally, either in community investment funds or even in specific sectors or businesses.

Focusing even closer in, I know of families and religious communities that have chosen to buy up student loans and credit card debt from their members and set up loan repayment agreements with zero or minimal interest rates.

Of course it is also possible to make interest-free loans. I personally feel blessed by the opportunities for connection that I get through a global on-line lending project called Kiva.

Finally, we can choose to invest in our common security by plain old sharing of wealth (to which our title tends to be pretty shaky) with groups like Right Sharing of World Resources, with their wonderful mission of relieving the burdens of both poverty and materialism.

Stewardship

I include stewardship dutifully in the list of testimonies, but have growing reservations about the whole concept. The original Biblical admonition seems to be so much about mastery and control, and has become so entwined with arrogance and separation. I see our current challenge as giving up the concept of “mastery over” altogether and working to understand our place within the ecosystems of which we are a part, and the role we can play as part of the whole that best enhances and maintains the whole.

What can we learn from the perspective of an ecosystem about a healthy and sustainable financial system?

Here I have to take what may seem like a little detour here to the subject of agricultural drainage ditches. It seems that the current practice (at least in the East, where we have rain) is to try to drain water off of fields as efficiently as possible, which means making deep and straight ditches that lead directly to a bigger waterway. But it turns out that deep and straight ditches are also efficient in washing away topsoil, eroding banks, and sending agricultural poisons directly into the adjacent water supplies. It turns out that, if you’re thinking in terms of the health of the ecosystem, it’s better to have a very slow and meandering stream that takes its time, replenishes the surroundings, and does a lot of self-cleaning in the process.

This is probably not an exact metaphor, but I’m pretty sure that a healthy financial ecosystem would be slow. There would not be an efficient stream whose goal was to pour stuff out at the end. Rather, as its resources meandered and percolated through the local economy, the health of the local system would be steadily replenished. It’s the difference between a model that extracts and one that generates.

Peace

I’ve left peace till last because it continues to puzzle me. I’m back to the same question I had writing my statement of conscience: how can I get more passionate about this central tenet of Quakerism?

I remember someone coming back from a demonstration against the war in Iraq and talking about a sign they saw: “What is our oil doing under their sand?” Now that sign spoke to me. How much of war is fueled by inequality and the demands of a growth economy in a world of increasing scarcity. How much is it fueled by a desire to gain greater control over wealth or productive assets or water? Removing economic injustice from that picture would certainly drain a lot of conflict.

Remembering that economics at its heart is “management of the hearth”, we come back to Walter Wink: every human institution has a divine vocation, from which it

has fallen, but for which it can be redeemed. The divine vocation of the economy is to organize our communities to meet our common needs. Now that’s a way of evoking peace that I can get passionate about!

Conclusion

As I conclude, I want to remind us that while we are entangled, we are not immobilized and we need not be silenced.

When I lead my child care workers’ retreats, we always spend time identifying something that each person in the room is passionate about improving or changing in the child care system. We take time to get our heads around how to set goals, gather resources, and overcome obstacles. Finally, everyone is asked to look at their goals and identify one concrete step they can take in the next ten days. I hope each of you leaves these sessions with a new idea of a next step you can take as well.

We’re thinking about issues that are way bigger than us, but nothing will happen if individuals don’t act. After all, we are God’s hands. We have many roles: as debtors, investors, community members, citizens. There are tons of steps we can take from where we are standing right now:

in our personal lives and our families in our meetings and wider communities through lending our weight to social movement and shifts in national

priorities.

When President Bush urged us all to respond to the attacks on the World Trade towers by shopping, I asked my father, now an aging economist, for his perspective. I knew this wasn’t the path that would guide us safely into the future. But what was? He said that the search is not for an economic theory that works, but for a theory of life that goes beyond economics as we currently know it.

There are so many unknowns about the future. The energy we spend second-guessing or judging our choices, or those of others is mostly wasted. We get to do the best we can, relying on the power of moving forward in faith. Together, we get to make the path by walking. Thank you for walking with me this afternoon.