A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough (3 page)

In short, sin is the wrong tool for the job.

It is classic bait-and-switch. We promise you love, but we just happen to be out of that right now. How about we sell you a little
lust
instead? You will barely notice the difference. We are waiting on an order of deep inner fulfillment—but we can send you out the door right now with a much cheaper box of
gluttony
. These empty substitutes for the authentic needs of the heart create an inescapable cycle of relentless striving, working harder to use a tool that is actually
designed not to work
. Worse, it invariably leaves us perpetually dissatisfied, always wanting more and more.

And it gets worse.

Over the past several decades, our culture has slowly turned these Seven Deadly Sins—these defective, anguish-producing tools—into our own shiny, brand-new Seven American Values.

Think for a moment. Are these not the values we project, enjoy, promote, sell, and promise as the New American Dream? We’re number one! (Pride) You can have it all! (Greed) Sex
sells! (Lust) I just want to be famous on TV! (Envy) All you can eat! (Gluttony) The world owes everything to me! (Sloth) If any bad guys stand in my way, well, bring ’em on! (Anger)

Food is no longer for pleasure or nourishment but for getting thinner or feeling more comfort. Greed isn’t about guaranteeing sufficiency; it is a fearful grasping for more than we need. Lust isn’t about lovemaking, a sweet touch of the beloved, but about getting more sensation in the body. Lovers become objects. Food is an object. Money, possessions, jobs, network contacts, all become objects.

When our precious human needs are transformed into objects—indeed, when even friends and colleagues assume the qualities of objects—we can treat them with less attention and care. Objects, by definition, can be traded, bought, sold, even disposed of without much thought or concern. Saddest of all, for all our accumulating and grasping, we are, so many of us, secretly, terribly, thoroughly exhausted, discouraged, and unhappy.

This New American Dream is like quenching our thirst for contentment and sufficiency by drinking from a fire hose. The new promise is that through commerce and technology there is no limit to what we can accomplish or accumulate. But while we have accumulated more and more goods and stocks and bonds and imaginary wealth than ever before in history, what has not and cannot change is that there is a fundamental limit to what has real value, what we can deeply absorb, use, digest, or ever enjoy. Beyond this point, anything more—whether real or imagined—simply creates suffering.

These Deadly Sins all have to do with excess. Which is more likely to bring to fruition the deepest dreams of our hearts, the
ones we invoked at the beginning of this chapter? Finding satisfaction in what we have, or grasping for more than we need or could ever use? Having enough to eat, or eating until we feel uncomfortable and obese? Exploring the endless pleasures of our senses with our beloved, or desperately craving more sexual stimulation, using others as objects, forsaking any love or respect?

We become increasingly desperate in our craving, reaching for the same ineffective, disappointing tools over and over again, forever disappointed, never feeling we have done, received, accomplished, nearly enough, in part because we stubbornly choose the same, wrong tool for the job. In the end, we feel disappointed, discouraged, unhappy. From there, the leap to concluding that we are not good enough, have not worked hard enough, will never be enough, is effortless, familiar, seemingly inevitable.

It is not we but rather the tools we have chosen that are defective. Let me be clear: I have no interest here in any moral argument regarding sin as a religious precept. I honor and respect any spiritual community that dedicates itself to creating a world where people’s lives matter, where they try to do more good than evil, do no harm, practice loving compassion and service to others. Indeed, I take this seriously enough that I answered my own personal call to graduate from theological seminary and become an ordained minister.

For our purposes, I am asking us to take time to listen—deeply, quietly, without hurry or distraction—to the simple physics, the unavoidable spiritual laws of cause and effect, that undergird this one simple question: When we sink deeply into the image of a sweet, loving life, in which we are loved, seen, appreciated, and valued—a life where we have, and are, deeply
and thoroughly
enough—
does this describe our days, our work, our striving, our full and desperate engagement in the marketplace of the New American Dream?

Traditional spiritual traditions that offer reliable, healing relief from the anguish of
sin
generally prescribe some period of rigorous, honest self-examination, followed by a turning—a change in direction, a new path, a beginning of some more deeply accurate journey. The word
repent
, for example, means
to turn around
, or
turn back
. Aboriginal elders in Australia say that if we find ourselves lost, we must retrace our steps back to the place where we last knew who, or where, we were and start over from there.

In the Hebrew tradition, a period of ten days—beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur—is dedicated specifically to this repentance, culminating in the most holy
Day of Atonement
, which in Hebrew is
Teshuva. Teshuva
invites deep self-examination, confession, and an invitation to forgiveness, and a recommitment to a new, fresh, honorably nourishing life.

Some Hebrew scholars say the word
Teshuva
can also mean “A return to clear seeing.” This investigation of
enough—
this pilgrimage we have begun together, this collaborative wandering through our heart’s confusion—will hopefully seed a fruitful “return to clear seeing.” Our journey is an adventure in listening for how we find sanctuary and see more clearly what is good, what is whole, what is beautiful and holy, and what is, in the end, this day, this moment, enough.

Enough for Today

I
t is good for us to pause and reflect on how privileged we are to be able to carefully reflect on this essential question of what is, for us, enough. There are literally billions of children, families, and communities all over the world for whom the issue of enough is not a meditation but a daily challenge to their life and death. The ways in which we honestly respond to this question have an undeniable, direct impact on the lives of those children.

Whenever we fear we may not have enough, we tend to hoard more than we need. This, of course, limits the food, energy, medicine, raw materials, and other resources available to the rest of our family. Twenty-five thousand children lose their lives every day for lack of clean drinking water, food, or inexpensive medicines costing less than a dollar.

So as we feel our way into some sense of enough, we are caring for our own well-being while remaining mindful of the very real, unmet needs of our sisters and brothers in the family of the earth. We are essentially grappling with two questions. First, how do we know we have secured enough food, shelter, sanctuary, health, and security for ourselves and our loved ones? And second, as members of our global human family saturated with unnecessary suffering and death, what is enough
for us to do, to give, to contribute? As we listen together to these challenges, I expect we will discover that these two basic human needs—to have enough and to do enough—live within us as two chambers of a single beating heart.

For those who can never be certain, when they awake in the morning, that they will have enough food, enough clothing, enough shelter, enough medical care, to keep themselves and their children alive through the end of this one day, sufficiency is not a matter of personal inquiry, it is a matter of life or death: a life of rising well before dawn to walk hours in both directions to fill their one unbroken container with enough barely drinkable water; to grow, find, borrow, forage—or, if they are so privileged, buy—enough rice, enough bread to keep their bodies alive one more day; to seek shelter from the elements, shade from the punishing midday sun; to barter, sell something—or someone—to procure whatever medicine or health care is required to keep their likely undernourished and dehydrated children healthy enough to contribute to their family’s daily survival.

Were any of us forced to endure even one day’s experience of this life, the life of these billions of our sisters and brothers on the earth, we would undoubtedly rail in anger against the obvious injustice of it. The sheer impossibility of obtaining even the most simple things, readily available elsewhere—clean water, a roof, commonly available medicine—would drive us to seek redress. But we would never find anyone anywhere to fix this for us, to get us out of it, to correct this mistake. We would be fully convinced we were being unfairly robbed, abused, and forgotten.

We would be right, of course. But for most of the world,
this is beside the point. There is no official, no department, no court, no representative, no friend of a friend who will make any of this—not today, not tomorrow, never ever—come out right. The fact that I lived among people for whom this had been true their whole lives, and that those people did not simply hate me for my privilege, or lead lives of seething rage, or erupt in regular explosions of frustrated violence, has been one of the most potent and humbling teachings of my life and work.

Having been honored and blessed to accompany the poorest of the poor (as many Maryknoll sisters and brothers described those with whom I met and lived and worked in the slums of Peru), it is easy to observe these fierce choices, sacrifices, and astonishing generosities; they are always and everywhere here and throughout the world. What is not easy to witness is the human spirit—this soaring, sacred, miraculous thing—subjected to relentless, corrosive scarcity day after day, trying to find meaning, love, and hope in the ashes of this life. As someone male, white, from a nation of substantial privilege, I was humbled, humiliated, by the haunting memory of what waste and excesses I had left behind in my own family, my own community.

It is far too easy—cheap grace, some would call it—to romanticize the poor, their strength, their faith, their resilience in the face of scarcity, poverty, and want. We must see, feel, learn, touch, know that these poorest of the poor who blanket the parched earth of our fragile planet are, in fact, in no way different from, in any way, but precisely, exactly, in every way like us, our family, our friends, human beings. For many of us, I am aware, if we are willing to admit it, this may come as a challenging
surprise. We so easily think of “the poor” as somehow a different kind of people than you or I. But none, not one single child or parent who has become “the poor” was ever born, or just happened to know, how to live this way; no one is an especially blessed person for whom poverty isn’t as bone-weary, soul-crushingly hard for them as it would be for us.

For these women, men, children, and grandparents, who must open their eyes each morning, and, as the fleeting blessing of blissful sleep dissolves into a sudden stab of remembering where they have been placed on the earth,
enough
is not an idea but a real, concrete, desperately frail thread on which the very lives of their children are hung anew every single morning.

I have been taught, held, cared for, fed, sheltered, welcomed, guided, and yes, even loved by these, on whose behalf I could never, not for one day or one minute, help but wonder why any kind and loving God seemed so very, very far away.

Still. Having said this one true thing, there is another thing we must know. If we are ever to honestly and honorably understand, confront, or make some unimaginable peace with our own grasping, fearful response whenever our sense of enough for ourselves is threatened in any way, we must know this other true thing. It is this: When people in debilitating, soul-crushing poverty do, at the end of the day, feel and know they have enough food, enough shelter, enough water, enough medicine—then, in the most impossibly, ridiculously true very next moment—these very same mothers and grandmothers and children will, more than likely, become instantly generous with whatever small portion of anything they may have left over.

PART TWO
finding enough
in the next
right thing

The Next Right Thing

W
e make only one choice.

Throughout our lives, we do only one thing—again and again, moment by moment, year after year. It is how we live our days, and it is how we shape our lives.

The choice is this: What is the next right thing for us to do?

Where, in this moment, shall we choose to place our time and attention? Do we stay or move, speak or keep silent, attend to this person, that task, move in this or that direction?

With each succeeding moment, we make a new choice. After each decision, there is another. And another. These are not enormous choices, decisions about whether to change careers, get married, or move to a new city. Our choices are small, quiet, intimate things that flow from us as water from a mountain spring, simple, endless, each thimble of water tumbling into the next, creating a small stream that somehow, with neither a map nor a plan, through surprising twists and curving around unforeseen obstacles, somehow inevitably finds its way down the mountain to the sea.

If we follow our tiny stream, we will see that at every turn it makes a choice, to go right or left, over or around, or to pool up for a while, waiting to spill over. The stream knows nothing of what is ahead, is not conscious of planning for the
future. It simply follows the path of least resistance, motivated by gravity. Still, how does the water “decide” to go right or left when approaching a boulder or fallen tree? Somehow, inch by inch, choices are made, perhaps joining other rivulets or creeks along the way, and by the end of the journey, if we look back, we witness the gradual, evolving birth of the stream.