Father Peter's Forum

Val J. Peter

The people who lived in this country before us for hundreds of years surrounded their lives with moral boundaries around money, power and sex. They tried to steer a course between puritanical suppression of pleasure, on one hand (being insensitive to the good things of life) and pagan indulgence (coming to wallow in materialism. Remember the ad for Chase Bank: “I want it all. I want it now.”) My thoughts here focus on a middle ground between the two. We call it the right balance between the two extremes. We call it moderation. It is the right balance that puts the brakes on the downward drag of materialism. It is the right balance that calls us to be slightly countercultural in order to break the pattern of political correctness, to go against the pleas that “everybody has it” and “everybody else does it.”

1. What are the basic elements of balance between riches and poverty, the basic elements of the right balance?

a. Many agree when I say many affluent Americans want too much and expect too much and that makes us very unhappy because in times of scarcity, such as now, we get frustrated. But even in times of great abundance, we feel an emptiness of material things.

b. The basic elements of balance or moderation are:

 Gaining control over our wants, especially our sensual appetites. (more economic goods)
 Gaining control over our appetite for gain. (more income, more wealth seeking)
 Gaining control over our appetite for power. (money brings power…a $100 bill is a magic piece of paper)
 Gaining control over our appetite for political correctness. (which brings a preference for prestige over truth and goodness)

In ancient and medieval times, these controls to gain a right balance of our material wants were lumped together in a very specific way:

 In static economies of ancient and medieval times, extravagant living, time and again, involved depriving the poor of some means of livelihood. In economics, this is called a “zero sum game” where the pie is only so big. And you can only get a bigger piece from the pie by taking a piece from somebody else. Growing economies are not zero sum games.
 Control over the desire for power and political correctness is much more needed today because of the strength of environmental reinforcement. This is a very important point. Let’s take the example of associative conditioning in the media changing people’s views. The first example of associative conditioning I can think of was in Hitler’s Germany where a Nazi propaganda machine cleverly would show a picture of Jews immediately followed by a picture of rats. If this was shown over and over again, as soon as you saw rats you thought of Jews and as soon as you saw Jews, you thought of rats.

In our time, associative conditioning is more subtle. You put together one after the other, pictures of an extravagant lifestyle and happiness over and over again. So much so that as soon as people think of happiness, they think of an extravagant lifestyle. This is coupled with the associative conditioning of pictures of the Church, coupled with old dumb men demanding stupid morality. So that when you think of morality, you think of old dumb men in the Church. And when you think of the Church, you think of old dumb men demanding morality.

2. So we have to work on a right balance (or moderation) between too much or too little.

 A proper balance between the two can help us develop a moral compass and religious sensitivity.
 The gospel of the Lord calls us to seek first the kingdom of heaven. The gospel calls us to look at the lilies of the field which neither sow nor spin, yet our Heavenly Father closed them in glory in abundance.
 The birds of the air do not engage in commerce, yet our Heavenly Father feeds them.
 The presence of wealth is not an automatic sign of divine favor.
 Sensitivity to moral values comes from embracing the gospel and daily following the Lord.
 The gospel says we are to pray: Speak Lord, your servant is listening. An affluent person prays: Listen Lord, your servant is speaking.
 Look at the story of Dives and Lazarus in Luke’s Gospel. Dives did not kick old Lazarus. He did not spit on Lazarus. He did not make fun of Lazarus. He did not have Lazarus removed from his doorstep…Dives was condemned for none of these things. Then why was he condemned? Because he simply did not much even notice Lazarus. He simply accepted the world in which Lazarus existed. He just did not really care. He was indifferent. He was too busy with other things. The opposite of love in the gospels is not hate. It is simply not caring. (Remember in Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler was saying to Scarlet: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a….” Indifference.

3. St. Theresa of Avila tells this story in The Interior Castle (the 3rd mansion) of a person quite affluent who loses some money on a bad investment. (It wasn’t the subprime mortgage crisis, but it was something.) He is simply crushed by it. He is anxious, upset, angry and out of sorts. Theresa asks: how can the Lord possibly get through to that person when he is so wrapped up in himself? What should he do? And she answers: he should admit he has a neurotic attachment to his wealth. He must pray to the Lord to give him freedom in this area.

4. Are there such things as people who think they can buy love? The man who pays a prostitute knows he is really buying sex and not love, but for a few moments he fantasizes that he is buying love. The same is true with most people who are so starved for love that they try to buy it with gifts to their children, etc. Except for a few brief moments here and there, it is unlikely that they really believe they can buy the love they feel they so desperately need. Most people who are hungry for love have never tried hard to let the Lord love them and they feel unloved under any circumstances. They are willing to settle for being liked. They can buy attention, even admiration. Love buyers tend to spoil their children. They give into the wishes and desires of their children and buy them all sorts of things they don’t need. Love buyers get admiration and attention. But admiration and attention are only poor substitutes for real love and they are never quite satisfied. But many love buyers just keep trying.

Chapter IV
The Christian View of Scarcity and Plenty
Val J. Peter

The economic downturn has touched the lives of countless Americans. As I write this, there are six million workers who have lost their jobs. Countless retired persons have seen the funds they were counting on shrink by 30 or 40 or 50%. Or even more. Here at Boys Town, our graduates of last year (2008) are being rifted from $12 an hour jobs in nursing homes, telemarketing and so many other low end occupations. They struggled mightily to secure those $12 jobs and (together with the class of 2009) they can now only find $7 jobs.

Take the example of a friend of mine who was let go by downsizing, losing his $60,000a year job. He has a wife who is a homemaker and two children, ages 10 and 16. He is in a state of shock. He is feeling helpless and he is just plain depressed. You can see the darkness descending on his life. Yes, his family right now is a dark place. There is lots of bitterness. There is lots of sadness. There is a feeling of being betrayed.

A 40-year-old young woman delivered a flower from a local florist to us at Dowd Chapel yesterday. And I said: “I have never seen you before.” She told me she had lost her job so she has to deliver flowers for two days a week. “That way I will get a little money.” Then she shook her head and said: “Life just isn’t fair.” That is true, but it is not much of a consolation. She, too, is complaining. She, too, can embrace hopelessness. She, too, can say: “I drive to the next place, deliver a lousy flower and then another lousy flower at the next place and get a lousy, measly salary.” She can do all of that if she wants.

But she has another option, namely, to open her heart to the vision and the power of the Lord’s way to deal with material goods with scarcity and with plenty. This is no so simple. And it starts with some serious prayer and deep reflection on the gospels. Both the flower lady and my friend should start with the gentle realization that although the economic abundance they had was certainly better than not having it, yet at the same time, it did not bring them happiness. It brought convenience and simple solutions to their problems, but not happiness. They sadness they feel is all about having to live with less, not all about losing happiness.

Here is an even more helpful thought. The flower lady and my friend need to realize that in some ways their lives were helped greatly by abundance. They had fund going out to dinner, they had fun buying a nice new car, they had fun going on good vacations, they had fun making happy memories. At the same time, the flower lady and my friend need to realize that in some ways our lives have been imparished and poverished by abundance in comparison with the days when we were less affluent. How many times have you said to yourself as you walk through your home early in the morning before anyone is up and realize you have more of this world’s goods that you used to have, but aren’t any happier and, in some ways, you feel impoverished? How many have you said to yourself that your children have too much and are getting selfish? How many times have you said to yourself that you wish they could learn how to sacrifice? How many times have you thought to yourself that economic abundance has not brought you peace of mind, but pernicious debts rising faster than your income?

In some ways, we realize that affluence has done wonderful things, but in the same breath it has created an insecurity in the sense that the more income we have the more wants we have. It has created a much more complex, hectic life. It has created a different kind of insecurity, namely, in the sense that all of us complain that we are always in a hurry, always in a rat race and always on the treadmill. We complain we don’t have enough time to read, we don’t have enough time to pray, we don’t have enough for wisdom, love and friendship. Despite all the goodness of God’s material creation, we know our affluence has also eroded parental authority in our families. We know that our kids’ culture is often a culture of money. It is what I call erosion caused by affluence. Rain is good for the crops, but if it rains too much or too hard there is erosion on the land.

It is now time to talk about the great spiritual gift our Christian faith gives us that enables us to find happiness in good times and in bad, “for richer, for poorer.” This gift of faith is a pearl of great price. Let us go slowly here. Something very important, but subtle, gradually befalls us when we arise to the level of affluence that we had before the economic collapse. You see material possessions and economic wellbeing make us towering promises which they cannot keep, promises that riches will bring us happiness and satisfaction and self-fulfillment and riches cannot possibly do that.

Why? Because at the heart of all these material possessions, material gains, material success is the kind of emptiness of material things. Our Christian tradition calls it ontological poverty. It is not that material things are bad. They are not. They are God’s good creation. They are to be enjoyed. It is rather that material things and economic wellbeing can satisfy certain hungers, but they can never satisfy the deepest hungers of the human spirit. There is a longing in the depths of each of our hearts which can never be satisfied by material goods or by a high standard of living. St. Augustine said it well: “Our souls were made for thee, O God, and they will not rest until they rest in thee.” To rest in material goods or to embrace them too much brings the trivialization of life. Too many riches cannot bring about a rich life.

Christians through the centuries have asked what is the remedy for this emptiness that is at the heart of material things. And the answer is that only the evangelical spirit of poverty found in the gospels and in Jesus’ teaching can alone fill the ontological poverty that alone can bring meaning to the frustration that material goods generate. It alone can bring deep enjoyment for the good things of life. The gospel’s spirit of poverty alone can answer the question so often expressed by us: I have so much more than my grandparents or parents, but what good has it done me or what good has it done anyone else? It is not that material goods are bad, it is rather that they are pitched to us in a great marketing world. It is a way to satisfy needs when they are only a way to satisfy the artificial wants created by our culture. “If I only had a new car or a better home or a bigger salary, then I would really be happy.” And yet we know deep down that’s not true, that after a few days our new car doesn’t bring us promised happiness and now we want something else. Yes, material goods generate more wants, more wants, more wants. Christian authors have often put it this way: Affluence creates scarcity and that brings emptiness.

With the economic downturn, almost all of us realize that we are too far in debt and the more we have the more we spend, the more we worry and the deeper the debt piles up. Yes, we need the spirit of poverty to fill this emptiness.

In addition, we get hooked on material goods. They bring us less freedom, not more. Remember the ad for Chase Bank: I want it all. I want it now.

And if I want it now and want it all, I just may be tempted to fudge a little bit, to cheat a little bit to get ahead. After all, only suckers follow all the rules. And cheating a little bit doesn’t just involve material goods. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. So we’re tempted to cheat on other things, in marriage, in family, in business, in pleasure.

And now we come to a very hard saying. If you have been reading this series, you have found me saying there have been people out there who are greedy and villains and rogues, both in government and in business. You and I did not create the subprime mortgage crisis, but you and I may fall into the trap of believing everything will be okay once blame is fixed and the villains exposed. But there is a problem in our heart, a big problem, namely, a lack of a gospel’s spirit of poverty.

If you look in the scriptures, you will see that poverty is described, but never defined. There are certain ideas that the scriptures give us about poverty:

 The first idea is that poverty is often a scandalous state of affairs due to the neglect of the wealthy to help the poor. Think of Divvies and Lazarus.
 There is another theme in the Old Testament, namely, that poverty is the result of Israel’s unfaithfulness to the Lord.
 Thirdly, in the Wisdom literature, poverty is a middle state between excessive wealth and excessive want, a state of life most helpful for virtuous living. We have neither too much, lest we be tempted to rely on ourselves and not on God or we have too little and are tempted to curse God.
 The theme we focus on runs all through the scriptures and it is this: The person with this spirit of poverty is one who trusts the Lord in good times and in bad. It not only depends on God, but also furthers God’s holy purposes. It is a person who actively helps usher in the Kingdom of God in their hearts and in their homes.

Many authors, when speaking of spiritual poverty, point out that it is a main theme in the Old Testament leading to the New Testament. Let us look at the three steps that can be taken as spiritual poverty grows in our hearts to maturity:
 In the first step (from Exodus to the prophets) the people of Israel are told that if they follow the covenant with their whole heart and soul God will literally bless Zion with material wellbeing. This is God’s promise to Israel and the promise is to the community, not to individuals. So if you are a person in the community who has more, then you have to share with those who have less. You are literally actively being God’s agent in bringing material wellbeing to those who have less. Over and over, we read in the Old Testament that those who have plenty should provide special help to the orphan and the widow. Sharing your material wealth with those who have less is part of Israel’s faithfulness to the covenant. Spiritual poverty is about what you do with your wealth.
 In the second step, spiritual poverty is interiorized. This is during the exile. In the exile in Babylon, where the children of Israel underwent real true physical poverty. What did they do with it? They interiorized it by giving themselves to the will of God, patient in tribulation, trusting the Lord that He and His justice will someday rectify their plight.
 In the third step, we see the Son of God come down from heaven seeking and preferring poverty. This adds a new dimension to the interiorization of poverty, namely, you seek it and prefer it.

Jesus’ life was a song of praise to poverty. He was born in a stable. He grew up in obscurity. He was a village carpenter of no public account and in His ministry, He took, with gratitude, whatever people gave Him…water from a Samaritan woman in Jacob’s well, a fine meal from the rich man, Zacchaeus, a donkey from a stranger to ride into Jerusalem and, finally, a burial place in someone else’s tomb.

When asked what it was like to follow Him, He said: The birds of the air have their nests, foxes have their lair, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”

And then there are those sayings of the Lord where Jesus warns us about how seductive wealth can be…“woe to you rich”…“woe to you who have your fill now”…“if you would be perfect, go sell what you have”…“seek first the kingdom of heaven”…“prefer spiritual wealth over material wealth.”

In the early Church, the apostles and their followers took Christ’s words as applying to them all. All said that the spirit of poverty…according to their circumstances…is an essential ingredient on the way to salvation. Yet remember they still kept their property. Jerusalem was unique in that regard and, even there, the surrender of private possessions was not mandatory.

And then there is that marvelous idea coming from the gospels that we are not owners of the goods of this world, but only stewards. Those things have been given to us by God to use for the sake of the kingdom. We are caretakers of God’s goodness. God gave us these things to use for a while as good stewards. Wealth was for the good of all. It was a way to unite, not to divide.

In other words, the spirit of Christian poverty:
 Asks us to trust in the goodness of God whose bounty overflows with spiritual riches and even good things to eat and good things to wear in material abundance.
 Christian poverty is clearly open to the needs of others.
 It instills in us the idea that our desire for gain has to be moderated by our willingness to share.
 It says: The only things that you ever keep are those you give away.

In summary, spiritual poverty shows us three things:
 The poor of the world have a Sacramental meaning. In the poor, we encounter Christ. See what Mother Teresa had to say about that. The poor are those with physical needs and those with spiritual needs.
 Spiritual poverty involves a commitment to doing God’s will whether you have much or little. And it cautions that too many material cares can corrode our souls and make our commitments difficult.
 Genuine spiritual poverty transforms our lives and is creative of life energy and contentment.

In other words, only the Christian spirit of poverty trusting deeply in God can calm the emptiness or restlessness that is produced in good economic times and in bad economic times. Our helping others can fill the emptiness that is at the heart of our material possessions.

In the end, let us compare this Christian spirit of poverty with two opposing views:
 First, let’s remember the Christian spirit of poverty trusts in the Lord in good times and in bad and never forgets the poor and is grateful for whatever God gives to use on our way to heaven.
 In contrast to this Christian view, a Marxist view is that we should envy and despise those who are rich. We should pull them down. We should reduce them to poverty. We should overtax them. There should be class warfare. We should hate them.
 Then there is the secular view that is so pervasive in our society today, namely, that money creates power. Here’s what one author has to say: “Like a king, a person with money is endowed with great power. But waving a handful of money in the air am otherwise a significant person can command others to wait on them to satisfy their every need and will, shine their shoes, clean their clothes, pour their wine, satisfy their needs and desires. A $50 bill can work magic in a restaurant, making a nonexistent table suddenly appear out of nowhere. A $100 bill can produce even more stunning results. Money clearly has a magical quality to it. It is power. It says: I can give whatever you need. Put your trust in me.”

Val J. Peter

This is part three of an eight part series on how to live a rich spiritual life in the midst of economic scarcity. Hope you like reading it. Please give me feedback.

Being born in the heart of the Depression (1934) and raised during World War II, I lived in a family that was part of the thrift culture. We were surrounded by thrift institutions and practices that in spirit went all the way back to Ben Franklin.

As children, we all had very small savings accounts. I remember putting in 11 cents a month. My grandmother would take the streetcar downtown (cost 5 cents) each month to pay her gas bill, electric bill, telephone bill and deposit $2 in the Conservative Savings and Loan Association. She thus saved the expense of four 3 cents stamps and enjoyed the outing. In World War II, my brothers and I would buy 5 cent U. S. savings stamps at the grocery store and put them in a booklet until we had $18 and that would buy us a $25 war bond.

Everybody we knew saved in this way through credit unions, building and loans and other nonprofit banking places. We were what were called the small savers. In the fall, parents bought gifts on Layaway plans. We were taught that saving for a rainy day was important. You would need money for high school and for college. When my parents came to buy a house, they needed a down payment of at least $1,000 saved for their first house which cost $5,000. They had to go to the bank and show their credit worthiness. There were limits set by the government on the interest and fees the bank could charge. My brothers and I studied mightily so we could get into a private prep school where the tuition was $76.50 per semester. You could make that much money if you had a paper route.

We knew there were other shady ways of obtaining money. The pawn shops were across the river, together with the peep shows and skid row. We knew there were loan sharks and numbers games which our parents taught us were a waste of money and a financial rip off.

Yes, thrift was a virtue everyone needed in order to be successful. Our parents would never think of borrowing money to buy superfluous items. Dad would announce solemnly the Friday after Thanksgiving: Santa this year can afford $2.50. We were sure envious of kids who had shiny new bicycles, but we knew not to ask for one as a Christmas present because our parents could not afford them and it would hurt them if we asked. I remember my mother crying one Friday night at dinner, saying: “Boys, I am sorry all we have for dinner is pancakes. I wish there was something else.” And we were not poor by any means. We never thought of ourselves as any other than middle class in hard times. And we knew that thrift was the key to a brighter future. Greed was clearly a bad thing. Early on, I learned this prayer:

Dear Lord,
“Do not let me be too poor
Or too rich.
Give me just what I need.
If I have too much
I might forget you.
If I don’t have enough
I might steal. (Proverbs 30 8-9)

What happened to all of that? Well, after World War II during which such great sacrifices were made by so many Americans, a feeling of entitlement entered the mentality of most of us. The returning soldiers often said they had sacrificed so much they were entitled to a little bigger house, a little nicer car and a little better vacation not spent at home, also the GI bill. Credit cards began to appear and at first they were not used by most people for credit as much as they were used in lieu of cash and that’s how they were advertised. Slowly, but surely, they became instruments of heavy debt with minimum payments required. Usury laws prohibited predatory interest rates and, in some ways, that encouraged spending and building up debt. Through a variety of influences we were slowly, but surely, becoming an affluent society.

What is affluence? It’s the subtle change from a state of wanting more goods and services to expecting more goods and services. We began to expect more goods, more services and we were willing to move away from what is called a thrift culture. In a thrift culture, you save until you can afford to buy something more. You work very hard and, although you want more goods and services, you do not buy them until you can afford them. But the post World War II boom led the Americans to change their expectations. Thrift began to come less and less to the foreground. We began to buy more and more on credit. Credit cards became easier to obtain and then loans became easier and easier to obtain because less collateral was needed. Then came signature loans.

I remember clearly in 1960 arriving home from Europe after six years of study there. I was a newly ordained priest making $75 a month and I applied for a Phillips 66 credit card. On the application, I stated honestly my income was $75. Well, of course, I was denied a credit card. So I changed the $75 on the new application to $750 and immediately a card was issued to me. Nobody cared to check. That was way back in 1960. By 1970, people were sending all of us offers of credit cards in the mail. By 1980 and 1990, this became much more frequent. People were piling up credit card debt and fewer and fewer people even thought of delaying purchases until they could afford it. We had now become affluent and debt ridden. Candidates for President usually ask the voters: are you better off today (financially) than you were four years ago?

As said above, affluence doesn’t simply mean wanting more goods and services. It means expecting more goods and services. The difference is startling. In Africa, for example, everyone would like to have a higher standard of living, but they do not expect it. Here in America, we expect to be making more every year, to be buying bigger and better things. Until, of course, the current economic collapse.

It now began to be clear that we were borrowing far beyond our means. On the horizon came subprime credit card issuers. In times past, payday lenders were in the seedy part of town. So were rent to own merchants. Now payday lenders, rent to own merchants, auto title lenders, check cashing outlets all appeared in the new strip malls right next to us in the suburbs. Have you noticed the pawn shops that have sprung up in the middle class part of town?

And even more than that, the government has now gotten into the anti-thrift business by state owned and operated lotteries. Until 1964, not one government sponsored lottery existed in the United States. Today, almost every state has one. It is interesting to look at who are the most loyal customers of state run lotteries. It is the low and moderate income families that, somehow or other, hope to win big. So instead of saving $5 a week at a credit union, they buy five lottery tickets as a way to fantasize about instant wealth. And, of course, we forgot to mention casino gambling which in times past was allowed only in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. In times past, those who pawned their wedding rings or gambled away their family savings or borrowed from loan sharks were viewed as destroying or despairing of family life.

In 2008, the Institute for American Values published a report from the Commission on Thrift, pointing out that formerly thrifty Americans in the moderate and lower economic brackets have now become habitual debtors. And at the same time, the report noted there is an upper tier of richer Americans who were investing and building wealth through pro-thrift institutions. The lower tier had been serviced by anti-thrift institutions that “provide multiple ways and means for lower earning Americans to forgo savings, borrow at predatory interest rates and fall into a debt trap.”

And that’s all before the economic collapse. Members of what the Commission calls the lottery class were not motivated to put aside extra dollars. They were motivated often to forgo some of their tax refund dollars in exchange for fast cash from H & R Block.

It is good to remember that a century ago in 1900, anti-thrift agencies were ripping off many hard working Americans, taking their dollars and dreams. They were “chattel lenders” or “salary lenders.” But most people knew them as loan sharks. One writer says that in New York alone, 100 years ago, three out of every ten workers owed money to loan sharks. The honest, noble response to loan sharks was a national campaign among honest business men and politicians to drive them out of business. It worked. Journalists wrote exposés of their corrupt practices. They were called muck raking articles. And legislation was passed to encourage credit unions, thrift agencies of all kinds.

This is not to say that borrowing is a bad thing, but it is to say that access to credit, on one hand, helps a young family to grow and to develop, to start businesses, to boost job prospects. But, on the other hand, it can also promote mounting debt, even staggering debt which slams the door on the future. The whole credit union movement had as a motive to engage in thrift and enable savers to engage in low cost loans as an alternative to pawn shops. In our day, a pinched wage earner has more places to turn to get fast money. More than one billion credit cards are in the wallets of Americans. There is hardly one of us who has not paid late fees or been charged for missed payments on credit cards. In 2006, late fees and missed payments were at $17.1 billion in fees. And for unexpected expenses such as house repairs or car repairs or medical emergencies, there isn’t a nest egg at the credit union, but there is a credit card.

Around 1960 when banks began to issue credit cards or bank cards, they offered fixed interest rates to credit worthy people. Usury laws in most states capped out at 12 – 14% interest that could be charged on credit card balances. In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that banks could get around the usury laws by charging interest rates allowed in their own home state rather than in the consumer’s home state. So if you moved your credit card operation to South Dakota, you could set whatever interest rates you wanted. Then the home states responded out of fear of losing banking industry to places like South Dakota and lifted their own caps.

The credit card folks, early on, realized they could make a lot more profit if instead of issuing short term credit to financially solvent customers, they extended long term credit to financially shaky customers. Card companies made the minimum payment as low as possible and encouraged card holders to only pay the minimum payment.

And, of course, then they discovered the student market. These were kids who did have jobs, have some spending money and were told not to save, but to buy right now what they really wanted and put it on their cards. The credit card companies counted on their parents to bale them out and oftentimes they did. The credit card folks also demolished the traditional banking relationship between lender and borrower. Today, for example, I have three credit cards and on only one of them do I have a depository account.

The result of all this was that many, many Americans are now dependent on expensive credit. And don’t forget what we call the “democratization” of credit. It’s a noble motive in helping the poor avoid loan sharks, but it didn’t turn out so noble. And this subprime lending market resulted in the poor having more debt than they could ever pay off. A young couple the other day told me they ran up $60 of credit card debt in two weeks at McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s.

And now we are in a very severe recession with millions and millions of Americans laid off, with our homes worth far less than they were before and with many, even in the culture of wealth, experiencing a decline of 30 or 40% in their 401(k)s, profit sharing plans, Keogh plans, deferred income compensation plans and retirement savings plans. Whether we like it or not, it’s time to take seriously the task of rediscovering thrift.

Yes, we are in tough financial times. And when things get tough, it’s time to get back to the basics of thrift – only spend when you have saved up for the purchase. There are bright spots in economic hard times and we need to focus on them. One great benefit of tough times is we are much more structurally motivated to help one another. Let’s take examples from the family. In these times, it’s better to limit going out to eat and it’s much better to have family meals. That’s a plus. In these times, it’s structurally better to live at home. And to do so, we have to try harder to get along with each other, to treat each other as brothers and sisters. In these times, it’s much better to pay down our credit card balances. We learn to get along with less – entertainment, excursions, clothes, etc.

It’s a good time to sit down with your children and explain in simple honest terms, without panic, that the family has to reduce spending and that we can do it by becoming closer to one another, helping one another more.

And we can explain to our children that it would be good not to ask for as many expensive gifts as they have in the past. And if they see us, their parents, doing without certain luxuries we are accustomed to, they will be inspired by our role modeling.

There are three basic themes we are suggesting you consider adopting as a family.

1. The first theme is that who you are is much more important than what you have. Are we people who care for each, love each other, help each other? That’s much more important than lots of money.
2. The second theme is that self-donation is much more important than self-absorption. Helping others is much more important than being selfish. Caring for one another, helping each other is much more important than looking out for yourself.
3. And the third theme: if we learn to live with less, we will be far happier.

It is a great time to discover and foster family life, togetherness, caring, sharing. Hope you enjoy reading this.

Postscript: Please go to the web site of the Institute for American Values and see “A Report to the Nation from the Commission on Thrift.” Many ideas in my paper were taken from it. It is great reading!

This is part two of an eight part series on how to live a rich spiritual life in the midst of economic scarcity. Hope you like reading it. Please give me feedback.

Chapter II
Freedom from Restraints
Val J. Peter

One of the casualties of the meltdown of the world economy is a happy one, namely, the growing recognition among all of us of things we sometimes forget: namely, that thrift is important, selfishness and greed are wrong and freedom from restraints is nonsense. The world has changed. It has changed for all of us. We are no longer free to borrow, borrow, borrow. We are no longer free to rack up huge bills in credit cards. We are no longer free to spend, spend, spend. The world will not be the same as it was.

It was St. Paul who said: I learned to live in abundance and I have learned to live with scarcity. If the world has changed, what do we do? We cannot change the world. We cannot change the economy. But we can change ourselves. Yes, there are a number of ways we can change ourselves.

To understand our situation, let us start off with the common place realization that most of us when we were teenagers wanted to be free from moral restraints. We said to ourselves: nobody is going to tell me what to do. In our adolescent fantasy world of the time, we believed that we could perhaps lie a little, cheat a little and steal a little and get away with it. It came as a shocking realization that when we lied we usually got caught. It came also as a shocking realization that if we cheated, we did not always get caught, but some day it would catch up with us. And if we stole, we almost always got caught.

And yet as adolescents, many continued to lie, cheat and steal. At the same time, have you noticed how many young Americans today are prolonging their adolescence for decades when it comes to freedom from sexual restraints? Following the mass media, there are those who engage in sex without feeling and coupling of all kinds, boys ripping off boys, girls ripping off boys, girls with girls, boys with boys and pornography. The result is often depression, loneliness and alienation. We see this very clearly with our children who come to us at Boys Town. Sometimes these young people are slow learners and say next time it will be better, but it is not better. Many more come to their senses and learn to practice self-discipline and self-restraint.

It is very interesting that as restraints were lessened for adolescent youth so, too, there was a movement to gain more freedom without restraint in financial matters. This simply means that the profit motive was allowed to be less and less restrained by any sense of justice or fairness. Freedom in the economic sector meant let the market prevail and the heck with everything else. It did not matter if you lied a little bit or cheated a little bit or even a lot. The harbingers were ENRON, World Com and the collapse of Arthur Anderson.

This was becoming a bad form of capitalism. A good form of capitalism is simply an economy based on private property, free exchange of good and justice and fairness. It means free human creativity in the economic sector, the positive role of business with justice and caring. That is good capitalism.

But what began to emerge was a global economy where freedom in the economic sector was not limited by justice and fairness by economic leaders or government leaders. At the top of the economic ladder, at the bottom and sometimes in the middle, greed, lying, cheating and even self-deception were allowed to flourish…without our hardly noticing it. We call it “making a fast buck.”

How did we lessen restraints in the financial area? It began with the insistence that we should have fewer banking regulations. Who was one of the chief proponents of this? Alan Greenspan and many others like him. Greenspan for two decades (1987-2006) was Chairman of the Federal Reserve with great influence on Congress, the White House and others in promoting deregulation of financial markets. He would say that markets worked best when left alone. Many nodded their heads in agreement. That sounded great to a lot of people. No mention of justice, fairness or regulation. Greenspan argued that government intervention was a problem, not a solution. Many nodded their heads in agreement to this, too. He always advocated for less regulation and called it voluntary oversight. That’s like telling the manager at McDonald’s that when he counts the cash drawer, there will be only voluntary oversight and no further checking.

What were the ideas behind this? In the 1950s, Alan Greenspan joined the inner circle of Ayn Rand who believed that self-absorption, not self-donation, was the answer, not the problem. He joined her inner circle in the 1950s. She praised anyone who pursues their own advantage regardless of others as long as it was not done by force or fraud. She said: “You have no responsibility to others except through self-restraint and self-interest.” She said: “Individual happiness is the ultimate good.” Alan Greenspan believed that in the 1950s and later put it into practice as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He said it this way: “There should be less government regulation, there should be self-regulation guided by self-interest.” He said that self-interest (code word for selfishness) would stop people from being unjust, unfair and greedy. How foolish that was. He said that was the way to great freedom and great prosperity. He followed Ayn Rand’s book written in 1964 called The Virtue of Selfishness.

On 23 October 2008, Alan Greenspan appeared before the Government Oversight and Reform Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The economy was in shambles. He admitted there was “a flaw” in his beliefs about self-interest and market forces. He said:

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of leading
institutions to protect shareholder equity, myself included, are
in a state of shocked disbelief.”

He suggested what went wrong was excess demand for home mortgages and failure to properly price them. He failed to mention selfish greed, fraud and neglect of justice and fairness. Justice is about giving everyone their due. Fairness means not just thinking about your own advantage and the heck with everybody else, but treating others the way you want to be treated.

Do you remember the commercial of Chase Bank which ran over and over in 2008: “I want it all…I want it now…”

Too many people believed that. It is nothing more than greed. Why? Instead of saying I WANT IT ALL, we should be saying I want to have my fair share and others should have theirs, too. Instead of saying I WANT IT NOW, it should say: I need to save. I need to discipline myself if I want something more and I have to be fair with others.

Too many people think of our economic system as a sophisticated money driven system “creating” wealth and driving progress in production and technology. What if it only does that for a few people of the world while many others are in abject poverty? Is that fair? Is that good? No.

Here in our country it was this self-interest that propelled our largest banks to successfully negotiate a bill in Congress in 1983 that would, to all extend and purpose, bypass the restrictions of how much interest credit card companies could charge. It was usually pegged at 17 or 18%. The law in 1983 was changed to say that if a bank or credit card company had a headquarters in a state where there were no restrictions, such as South Dakota, then the credit card company could allow the no restriction on interest rule throughout the United States as long as it came from South Dakota. This was in their own self-interest.

Many of us have received two or three monthly solicitations for credit cards. How many did you get in the mail this past month? There is an alumnus who came to me with 19 credit cards and $38,000 in credit debt on them and there was no way he could pay. I helped, through Credit Advisors, to consolidate his debts, but then come to find out, he had received three more credit cards in the next two months. When I chided him for it, he said: “What could I do? They made these offers in the mail and I simply accepted them and they sent me a credit card.” Credit card debt has tripled.

One of our recent high school graduates who is going to college said he did not qualify for a Stafford loan but, on the other hand, he did receive a private student loan from a bank. I asked him if he intended to pay it back. He said: “Why would I have to pay it back? I think it is like a Pell grant.” By the way, so many kids say that a Pell grant is what they call “free money.” You do not have to spend it on school and there is no need to repay it. All you have to do is be enrolled in school the day you receive it. From my viewpoint, this all seems to be very selfish, very unfair and very unjust.

You would not be surprised to hear me say that our most pressing moral threat in the United States is not sexual, but financial. It will destroy our lives.

Some years ago, a variety of politicians argued very strongly that we should “democratize credit.” They meant we should make credit available to the poor so they don’t have to go to loan sharks. It started as a good idea, but then it mutated into selfishness in such a way that many cannot pay back their loans. Some care. Some do not care. This is very complex. It is very convoluted and it is very immoral.

I sat down at a table for lunch the other day with new employees. One, very energetic, middle-age person said she was so happy to be at Boys Town. I asked her why she left the mortgage company she had been working for and she said: “I left because I just got tired of falsifying loan applications by using someone else’s salary stubs.”

In my next installment, I will try to explain how we went from a nation of savers, namely, a thrift culture to a nation of debt ridden slouches. That Chase ad pretty well summarizes it. “I want it all…I want it now.” Another good example is the show on the A&E Channel called “Flip This House.”

A hard working young Boys Town alum told me the story the other day of going to buy a used car. He had only enough credit for a $7,000 loan and picked a car with that price tag. The salesman showed him a $12,000 car, which the boy liked a lot, but said he could only afford a $7,000 loan. The salesman said: “That’s doesn’t matter. We will use someone else’s check stubs when we submit the loan application.” “I want it all…I want it now.”

William Donaldson was head of the FTC and when he said we needed more financial restraints and was told no, he quit. Good for him. This financial crisis is brought to us by some of the best and brightest in the country. And some of them are saying they did not know what they were doing. My response is: We were paying you enough money. You should have known what you were doing.

I tell our kids at Boys Town they cannot live a life without restraint, without a sense of justice, without a sense of fairness and that selfishness and greed are sinful. Our leaders knew that or should have known that, but they followed the crowd. The question they asked was: what’s everybody else doing? And when they did, the result was we are all suffering. Sometime ago, I was in New York and made remarks such as this and the chairman of a very large American company came up to me and said I was making people fearful by saying these things. I told him he had made people fearful and he should reflect on that reality. Needless to say, we did not have any further conversation.

“I want it all…I want it now…” That commercial reminds me of some of our boys and girls who come from very, very poor families and who complain to me: Why can’t we buy brand name foods such as Del Monte? Why do we have to buy Shurfine? They do not know that the same company makes both. But they have been told that just because you are poor you should still buy the finest brand names. I mentioned this one day at dinner with some very, very wealthy people. And one of them said: “This just goes to show you, Father Peter, that the poor have very good taste and a demand for quality.” My response: “This just goes to show you that someone taught even the poor to want it all and to want it now.”

Getting up this morning, it dawned on me that you and I and all of us citizens…on the basis of the mother of all bailouts given by the government to banks, to AIG, to General Motors and so many others makes us citizens owners of all kinds of bad debt. And someone said to me: “You now own bad debt.” In fact, we American citizens are the largest holders of bad debt, perhaps in the world.

In conclusion, we need to discipline ourselves and we need to shed ourselves of the conviction that we should be free from all restraints. We need to help our brothers and sisters. We need to practice self-discipline. We have to start with very small things in denying ourselves. We need to pray every night: Lord, make me a more disciplined person. Make me more unselfish.

Perhaps, like Alan Greenspan, many of us trusted those in important positions in government, banking and industry to be people of character and virtue and too many were not.

We live in very difficult economic times and this is the beginning of an eight part series on how to live a rich spiritual life in the midst of economic scarcity. Hope you like reading it. Please give me feedback.


Chapter I
The Gospel of Prosperity
Val J. Peter


One of our recent graduates is studying culinary arts at Metro Community College. He is a good lad and likes to listen to religious radio programs. The other day, he told me he has been getting some rather interesting letters from preachers. This one is from a prophet, self-styled prophet, Danny Davis in Twentynine Palms, California.

Dear Kyle,
Just after midnight this word came to me…the most
blessed days of thine entire life lie just ahead if you
will move in obedience unto the Lord. For I have a
Golden Prosperity Blessing to pour out upon thee…it is
flowing upon thee like a mighty river. My hands feel
like fire. The whole room is filled with God’s glory
cloud.

The prophetic message now unfolds:

In the next few days, a beautiful golden cloud is going
to rest on your shoulders, Kyle, like a golden mantle
of prosperity. God spoke to me to place this golden
mantle (a small piece of yellow cloth) inside this letter.
He told me to pray over it all night and for you to cut
it in half and put half of it in your billfold for the next
seven days…then take your very best offering unto the
Lord and lay the other half with the golden mantle on
it so a faith seed. Sister Robin and I feel led to
$100.28. That’s a double portion of Psalm 50,14 seed.
“Offer to God thanksgiving and pay your vows.” Then
we call upon the Lord in any day of trouble and He will
deliver us. Maybe your best is $50.14 (don’t forget to
include the 14 cents).

Here comes the ask:

God told me to lay the half of the golden mantle you
return to me on the altar of prayer. And when I do,
your miracle from God will begin in your body
financially…yes, a three-fold miracle is what I believe
God is going to do for you.

In another letter from this preacher, Kyle received a glove (of yellow plastic) and was told that God will bless him if he puts money inside the glove, touches the glove to his head and then, when it gets to the prophet, Danny Davis, he touches it to his head and great monies return.

And in another letter, there was “sack cloth – prayer cloth” which Kyle was told to put on top of his head just like the prophets put sack cloth on in the days of old. Then he was to put the sack cloth under his pillowcase for “tonight only.” (Joel 1,13 says: “Come lie all night in sack cloth.”) Finally he is reminded to wrap his sack cloth – (prayer cloth around an offering) and rush it back to Danny Davis who says “I keep seeing $113 in the spirit.” (Joel 1,13) And then Kyle is told to say this prayer: In Lord Jesus name, I confess “money cometh in the next 113 days. I confess the angel of blessing will visit me, not once, but many times.”

I am sure you would not believe these kinds of letters, but some do. They are an instance of something called “the gospel of prosperity.” What is the gospel of prosperity? It is this: God wants you to make a lot of money.
But even if you would not believe Kyle’s letters, many watch the televangelists…wearing Armani suits, driving BMWs or Mercedes 600s, black with tinted windows. And the preacher tells us over and over again that we have not stretched our God given potential and that we can be very prosperous and we should not be satisfied in our low income. God’s blessings are just waiting for us around the corner. And if the preacher is asked why he wears expensive clothes, drives fancy cars, lives in a mansion, he says that he is an ambassador of the Lord and an ambassador has to look the part.

Perhaps you are one of those who says you do not believe that either. And yet, many of you believe that those who are in poverty in the United States, at least, are somehow or other failing in their moral duties and that if you fulfill your moral duties you will not be in such bad straights.

Well, what has happened to almost every American, in fact, almost every citizen of the world is an economic collapse in these past long months. It started as a subprime mortgage crisis. It ballooned into world-wide economic bad times. And so many of you who are reading this are shaking your head realizing that your 401k or 503b are worth half what they were before. This is a financial crisis hitting the global economy in a way that Americans have not experienced since the Great Depression. Many have lost their jobs and some have even lost everything. Banks are foreclosing on houses. Often, there is a sense of betrayal or guilt or shame or failure and lots of unexpressed anger.

I was just a young growing boy when the Depression hit American in the 1930s, but some memories are very, very vivid. One picture I still carry in my mind is the sign in the back window of a Model A Ford saying: “In God we trusted. In Kansas we busted.” This little series of essays is written about trust in God in bad times. I wonder if the person who put that sign in the back window of the Model A was like Kyle, namely, succumbing to the temptation to believe that if we love God and work hard that God loves us by the amount of money that comes into our lives.

There are two starter things we should do right away in the face of these economic hard times. One is spiritual and the other is material. First the spiritual, let us turn to the Lord as a first step in these tough times. Let us ask His strength and courage. Let us thank the Lord that we have a family. Let us thank the Lord we have people to care for us, to love us and that we have a Lord who will give us the strength and courage to do what we need. Secondly, the second is material. Let us have a family meeting and let us tell our kids that these are very tough times. We have to cut back on many things and this cut back will provide us an opportunity to love each other better, to care for each other better because we need each other more. Let us start off with a little more kindness, a little more caring, a little more understanding of our mom and dad. All of us, grown-ups and children, need to pitch in.

Cutting down on spending is a great idea. Here are a few stories of how we got into this mess and what to do.

A young graduate called me the other day. She is in the Army and just graduated from basic training at Fort Leonard Wood. Her AIT (Advanced Infantry Training) is at Fort Sill. Well, of course, she has a cell phone at $49.99 a month, but when she got her first bill it was $702. How is this possible? Well, she did a lot of text messaging and does not have $702 to pay for it. She said she thinks it is unfair the mess she is in and does not feel like praying. It is almost as if God let her down. I assured her that God still loves her a lot and it was not God who let her down, but it was her own foolishness. Josie and I can work together, but it starts with her disciplining herself and only using up the minutes on the $49.99 plan.

Then there is a boy who signed up for the winter semester at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is a ward of the state and so they are paying for his tuition. He signed up for summer school and moved into the dorms, but did not go to class and withdrew from class just before he would receive an automatic F. So he signed up again for the fall classes. He received his Pell Grant and was not going to fall classes either. He called his Pell Grant “free money.” That means that he does not have to pay it back to the government. Ted and I need to have a nice long talk.

This is a time for all of us to look at our priorities and to reorder them. It is a great time to look at the effect of advertising in our lives. It is a good time to look at our needs and distinguish them from our wants. We want all sorts of things. But we do not need all of them. It is a good time to look at our spending habits. It is a good time to look how little time we spend with each other and how much we need to now. It is a good time to learn how to care for one another a little more.

And it is especially a good time to sit down and to remind ourselves of what the Lord said: If you wish to come after me, take up your cross and follow me. So it is a good time to say, perhaps, the cross we need to carry now is the cross of having less money, less affluence and more caring and more sharing.

Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION: Once again, we are looking at Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth. His writings have sold a million copies and that tells you how much people like what he has to say and teach us. The ideas here are his. I often paraphrase so what is good is his and what isn’t so good is mine.

Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life. Of all the Spiritual Disciplines, prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with God our Father.

 Mediation introduces us to the inner life.
 Fasting is an accompanying means.
 Study transforms our minds.
 It is real Prayer that is life creating and life changing.

William Carey says: “Prayer, secret, fervent, believing prayer lies at the root of all personal goodness. To pray is to change. Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer. And abandoning prayer is a noticeable characteristic then of our lives.”

“The closer we come to the heartbeat of God the more we see our need to pray, to be conformed to Christ.” William Carey tells us our task in life is to learn to bear God’s “beams of love.” How often we develop ways to keep the beams of love away from us. But when we pray, God slowly and graciously reveals to us how we try to hide from him and he sets us free from this hiding.

The Epistle of James says: “You ask and you do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4,3) To ask “rightly” involves transformed passions. In real prayers, we begin to think God’s thoughts, to desire the things God desires, to love the things God loves, to will the things God wills. And slowly we are taught to see things through prayer from God’s point of view.

All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives. The word of the gospel of Mark: “And in the morning, a great while before day, He rose and went out to a lonely place and there He prayed,” stand as a commentary on the lifestyle of Jesus. (Mark 1:35)

David’s desire for God was such that: “Early will I seek Thee.” (Ps. 63,1)

When the apostles saw they should invest their energies in other important and necessary tasks, they determined to give themselves continually to pray and the ministry of the word. (Acts 6, 4)

Martin Luther says: “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”

John Wesley says: “God does nothing without answering our prayers.” And Wesley backed up this conviction by devoting two hours daily to prayer.

David Brainerd’s life was his prayer. His Journal is filled with accounts of prayer, fasting and meditation. “I love to be alone in my cottage where I can spend much time in prayer…I set apart this day for secret fasting and prayer to God.”

William Penn testified of George Fox: “Above all, he excelled in prayer.”

Adoniram Judson takes seven times a day in order to engage in the holy work of prayer. He prayed at dawn, at nine, twelve, three, six, nine and midnight.

John Hyde of India made prayer so important in his life that he was nicknamed “Praying Hyde.”

Most of us are discouraged rather than challenged by such examples. These are giants of the faith and we are beginners ourselves. But we should remember that God always meets us where we are and slowly moves us into deeper things. No runner starts off by entering a marathon. They prepare and train for a long time and so should we. If we start now, we can expect to pray a year from now with greater authority and spiritual success than at present.

Many people who emphasize doing the will of God often do not pray much. Moses prayed boldly because he believed his prayers could change things, even God’s mind. The Bible stresses so forcefully the openness of our universe that it speaks of God (anthropomorphism) constantly changing His mind in accord with His unchanging love.

This comes as a genuine liberation to many of us, but it also sets tremendous responsibility for us. We are working with God to determine the future. Certain things will happen in history if we pray rightly. We are to change the world by prayer. Think of all the Catholics who prayed for the fall of the Soviet Union over and over and over again. And in 1991, it just happened one day.

Many forms of prayer have nurtured Christians through the centuries. There is discursive prayer, mental prayer, centering prayer, the prayer of quiet, the prayer of guidance, the prayer of intercession and many more. This paper is confined to prayer of intercession. That means learning how to pray effectively for others. We, who live in the 21st century, desperately need to learn how to pray. Those who lived in the 1st century already knew. Our culture does not teach us that. Theirs did. We need to learn.

Learning to Pray

Real prayer is something we learn. The disciples asked Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray.” (Luke 11,1) They had prayed all their lives and yet something about the quality and quantity of Jesus’ praying caused them to see how important His prayer was. If their praying was to make any difference, there were some things they needed to learn from Jesus.

It’s liberating to you and me to understand that prayer involves a learning process. You are set free to experiment even if you fail, for you know you are learning.

Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of Jesus praying is that when He prays for others, He NEVER concluded by saying: “If it be thy will.” His praying was so positive; it often took the form of a direct authoritative command: walk…be well…stand up…devil out of him.

There is, of course, a proper time for us to pray: “If thy will be done.” In the prayer of guidance, it is the great yearning of our hearts to know the will of God. And so we pray: “What is your will, Lord? What would please you, Lord? Speak Lord, your servant is listening. What would advance your kingdom upon earth?”…and then there is the prayer of letting go where we are committed to letting go our will whenever it conflicts with the will and way of God.

At times, we must follow the lead of the Lord who in the garden prayed: “Nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42)

The work of prayer is the learning process. If we turn on our TV set and it doesn’t work, we assume something is wrong and we have to find what’s wrong and correct it. We can determine we are praying correctly if the requests we make come to pass. If not, we look for what’s wrong.” Perhaps we are praying wrongly. Perhaps something within us needs changing. Perhaps there are new principals of prayer to be learned. Perhaps patience and persistence are needed. So we listen. We make adjustments and we try again. We know that our prayers are being answered as surely as we can know the television set is working.

One of the most critical aspects of learning to pray for others is to get in contact with God so that His life and power can flow through us into others. Often we assume that we are in contact with God when we are not. For example, dozens of television and radio signals are going through your room while you are reading these words, but you have failed to pick them up because you were not tuned to the proper frequencies. Often people pray and pray with all the faith in the world, but nothing happens. They are not tuned into God. We begin praying for others by first quieting our fleshly activity. Listening to the Lord is a first step. Speak Lord, your servant is listening. It is also the second thing necessary.

Soren Kierkegaard once said: “A man prayed and at first he thought that prayer was talking. But he became more and more quiet until, in the end, he realized that prayer is listening.”

Listening to God is the necessary prelude to intercession.

Sometimes we are afraid we do not have enough faith to pray for this child or that marriage or whatever. Our fears should be put to rest. The Bible tells us that great miracles are possible through faith the size of a tiny mustard seed. The courage, actually to go and pray for a person, is a sign of sufficient faith. Frequently our lack is not faith, but compassion. It seems that genuine empathy between the one praying and the one prayed for often makes the difference. We are told that Jesus was “moved with compassion for people.” Compassion was an evident feature of every healing of Jesus.

The inner sense of compassion is one of the clearest indications from the Lord that this is a prayer project for you. In times of meditation, there may come a rise in the heart, a compulsion to intercede, an assurance and a flow of the spirit. This inner “yes” says to pray for that person or situation. If the idea is accompanied with a sense of dread, you should probably set it aside. God will lead someone else to pray for that matter.

The Foothills of Prayer

We should never make prayer too complicated. Jesus taught us to come like children to a father. Openness, honesty and trust mark the communication of children with their father. The reason God answers prayers is because His children ask. There is intimacy between parents and children that has room for both seriousness and laughter.

St. Teresa of Avila said: “This is my method of prayer. I try to picture Christ within me…I did many simple things of this kind…I believe my soul gained very much in this way because I began to practice prayer without knowing what it was.” George Bernard Shaw, in the play St. Joan, points out that Joan of Arc hears voices that come from God. The bishop, who is a skeptic and laughs at her voices, hears Joan saying to him: “You would hear voices of God, too, if you listened.”

We must learn to pray against evil. The old writers urged us to wage spiritual warfare against “the world, the flesh and the devil.” We must never forget that the enemy of our souls prowls about like “a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5,8) In prayer, do we fight against the principalities and powers. And we need to pray prayers of protection, surrounding ourselves, covering ourselves with the blood of Christ, sealing ourselves with the cross of Christ.

We must never wait until we feel like praying before we pray. Prayer is like any other work. We may not feel like working, but once we have been at it a bit we feel like working. We may not feel like practicing the piano, but once we play for a while we feel like doing it. In the same way, our prayer muscles need to be limbered up a bit and we find then that we feel like praying.

We need not worry that prayer will take up too much of our time. It takes little time, but it occupies all our time. Thomas Kelly says: “There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level, we may be thinking, discussing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.

We have so much to learn, so far to go. Listen to your heart saying: “I want a life of greater, deeper, truer prayer.”

If you like this chapter, why not go to the bookstore and buy Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (Harper Collins, San Francisco: 1978)

Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION:
St. Paul says we are mere strangers and pilgrims passing through this life on the way to eternity. We are made in the image of God, but that image has been so dulled that we need to learn how to pray, how to worship, how to meditate, how to think.

This is a shorter version of the first chapter of Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline. It is more or less a paraphrase. The good stuff is his. Stuff that is not so good is mine.

Superficiality is the curse of our age. We know in our hearts we are like the Platte River, having almost no depth at all, very shallow. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for gifted, intelligent people, but for deep people.

The classical Disciplines of the spiritual life call us to move beyond surface living into the depths. They invite us to explore the spiritual realm beneath the surface. They urge us to be an answer to a hollow world. John Woolman counsels: “It is good for thee to dwell deep, that thou mayest feel and understand the spirits of people.” The Disciplines are not only for spiritual giants, although many think they are. If you think they are, they are beyond your reach. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings, people just like us who have jobs, go to work, raise children, do the laundry, mow the grass.

Too many think of the Spiritual Disciplines as some dull drudgery aimed at chasing laughter off the face of the earth. Yet joy is the keynote of all the Disciplines. Why? Because the purpose of the Disciplines is to free us from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear. Inner spirit needs to be liberated from all that weighs it down. When that happens, singing, dancing, even shouting characterize the Disciplines of the spiritual life.

The primary requirement is a longing after God. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, oh God. My soul thirsts for God, the Living God” writes the psalmist (psalm 42,1-2).

Most of us, every now and then, have glimpses, hints of something more than the surface in our lives. And inwardly we all, at times, want to launch out into the deep. To launch out into the deep, we are immediately faced with two difficulties.

 The first is this: The consumer society and the materialism of our age have become so pervasive that it has given many people grave doubts about their ability to reach beyond the physical world. It’s hard to overestimate how saturated we are with the mentality of our times. For example, meditation, if allowed at all, is not thought to be an encounter between a person and God, but psychological manipulation. We need the courage to move beyond the prejudice of our age and affirm that more than the material world exists. The spiritual life cannot be summed up by psychology or sociology. It is far deeper than that.
 The second difficulty is a practical one. We simply do not know how to go about exploring this inward world. That was not always true. In fact, at the time of Jesus and the time the New Testament was being written, there was no need to give instruction on how to do the Disciplines of the spiritual life. The Bible called people to the Disciplines of fasting, prayer, worship, celebration and gave no instruction how to do it. That’s because these Disciplines were so frequently practiced in that culture that the “how to” was common knowledge. Fasting was so common, for example, that no one had to ask what to eat before a fast or how to break a fast. Every one already knew.

This is not true of our age. There is an abysmal ignorance of the most simple practical aspects of all these Spiritual Disciplines. One word of caution here if you know the mechanics of meditation, that does not get you to the depths. What gets you to the depths is to experience a life of relationship and intimacy with God, “the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1,17)

The Slavery of Ingrained Habits

We are accustomed to thinking of sin as individual acts of disobedience against God. This is true enough as far as it goes. But Scripture goes much further. For example, the Hebrew language has eight different words for sin and all of them are found in the Bible. It’s a complex thing.

In Romans, the Apostle Paul frequently refers to sin as a condition that plagues the human race. (Romans 3,9-18) Sin, as a condition, works its way out through the “bodily members.” That is the ingrained habits of the body. (Romans 7,5) There is no slavery compared to the slavery of ingrained habits of sin.

In Isaiah 57,20, we read: “The wicked are like the tossing sea. For it cannot rest. And its waters toss up mire and dirt.” The sea does not need to do anything special to toss up mire and dirt. That’s the result of its natural motions. That’s also true of us when we are under the condition of sin. The natural motion of our life produces mire and dirt. Sin is part of the internal structure of our lives. No special effort is needed to produce it. No wonder we feel trapped.

Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our will power and determination. Whatever the issue may be - gluttony, pride, abuse, fear, anger, addiction - we determine never to do it again. We pray against it, fight against, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain. We find ourselves, once again, morally bankrupt or, even worse, so proud of our external righteousness that “whitened sepulchers” is a mild description of our condition. Heini Arnold says: “We want to make it quire clear we cannot free and purify our own heart by exerting our own will.”

In Colossians, Paul lists some of the outward forms that people use to control sin: “touch not, taste not, handle not.” He then adds these things “have indeed a show of wisdom and will worship.” (Col. 2,22) “Will worship”…what a telling phrase and how description of much of our lives. The moment, we feel we can succeed and attain victory over sin by the strength of our will alone is a moment we are worshiping the will. Paul looks at our most strenuous efforts in the spiritual life and calls them idolatry, “will worship.”

Willpower will never succeed in dealing with the deeply ingrained habits of sin. Emmet Fox writes: “As soon as you resist mentally any undesirable or unwanted circumstance you thereby endow it with more power – power which it will use against you, and you will have depleted your own resources to that exact extent.” Arnold concludes: “As long as we think we can save ourselves by our own willpower, we will only make the evil in us stronger than ever.” All the great writers of the devotional life have experienced this: St. Augustine, St. Francis, John Calvin, John Wesley, Teresa of Avila and Juliana of Norwich.

The Spiritual Disciplines Open the Door

When we despair of gaining inner transformation through our own willpower, we are open to a wonderful new realization: inner righteousness is a gift from God to be graciously received.

In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul goes to great length to show that righteousness is a gift of God. He uses the term 35 times in this letter insisting that righteousness is not attained or attainable through human effort. This is also found throughout Scripture and is a cornerstone of the Christian faith.

On the other hand, once we grasp this breathtaking insight, we’re in danger of an error in the opposite direction. We’re tempted to believe there is nothing we can do. Should we wait for God to come and transform us? Strangely enough, the answer is no. The analysis is correct (human striving is insufficient and righteousness is a gift from God), but the conclusion is faulty. Happily, there is something we can do. We do not need to be hung on the horns of the dilemma of either human works or idleness. God has given us the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving His grace. The Disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that He can transform us.

The apostle Paul says: “He who sows to his own flesh will reap corruption from the flesh. But he who sows to the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.” (Gal. 6,8) Paul’s analogy is instructive. A farmer is helpless to grow grain. All he can do is to provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, plants the seed, waters the plants and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain.

This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines, they are a way of sowing to the Spirit. They are God’s way of getting us into the ground. They put us where He can work within us and transform us. By themselves, the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing. But they can get us to the place where something can be done. They are God’s means of grace. The inner righteousness we seek is not something that is poured on our heads. God has ordained the Disciplines of the spiritual life as a means by which we place ourselves where He can bless us.

Foster then uses a very good picture or analogy. He says we should picture a long, narrow ridge with a sheer drop-off on either side. The chasm to the right is the way of moral bankruptcy through human striving for righteousness. This historically has been called the heresy of moralism. The chasm to the left is a moral bankruptcy through the absence of human striving, going with the flow. Politically correct behavior. This has been called the heresy of antinomianism. On the ridge, there is the path, the Disciplines of the spiritual life. This path leads to the inner transformation, to the healing which we want. We must never veer off to the right or the left, but stay on the path. The path is fraught with severe difficulties, but also incredible joys. As we travel the path, the blessing of God will come upon us and reconstruct us into the image of Jesus Christ. We must always remember the path does not produce the change. It is only the places where the change can occur. Once we live and walk on the path of disciplined grace for a season or two, we will discover internal changes within ourselves.

As we enter the inner world of the Spiritual Disciplines, there will always be the danger of turning them into laws. And then the Spiritual Disciplines are used to manipulate and control others. But we are not left to our own devices. Jesus Christ has promised to be ever present to us as teacher and guide. His voice is not hard to hear. His direction is not hard to understand. We can trust His teaching. If we are wandering off towards some wrong idea or unprofitable practice, He will guide us back. If we are willing to listen to the Lord, we will receive the instruction we need.

Leo Tolstoy says: “Everybody thinks of changing others and nobody thinks of changing himself.” Let us be among those who believe that the inner transformation of our lives is a goal worthy of our best effort.


If you like this chapter, why not go to the bookstore and buy Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (Harper Collins, San Francisco: 1978)