Friday, December 04, 2009
INTRODUCTION:
It should be clear from everything said in the prior six chapters that we Americans have overspent, have become too dependent on that spending for our wellbeing and have, in some ways, succumbed to the dangers of consumerism and affluence. This simply means, not just wanting, but expecting more goods and more services year after year after year. The current economic downturn is not just a mere minor bump in the road. It is the major milestone in the last 100 years. America has lost its economic prominence and many, many of us Americans are hurting financially and emotionally.
We can seize the moment in this economic downturn to reorient our lives as individuals, as families and as a nation. This can be done in the following ways:
The question is where do we go from here? Based on the decisions we come up with, we need to work to change our families and ourselves in accord with this plan. To find an answer we have to engage in introspection.
The question we ask is the title of this book: How Does a Christian Family Profit from Tough Economic Times. It is my hope that you will choose one or all of the following in your decision making.
1. Live within your means.
The obvious meaning of this is that we have to sit down and figure out what changes we need to make in our lives so we are no longer regularly filled with anxiety regarding our debts and our bills. This includes not only tuition for our children. It includes payments on our house, payments for our car, payments for so many other things in our busy lives.
This requires an agreement among all family members. A concrete agreement as to the things that need to change.
Robert N. Bellah, the well known sociologist at University of California at Berkeley, says it this way: “If both parents are working, and perhaps working for excessive hours, not to meet the basic necessities of life but to pay for what they think is a preferred style of life, (because of the pressures of consumerism) family life can suffer as consequence.”
This is a nice way of saying that the job culture in our lives may be crowding out the family culture. Economic pressures that families face have to be considered in the light of the accommodations which families make to the allure of consumer goods which very suddenly become “needs.” This takes a lot of reflection.
The other facet of this is the spiritual side of our family life. If our religious and spiritual life have been eroded by materialism, we are neglecting the call to the evangelical spirit of poverty. You and I are neglecting self-discipline.
We need to slow down our lives so that we are not always in a hurry, not always in a rat race, not always on the treadmill. We have to take enough time to read. Take enough time to pray. Take enough time for wisdom, love and friendship.
2. Help our children do the same.
Introspection also needs to focus on the culture our children are being brought up in. Is it simply a consumer culture or is it a family culture? A consumer culture is profoundly destructive of family life. So we will need to teach our children self discipline, charity, empathy and all the other values that will help them neutralize the messages of advertising and marketing. Of course we have to model these values in our own lives as well.
Very sadly, a consumer culture says to our children that their identity is determined by what they have and what they buy. Very happily, a family culture of faith tells our children that their identity and ours is determined by who we are as a family and how we are related to God, our brothers, our sisters, our mom, our dad and our neighbors.
Consumer culture tells our children that buying is good and will make us happy. Our family culture says that buying needs to be moderated and will not make us happy for very long. What will make us happy for a long time is caring for each other as family and loving God. It even includes prayer and the sacraments.
3. Saving for rainy days.
Discernment is also needed to commit ourselves to saving for rainy days. The job culture surrounding adults says that the solution to life’s problems lies in spending and purchasing material things such as trips, vacations and a big house. Our family Christian culture says the solution to life’s problems is trusting in God, in each other and values and hard work and education.
Our job culture will say that a good life is a materially successful life. Our Christian family culture says a good life is a good family life and a life of virtue and service.
That involves saving for rainy days. Rainy days include sickness, accidents, loss of work and other things that suddenly befall us.
4. Pay down our credit cards and other debts.
Introspection will also call us to pay down our credit cards. Our children need to see us as a family working to pay down our credit cards every month. We need to think about “making our homes commerce free zones.” That phrase was coined by the Institute for American Values. That means making a decision as a family to limit our use of cell phones, texting, TV, Internet, video games, etc. That means actively resisting buying the latest items right away. It means we will stop allowing ourselves and our children to become walking billboards for advertisers. It means engaging in activities that are not media driven and instead include volunteering together, walking, hiking, engaging in sports activities, etc. Paying down our debts is not just a small item, it is a huge item.
5. Practice frugality and industry.
To sum it all up, we need to practice frugality and industry. This idea goes all the way back to Ben Franklin. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are called the founders of political freedom in America. Ben Franklin is called the founder of economic freedom. He envisioned America as a place far different from across the ocean in Europe. It was to be a New World as compared to the Old World of Europe. In the Old World you could work all day every day, but as a serf or a peasant you usually couldn’t pull yourself up by your own hard work and diligence. You can in America with industry (hard work) and frugality (live within your means…help your children do the same…save for rainy days). Ben Franklin received much of his thought from Cotton Mather, the Puritan preacher of New England.
The idea was simple and straight forward, if you work hard, save up for rainy days and live within your means you could be, as a family, free from all the terrible anxieties and heavy loads that were a common lot imposed on the poor. He was not Scrooge, he believed a good life should come after you have saved, after you have worked hard as a reward. Ben Franklin believed we should sacrifice now for the freedom from worries about where our next meal was coming from. Consumer society believes that we should enjoy now and worry latter. Consumer thinking is something that has brought us to our current economic crisis.
Franklin also believed (we should think about this) that children should fulfill household roles with the expectation that they contribute to the family by what they do every day. Social scientists today warn that such simple things as thumb sucking, ADHD and many other maladies were close to nonexistent in families in Ben Franklin’s day when children had to contribute to the family well being with hard daily work in the home and on the farm. Are they on to something?
The practice of frugality and industry also have a larger purpose than the family. When citizens heed Ben Franklin’s wisdom, they pay their just debts, honor their contracts, keep their word, help each other in need, do not cheat each other and serve their country. This is called public virtue. And public virtue is absolutely essential for a democratic republic to flourish. In the 1830’s, Tocqueville pointed out that the American experiment was an affirmative answer to this question: Can a free people, self-governed, exist and prosper without a monarch?
The French commentator, Montesquieu, whose writings so influenced the founding fathers, was convinced that a democracy was the most desirable form of human association but also at the same time the least stable. As long as a democracy, he said, is animated by public virtue, it will flourish. But as soon as prosperity comes, public virtue tends to diminish and selfishness and greed take over. People don’t pay their bills, don’t honor their contracts, don’t keep their word, don’t help each other in need, and cheat each other and this at the highest level of commerce and finance and politics. They simply don’t serve their country, even ordinary citizens.
Does that sound like what we have been talking about through all these chapters regarding our economic collapse? Too much prosperity in Montesquieu’s eyes prompts temptations too strong for many to resist. In Montesquieu’s mind free virtuous people prosper. But then prosperity produces selfishness, greed and a laziness that affects the public business. Then they are no longer virtuous enough to govern themselves. There is a great deal of food for thought here.
Job culture and consumer culture say that the primary goal in life is to garner material possessions. Our family Christian life says that the primary goal is to love each other and bring each other help.
Our Christian way of life says material things are means to an end and not an end in themselves. Material surroundings must do what we want them to do instead of us doing what our material surroundings want us to do.
It should be very clear that just as we need to live more frugally, the poor need to be helped to live more humanly.
We (all of us including our politicians) must consistently reject the mantra: “I want it all. I want it now.” We must work hard to reject the greed of capitalist society, “the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions.” In other words, more and more is not better and better. To say that another way, we Christians are not inclined to look with great favor on the worship of mammon.
We pursue the good life, even the prosperous life, but we put God first. We must refuse to abandon life at any stage of its development. We do not believe in socialism. We do not believe in unfettered capitalism.
Our hearts must be obedient to the Lord in terms of the use of money, material possessions and goals and dreams. The Lord intends to redeem the whole world, to redeem all of us as a people and even to redeem the economic realities of our lives.
In the past, the economics courses we took in universities were individualistic (how do I make a lot of money with little or not thought given to how my individualistic economic goals impact others, both near and far). Individualism was a characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, but relationality in economics is what we need today. We need our economic and political leaders to think of the betterment of the worlds’ poor just as much as our betterment.
The Lord is our goal. Our real wealth is our family and relationships! Faith, hope and charity are our priceless possessions. Praise of God is our wealth. The whole Christ, head and body. We live in an increasingly pagan culture which needs to be Christianized. We need to integrate our religious values with our financial values and our community values and the time to begin is now.
It should be clear from everything said in the prior six chapters that we Americans have overspent, have become too dependent on that spending for our wellbeing and have, in some ways, succumbed to the dangers of consumerism and affluence. This simply means, not just wanting, but expecting more goods and more services year after year after year. The current economic downturn is not just a mere minor bump in the road. It is the major milestone in the last 100 years. America has lost its economic prominence and many, many of us Americans are hurting financially and emotionally.
We can seize the moment in this economic downturn to reorient our lives as individuals, as families and as a nation. This can be done in the following ways:
The question is where do we go from here? Based on the decisions we come up with, we need to work to change our families and ourselves in accord with this plan. To find an answer we have to engage in introspection.
The question we ask is the title of this book: How Does a Christian Family Profit from Tough Economic Times. It is my hope that you will choose one or all of the following in your decision making.
1. Live within your means.
The obvious meaning of this is that we have to sit down and figure out what changes we need to make in our lives so we are no longer regularly filled with anxiety regarding our debts and our bills. This includes not only tuition for our children. It includes payments on our house, payments for our car, payments for so many other things in our busy lives.
This requires an agreement among all family members. A concrete agreement as to the things that need to change.
Robert N. Bellah, the well known sociologist at University of California at Berkeley, says it this way: “If both parents are working, and perhaps working for excessive hours, not to meet the basic necessities of life but to pay for what they think is a preferred style of life, (because of the pressures of consumerism) family life can suffer as consequence.”
This is a nice way of saying that the job culture in our lives may be crowding out the family culture. Economic pressures that families face have to be considered in the light of the accommodations which families make to the allure of consumer goods which very suddenly become “needs.” This takes a lot of reflection.
The other facet of this is the spiritual side of our family life. If our religious and spiritual life have been eroded by materialism, we are neglecting the call to the evangelical spirit of poverty. You and I are neglecting self-discipline.
We need to slow down our lives so that we are not always in a hurry, not always in a rat race, not always on the treadmill. We have to take enough time to read. Take enough time to pray. Take enough time for wisdom, love and friendship.
2. Help our children do the same.
Introspection also needs to focus on the culture our children are being brought up in. Is it simply a consumer culture or is it a family culture? A consumer culture is profoundly destructive of family life. So we will need to teach our children self discipline, charity, empathy and all the other values that will help them neutralize the messages of advertising and marketing. Of course we have to model these values in our own lives as well.
Very sadly, a consumer culture says to our children that their identity is determined by what they have and what they buy. Very happily, a family culture of faith tells our children that their identity and ours is determined by who we are as a family and how we are related to God, our brothers, our sisters, our mom, our dad and our neighbors.
Consumer culture tells our children that buying is good and will make us happy. Our family culture says that buying needs to be moderated and will not make us happy for very long. What will make us happy for a long time is caring for each other as family and loving God. It even includes prayer and the sacraments.
3. Saving for rainy days.
Discernment is also needed to commit ourselves to saving for rainy days. The job culture surrounding adults says that the solution to life’s problems lies in spending and purchasing material things such as trips, vacations and a big house. Our family Christian culture says the solution to life’s problems is trusting in God, in each other and values and hard work and education.
Our job culture will say that a good life is a materially successful life. Our Christian family culture says a good life is a good family life and a life of virtue and service.
That involves saving for rainy days. Rainy days include sickness, accidents, loss of work and other things that suddenly befall us.
4. Pay down our credit cards and other debts.
Introspection will also call us to pay down our credit cards. Our children need to see us as a family working to pay down our credit cards every month. We need to think about “making our homes commerce free zones.” That phrase was coined by the Institute for American Values. That means making a decision as a family to limit our use of cell phones, texting, TV, Internet, video games, etc. That means actively resisting buying the latest items right away. It means we will stop allowing ourselves and our children to become walking billboards for advertisers. It means engaging in activities that are not media driven and instead include volunteering together, walking, hiking, engaging in sports activities, etc. Paying down our debts is not just a small item, it is a huge item.
5. Practice frugality and industry.
To sum it all up, we need to practice frugality and industry. This idea goes all the way back to Ben Franklin. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are called the founders of political freedom in America. Ben Franklin is called the founder of economic freedom. He envisioned America as a place far different from across the ocean in Europe. It was to be a New World as compared to the Old World of Europe. In the Old World you could work all day every day, but as a serf or a peasant you usually couldn’t pull yourself up by your own hard work and diligence. You can in America with industry (hard work) and frugality (live within your means…help your children do the same…save for rainy days). Ben Franklin received much of his thought from Cotton Mather, the Puritan preacher of New England.
The idea was simple and straight forward, if you work hard, save up for rainy days and live within your means you could be, as a family, free from all the terrible anxieties and heavy loads that were a common lot imposed on the poor. He was not Scrooge, he believed a good life should come after you have saved, after you have worked hard as a reward. Ben Franklin believed we should sacrifice now for the freedom from worries about where our next meal was coming from. Consumer society believes that we should enjoy now and worry latter. Consumer thinking is something that has brought us to our current economic crisis.
Franklin also believed (we should think about this) that children should fulfill household roles with the expectation that they contribute to the family by what they do every day. Social scientists today warn that such simple things as thumb sucking, ADHD and many other maladies were close to nonexistent in families in Ben Franklin’s day when children had to contribute to the family well being with hard daily work in the home and on the farm. Are they on to something?
The practice of frugality and industry also have a larger purpose than the family. When citizens heed Ben Franklin’s wisdom, they pay their just debts, honor their contracts, keep their word, help each other in need, do not cheat each other and serve their country. This is called public virtue. And public virtue is absolutely essential for a democratic republic to flourish. In the 1830’s, Tocqueville pointed out that the American experiment was an affirmative answer to this question: Can a free people, self-governed, exist and prosper without a monarch?
The French commentator, Montesquieu, whose writings so influenced the founding fathers, was convinced that a democracy was the most desirable form of human association but also at the same time the least stable. As long as a democracy, he said, is animated by public virtue, it will flourish. But as soon as prosperity comes, public virtue tends to diminish and selfishness and greed take over. People don’t pay their bills, don’t honor their contracts, don’t keep their word, don’t help each other in need, and cheat each other and this at the highest level of commerce and finance and politics. They simply don’t serve their country, even ordinary citizens.
Does that sound like what we have been talking about through all these chapters regarding our economic collapse? Too much prosperity in Montesquieu’s eyes prompts temptations too strong for many to resist. In Montesquieu’s mind free virtuous people prosper. But then prosperity produces selfishness, greed and a laziness that affects the public business. Then they are no longer virtuous enough to govern themselves. There is a great deal of food for thought here.
Job culture and consumer culture say that the primary goal in life is to garner material possessions. Our family Christian life says that the primary goal is to love each other and bring each other help.
Our Christian way of life says material things are means to an end and not an end in themselves. Material surroundings must do what we want them to do instead of us doing what our material surroundings want us to do.
It should be very clear that just as we need to live more frugally, the poor need to be helped to live more humanly.
We (all of us including our politicians) must consistently reject the mantra: “I want it all. I want it now.” We must work hard to reject the greed of capitalist society, “the unquenchable thirst for temporal possessions.” In other words, more and more is not better and better. To say that another way, we Christians are not inclined to look with great favor on the worship of mammon.
We pursue the good life, even the prosperous life, but we put God first. We must refuse to abandon life at any stage of its development. We do not believe in socialism. We do not believe in unfettered capitalism.
Our hearts must be obedient to the Lord in terms of the use of money, material possessions and goals and dreams. The Lord intends to redeem the whole world, to redeem all of us as a people and even to redeem the economic realities of our lives.
In the past, the economics courses we took in universities were individualistic (how do I make a lot of money with little or not thought given to how my individualistic economic goals impact others, both near and far). Individualism was a characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, but relationality in economics is what we need today. We need our economic and political leaders to think of the betterment of the worlds’ poor just as much as our betterment.
The Lord is our goal. Our real wealth is our family and relationships! Faith, hope and charity are our priceless possessions. Praise of God is our wealth. The whole Christ, head and body. We live in an increasingly pagan culture which needs to be Christianized. We need to integrate our religious values with our financial values and our community values and the time to begin is now.
posted by Fr. Peter | 9:57 AM
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