Father Peter's Forum

New Year's Resolutions

2010-01-08T10:28:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year! (Names are changed to keep anonymity)
Val J. Peter

New Year’s Resolutions

We ask our children to make New Year’s resolutions for the very simple reason that it is a New Year and as the New Year dawns, there is a fresh initiative of hope available to each and every one of us…a hope that we will grow and be kinder and better and more loving and more courageous. For this reason, we ask our kids to write New Year’s resolutions. We share some of them with you in the hope that you will be inspired by them.

1. My New Year’s resolution is to accept “No” for an answer and to stay in Community One until I am ready to go to a big house. This will mean that I have to promise myself not to run. I want to do this because when I go home, I want to be able to accept no for an answer and not argue. --Brittany

2. My New Year’s resolution is to be respectful to others by not talking back. By being respectful to my peers, I will not make rude comments to them, even though they deserve them…and many of them do deserve them. I will also talk to my Family-Teachers about my feelings and my problems. I know that I can trust them. --Debra

3. My New Year’s resolution is to set myself one goal every day and try hard to meet it. For example, one day I can try and improve on expressing my emotions and not hiding them all as I have learned to do. I am now eleven years old and growing up. I can do as well as the older girls do. --Lindsay

4. My New Year’s resolution is to work on having a better relationship with my mother by talking with her on the phone every week and trying to be pleasant, even when she is not so pleasant. If she hollers at me, I will hand the phone to my Family-Teacher.
--Martha

5. My New Year’s resolution is to deal with my anger more often. I will take deep breaths before I get mad. I think that will help me a lot. --Tony

6. My New Year’s resolution is to look on the positive side of things and stop looking always at the bad side. I learned how to look at the bad side from my mother. I am very good at it. I will do what I need to accomplish this resolution in my heart.
--Trevaughn

7. My New Year’s resolution is to work so hard on my behaviors that I can leave Boys Town positively in the spring, whether it is April or May. I am going to achieve that goal by praying real hard every day and by trying real hard. --Michael

8. My New Year’s resolution is to control my impulses. I act before I think. People have told me that, but now I believe it. I know it is not so good. I will try a lot harder.
--Wayne

9. My New Year’s resolution is to do a better job with responsibility so that when I grow up and get married, I can be a good father and a good husband. I know that is hard because I have never seen it at my own home. --Cameron

10. My New Year’s resolution is to hold my temper for at least two weeks. If I don’t hold it for fourteen days, then I have to start again. I think if I try to do this every day, I will achieve my goal and be a better person. --Jesse

11. My New Year’s resolution is to get an office referral only three times a week instead of five times a week. I think that is a good resolution. Maybe Monday and Tuesday I can have office referrals, but not Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
--Name Withheld

12. My New Year’s resolution is to have good home visits and not run around with my gang friends. I am going to talk to my mom about this resolution and hope I can keep it.
--Jordan

13. My New Year’s resolution is to get my act together. That is what my dad always tells me to do, so I am going to try and do it. I am not sure what that means, but I am going to ask my Family-Teacher. --Billy

14. My New Year’s resolution is to be a better big brother to my little sister and to obey my mom. It is going to be hard, but I think I can do it. --Michael

15. My New Year’s resolution is when I am angry to not be acting with aggression.
--Spencer

16. My New Year’s resolution is to talk to my mom respectfully, by not calling her names and cussing at her, especially when she is drunk. --Name Withheld

17. My New Year’s resolution is to lose eight pounds. Maybe if I lose two pounds, I will be happy. --Dawn

Watch Out for Your Credit Cards!

2009-12-04T10:02:00.002-06:00

Val J. Peter

We just finished a seven chapter book entitled “How Does a Christian Profit from Tough Economic Times.”

Now let’s look at the reforms and how they are getting along. The first one we will look at in this report is the credit card industry. As you recall, credit card issuers encouraged all of us Americans to spend more and more and more, put it all on our credit cards and then pay the minimum balance. With the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009, a new sense of thrift of frugality and industry is beginning to take hold in America. Congress looked at the credit card industry’s abuse practices and passed recently The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility & Disclosure Act of 2009, covering so much. The first part of the act went into effect in August and the second part will be in January of 2010.

What is interesting to see and sad to report is that credit card issuers have already figured out how to get around the new rules. Let us look at four ways they do this.

1. The new law says that issuers cannot raise the rates without 40 days notice. But, of course, there is a loophole. The rates don’t apply to variable rate cards (rates that float up and down).

So guess what? Credit card companies are moving more consumers into these cards whose rates will likely soar. It is estimated that variable rates cards will account for 75% of all cards in 2009 up from 65% in 2008. A September 2009 issue of BusinessWeek gave an example of a man in San Jose who was changed to a variable rate card and Barclaycards zoomed his rate to 26.99% from about 16%. He could have cancelled the account, but he was laid off from his job and depends on it. The man feels he’s being ripped off.

2. Starting in February, lenders won’t be able to charge consumers a penalty when they go over their credit limit.

But to make up for the lost revenue, there are new penalties being assessed. Some banks are assessing a level of $19 if a borrower doesn’t use the card for 12 months.

3. Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase now have special annual fees that target customers who pay off their balance and, therefore, don’t pay any interest. They are called “dead beats.”

4. Credit card companies are also imposing foreign transaction fees applied to all purchases made at companies outside the United States, even if they are purchased in dollars and not foreign currency.

5. Consumer advocates think that the issuers will dodge marketing guidelines, clamping down on selling cards to young adults. The rules prohibit issuers from giving out freebies to students on or near campus. But some issuers may set up shop a few blocks from school. Others may hit up parents in the hope of signing up their kids.

Be careful! Be careful! Be careful!

Chapter VII - Where Do We Go From Here?

2009-12-04T09:57:00.000-06:00

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.

Chapter VI - How Did We Get Into This Financial Mess?

2009-12-04T09:56:00.000-06:00

INTRODUCTION:

There are lots of books and articles explaining the financial collapse, first in the banking system and then the failure of so many other firms resulting in loss of jobs, savings and even hope for the future. For you and me who read this, the crisis is found in the terrible financial damage done to your household and mine and to small and big businesses resulting from the housing collapse and the credit market collapse. The authors point out that it was America’s bankers and businessmen, on one hand, and our government failing to regulate these credit markets which has put the American model of free market capitalism under a cloud.

The financial system collapsed. The government regulators failed to curb widespread abuses and corruption. America has lost its economic primacy in the world, just as you and I have lost much in terms of jobs, savings and hope. This economic crisis is global and it will go on longer than most of us think. America has to now focus inward because of unemployment and all our troubles. And much of the world blames American financial excesses of our bankers for the world crisis, and rightly so, as well as our government’s failure to regulate and rightly so. The good will towards President Obama mitigates some of this, but not very much.

What we are trying to do here is to help you understand how we got into this mess because it will help you personally get out of this mess, get your spiritual priorities right, free you from anxieties, and help you vote right so that we can put into our government leaders who can help us move forward in a just and honest way. This is a gigantic task.

1. So let us begin with the question: How did all this trouble get started? Lots of people have written much, but perhaps the most insightful way to look at it is to read a book by award winning Financial Times journalist, Gillian Tett, entitled Fool’s Gold. The basic narrative outline written here is following that text. Paraphrase is sometimes used. The ethical analysis and spiritual advice is mine. It is highly recommended that you buy the text itself. It is such worthwhile reading. It tells the story of how it all started at the beginning with bankers at J.P. Morgan who were looking for new “products” to peddle to make more money (the profit motive) and how they came up with exotic financial products known as credit derivatives. We will see how derivatives involved currency trading at the start and then grew to just about every aspect of the business known across the globe. We will describe some of it here. It is important we understand the great banks and financial institutions of the world were involved: Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Barclay’s Bank of London, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and insurance giants such as AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and many others.

2. Gillian Tett points out that this economic collapse was not triggered by a recession or war or other events. This is the way it usually happens. It was self-inflicted by the banking community, starting in America, and the failure of our government oversight bodies to regulate those bankers. The blame cannot be put on just a very few bad, greedy, ugly individuals, although there were some of those! The blame must be put on the entire investment system, as well as the watchdog regulatory structures of government and lack of oversight, plus plenty of greedy bankers who sat in their silos and abandoned the public and private virtues of prudence, moderation, balance and any real concern for the common good. A huge ethical failing. Instead, they relied on complex mathematical models which were based on what they now call a “ridiculously limited set of data” and which, they held, were an infallible guide.

3. Now this is an important point. Because these things were so arcane and hard to understand, these financial gurus did what, in anthropology, is called exercising the function of elites. Tett says: “Elites try to maintain their power, not simply by garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed.” Bankers sat in their silos. They said: we’ll make lots of money. Everything is OK. Don’t think anything is bad. And those elites dominated everyone below them so as not to ask questions. Regulators sat in their silos placing blind faith in the creed of risk dispersion. There is no need for more regulation, they said, and need for even less regulation. And anyone who disagreed with them was laughed to scorn. Congress sat in their silos. The whole financial community was in its own great big silo separated from the rest of society. Many smaller investment firms and trust funds cannot be blamed for believing the “big fish” would not lead them this far astray.

So let us start at the beginning.

4. In the early 1980s, J. P. Morgan, along with several other famous banks jumped into the new fangled derivatives field which then exploded rapidly. Some ten years later, by 1994, the total notional value of derivatives contracts on J. P. Morgan’s books was estimated to be 1.7 trillion in derivatives. These activities were generating half of the bank’s trading revenue. If you make .02% on each contract it is a small amount but it adds up to huge sums with great volume.

It is important to note that most members of the banking and investment world had absolutely no idea how derivatives were producing some phenomenal sums, let alone what so called swaps groups (another kind of derivative) actually did. Those who worked in the area intended to revel in its era of mystery. These bankers referred to their experiments as “innovation”, meaning the invention of new ways of generating returns. Peter Hancock, the leader of the group at J.P. Morgan, often said to his subordinates: “You will have to make at least half your revenues each year from a product which did not exist before.”

5. A derivative is, on the most basic level, a bet on the future value of an asset. It is a contract whose value derives from some other asset such as a bond, a stock or quantity of gold. Those who buy and sell derivatives are each making a bet on the future value of that asset. The bet can be one of two kinds…either a high risk long shot bet on price swings to make huge profits…or a way to protect yourself against undesirable price swings. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with derivatives if used prudently and regulated wisely.

Here’s an example Tett uses. Let’s say that on a particular day the pound to dollar exchange rate is such that one British pound buys $1.50. So Joe is going to make a trip from England to the United States in six months and he wants to be sure that he can buy dollars at that rate just before the trip. So he might enter into an agreement to exchange 1,000 pounds at a bank in six months time at $1.50, no matter what the actual exchange rate is then. And he agrees the trade must happen no matter what the rate of exchange at the time. That is a future. There is nothing wrong with futures if used prudently and regulated wisely.

Or he may agree to pay a fee (let’s say $25) to have the option to make the exchange at the $1.50 rate which he would decide not to exercise if the rate actually became more favorable.

Although the complex derivatives of the 1990’s were new, simpler versions of derivatives trading go all the way back to clay tablets from Mesopotamia in 1750 B.C., with futures and options trading. In the 12th and 13th century, English monasteries that raised sheep entered into futures contracts with foreign merchants to sell wool up to 20 years in advance…in the 17th century, Holland’s tulip prices began to rise substantially. The merchants frantically bought and sold tulip futures leading to a bubble that ended in a spectacular crash.

In 1849, the Chicago Board of Trade began to allow buying and selling of futures and options on wheat and corn, cattle and hogs, etc. Farmers often lock in a specific price for grain “for September delivery.”

6. What ushered in a bold new era of derivatives innovation was the idea to bring derivatives not just to commodities, (corn, beans, wool, livestock) but to currency trading, to homes, etc. The value of foreign currencies, (which had been pegged to the dollar) after World War II, became free floating. That led to unpredictable swings in exchange rates. Inflation in the U.S. peaked at 13.2% in 1981 and it made investors try to find ways to protect themselves from high interest rates.

The prime rate in the U.S. rose to 20% in June 1981. So now you could buy derivatives which offered you the right to purchase currencies as specific exchange rates in the future.

Peter Hancock’s group in the 1980’s at J. P. Morgan specialized in another creative version of derivatives known as “swaps.” Let’s take a simple example of two home owners, owner A and owner B. They both have a $500,000 ten year mortgage. And owner A has a fixed rate of 8% and owner B has a floating rate. If owner A thinks that rates are going to go down and he doesn’t want to pay 8% which is fixed and owner B thinks they are going to go up so he would like to have a fixed rate of 8%, they could swap their payments for a while or for as long as they agreed to.

Then take the case of IBM in 1979. They had lots of Swiss franks and Deutschmarks (they sold bonds in those currencies). And IBM didn’t need so many of those and needed a lot of cash in dollars. The World Bank said it would issue World Bank bonds in dollars, own the bonds, give the dollars and IBM would pay the obligations to bond holders and IBM would swap Franks and Deutschmarks to World Bank without having to sell them.

Note, too, that after the financial crash of 1929, bringing the Great Depression to America and the world, there was a popular backlash against Wall Street and the Glass Steagall Act was passed by Congress and signed into law forcing banks to split off their commercial banking business from the capital markets operation (trading of debt and equity securities…derivatives). Stern government regulation!

The crucial point about derivatives is that they can, on one hand, help investors reduce risk or they can create a great deal more risk. Everything depended on how they were used and the motives and skills of those who traded in them. So J.P. Morgan’s New York headquarters in the 1980’s could not (because of the Glass Steagall regulations) play capital markets but its London office could because England was not subject to Glass Steagall and had a more hands off attitude towards regulation. The London traders had greater power and freedom and they could make a lot of money fast, take far greater risks and they could walk if anything terrible happened. Few of the higher ups at Morgan knew how the swaps team trades worked.

Morgan was one of the very few banks with a top AAA rating and that assured clients that the bank could stand by its trades. By the early 1990s, the swaps department accounted for almost half the bank’s trading revenues.

7. The head of the swaps groups once explained to a reporter from Fortune that his group was like “the spaceship Galileo heading for Planet Jupiter.” “It would be something in which you would get beyond binary risk and into a combination of risks such as interest rates and currencies.” Hancock gave an example of an oil company which was afraid of oil prices dropping and interest rates rising. To hedge, it would buy an oil price floor and an interest rate cap…but maybe the company would like something a little cheaper: “In that case, we could do a contract that would pay out only if oil prices are low and interest rates are high at the same time.”

8. By the early 90’s, U.S. government bank regulators knew that many of their rules had been drafted before the explosion of derivatives innovation. They, for example, determined levels of reserves banks must have if they were engaging in derivatives activities. But the problem was the regulators couldn’t get good estimates of the risks involved and so many kept saying everything is fine. So their rules for levels of bank reserves were way too low.

Now there was an industry body to represent the swaps world and it was called the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. And the first thing the ISDA did was conduct a survey of the market. And in 1987, ISDA guessed the total volume of derivative contracts was $865 billion. That shocked western government officials. So in 1987, the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission wanted to regulate interest rates and currency swaps in the same way that it monitored commodities derivatives. The ISDA lobbied Congress and won. So government regulation did not happen as it should be. A sad day.

It was a crazy period because the ISDA now said that the rules should be written by the industry itself and upheld by voluntary mutual accord. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, liked voluntariness because he truly believed that if everyone followed their own self-interest everything would go fine. He’s a big follower of Ann Rynd whose books were popular in the 1950s, recommending what she called the “virtue of selfishness.” He believed: if everybody is selfish, everything will work out well. I know that sounds dumb, but Alan Greenspan believed it and so did lots of others because it fit their purposes…make a lot of money and the heck with everybody else. That is a horrible lack of virtue.

Remember a basic rule of anthropology: elites gain and maintain power not only by money, but also by making sure their view (Greenspan and Bernanke) dominated and prevailed. So if you were at a lower level in the industry, you were told to keep your mouth shut or you would be in trouble.

9. By now all the great banks and stock market firms not only of America, but the world were caught up in the derivatives movement: Chase Manhattan, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bear Stearns etc.

And do not forget about the mortgage market which became huge. The assumption of the elite was that home prices would continue to rise as they had, more or less, ever since World War II. We talked earlier in this series about the democratization of credit. Groups like ACORN and other well intentioned groups who wanted to help the poor thought it would be a good idea if the poor could borrow money and own a house. The problem was that to borrow, the money lenders had to become a lot less fussy about demanding that borrowers prove they had the income to repay the loans. The money lenders gave loans they knew they should not give. That is morally wrong because the poor get hurt even worse. Tett mentions that they even were offering “teaser” loans with very low initial rates (below 2.5%) and these rose in stages to be quite high, often well above 10%. Well, many of these families were taking out teaser loans and they could barely make the 2.5%, but neither they nor the lenders worried about the risk because it was assumed that they would simply refinance the loans at the end of the teaser rate period.

10. And they all assumed that the incredible rise in home prices would continue, when, lo and behold, in 2006 in Las Vegas and Miami and San Francisco and then Southern California, home prices stalled. And this began to trigger a wave of subprime defaults (people could not make their mortgage payments) and some began abandoning their mortgages when their house was worth less than they owed on the mortgage. Some banks then, interestingly enough, turned to the derivatives market to reduce their risk. They purchased credit default swaps which promised to redeem any default losses on the mortgage bonds. Tett points out that in January 2006, folks launched an index for tracking these offerings and their values. It was sort of like the Dow Jones and was called ABX. “Why didn’t someone (either regulators or people in the business) blow the whistle?” And the answer comes from anthropology. The elites gain and maintain power not only by money, but by making sure that their view dominated and prevailed. Their view was: this will all work very well. So be quiet!

11. In early 2006, small groups began spotting something odd: some of the data in the mortgage database suggested the pace of defaults on risky mortgages was starting to rise. This seemed strange and did not fit what they thought were the normal economic rules. At the same time, banks and other lenders were passing out lots and lots of mortgages which were becoming riskier and riskier. These loans were repackaged into more and more CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) in order to make up for declining profit margins. And these were bundled and the products were sold creating huge masses of super senior risk – and guess what. They brought insurance against the super-senior risk from places like AIG. Remember that in 2004, the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission’s five members voted unanimously to lift the leverage ratio control, namely, the controls on the amount of assets a brokerage house could hold on its balance sheet relative to its core equity. The UBS folks in Europe developed mathematical models that said super-senior would never lose more than 2% of its value, even in the worst cases. Nonsense! This defied all prudence and common sense. But remember what elites do!

In 2006, home prices across America started to slide. In October, the famous home builder, Kara Homes, filed for bankruptcy.

12. In June 2007, a crisis hit a hedge fund connected to Bear Stearns…J. P. Morgan now threatened to call in its loans. Disaster was near. In mid-July, another tsunami appeared as Deutsche Industrie Bank (IKB), a medium size lender in Dusseldorf, Germany, started to go under. Would anybody help supply new sources of funds? Nobody did until the German government stepped in. As with Bear Stearns bailout, this was only a temporary reprieve.

On August 6, 2007, American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation filed for bankruptcy. Now the commercial paper market was starting to get jittery.

13. Then the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Central Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank started to also get jittery. The Federal Reserve kept making statements that the problems were “contained.” Remember what elites do. They control what people believe. Investors were dumping anything that might contain default risk. They were heading for the safest assets around. Countrywide, America’s largest independent mortgage lender, on August 15, 2007, said its rate of foreclosure on subprime loans was roaring upward. Now real trouble came as many banks stopped lending money to any other banks or institutions that looked at all risky.

14. On August 31, 2007, then President George Bush stood in the Rose Garden with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Adjustable mortgage rates were climbing and defaults were rising enormously. Democratization of credit failed so many! The then President Bush tried to calm the nation saying: “This market has seen tremendous innovation in recent years, as new lending products made credit available to more people. For the most part, this has been a positive development…this has led some homeowners to take out loans larger than they could afford based on overly optimistic assumptions about the future performance of the housing market. Others may have been confused by the terms of their loan or misled by irresponsible lenders.” The President only offered some simple band-aid solutions. Then in September, in England, the fifth largest British lender called Northern Rock announced it had gone to the Bank of England to seek emergency support. Then on October 11, just as Citicorp and J. P. Morgan were trying to create a Superfund, the famous Moody’s cut its ratings on $32 billion worth of mortgage backed bonds which were issued in 2006 and had carried a medium risk rating. They said they might downgrade $20 billion more of mortgage backed bonds that carried a AAA stamp.

15. The entire credit structure was built on the guess that AAA was ultra-safe and AA almost rock solid. Now this was all crumbling.

At the beginning of 2008, UBS, Merrill Lynch and Citibank all reported huge write-downs on credit assets, totally about $53 billion just for those three banks.

Then Bear Stearns found itself in horrible shape and J. P. Morgan Chase cut a deal to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share with the Federal Reserve taking $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ assets. Remember that in October of 2007, Bear Stearns stock had been trading around $130 a share. Timothy Geithner, New York Federal Reserve Chairman, pulled this deal off at $2 a share! He is now Secretary of Treasury in the Obama administration! Yes, Geithner was part of that elite!

In February 2008, AIG finally admitted it did not have the reserves it would need to meet claims. It announced $43 billion of write-downs of super-senior assets, even more than at Citicorp and UBS. Lehmann Brothers then collapsed on Sunday, September 11, 2008 and at the prospect of AIG collapsing, the money market panicked…Tett notes calmly: “The three events produced the perfect market storm.” The markets went into a freefall.

The next logical step, if this crash continued, was there would be no money coming out of ATM machines. All commerce would be brought to a standstill. On the 16th, the Federal Reserve said it would give an $85 billion loan to AIG in exchange for almost 80% share of its company. Note the Federal Reserve had just refused that aid to Lehmann Brothers which was now gone. On Monday, the 15th, just before AIG deal, Bank of America was pushed to buy, by the feds, Merrill Lynch. Finally, on October 13, 2008, Treasury Secretary Paulson called nine American bank heads into the U.S. Treasury and they were each given a piece of paper the feds demanded they sell shares of their bank to the government and they were forcefully told to sign. Secretary of Treasury Paulson said: take it or leave it. Either you accept voluntary infusion of federal funds or you’re out on a limb by yourself. They accepted the funds and the rest is history.

16. Commercial paper was drying up. Credit was drying up. ATMs would have dried up had the Federal government not stepped in.

17. Summary and Conclusions:

A. Many people have wondered how these very bright people trading in derivatives and making subprime mortgages and taking huge risks with other people’s monies…their conscience did not bother them for what they did was ruin million of Americans’ dreams and deflate America’s greatness in the eyes of the world…Remember, these young people were trained in some of our finest universities. They were told not to worry about moral principles which were all relative anyway. They possess bright intellects and can understand complex business transactions. They have mastery of high level mathematical formulas.

A big part of the answer why their conscience didn’t bother them lies in that basic principle of anthropology we have repeated over and over again: “Elites try to maintain their power not simply garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed.” It is what the behaviorists call environmental conditioning and that is easy to understand. Most of us live in a bubble and what is inside the bubble conditions us to think the way we think, believe and act unless we are countercultural. For example, if you are a teenager and live in the bubble of MTV, rock stars, rappers, drugs, sex and alcohol, you are going to believe that is “the normal way of life.” To a teenager, you have to live that way. The elites in the teenage world maintain that supremacy.

To not believe what the elite says means you need to be slightly countercultural. A person with strong religious convictions and relationship to God and His people could overcome that environment, but others cannot.

If you live in a silo of bright banking people and your purpose is to make as much money as possible and the elites around you and above you make sure their view dominates and prevails (There is nothing to worry about. Everything is OK.) Then you will not realize that what you are doing is a violation of prudence, moderation, responsibility, balance and common sense. A violation of virtue! What you will not realize is that you are becoming very greedy and selfish and are going to harm others. What you need to overcome this silo effect is a Power greater than the power of the elites. Most traders and bankers had their private doubts, but they were swayed by environmental conditioning by the spirit of their organization. Or it was simply too complex to understand and you could not be reasonably expected to figure it out!

If you questioned the rightness of the thinking of the elite, in your bank or government agency, you would probably be fired or at least not promoted. All of this should provide business schools with the realization that there has to be an enormous effort made in ethical training, in neutralizing environmental conditioning and understanding anthropology required of students if this is not to happen again. Without virtue all ventures collapse.

B. Many of the banking, business and government elites believed in what Ann Rynd, as we saw above, called “the virtue of selfishness.” They believed that if anyone acts on self-interest everything will work out well. Alan Greenspan believed it and so many others did because it fit their purposes…that ethical theory has to be abandoned (namely, that all persons should seek their own self-interest and all would go well). It has to be abandoned immediately. It is wrong and destructive of human flourishing. It is based on the denial of original sin.

C. The bankers and investors in this drama often describe themselves as feeling invincible, charting new territory, applying new financial services without a touch of humility. They were suffering from what the Greeks called hubris or pride/arrogance. There is an old adage: Pride always comes before the fall and that certainly is true here.

What is hubris? It is the belief that you personally can do no wrong and (if you do) that nobody will challenge you. Remember the story of Darius, the great Persian King in the 5th century B.C. who, when Athens decided to stand up and declare its independence from him, Darius made up his mind to punish them, gathering a great Naval Armada and crossing over to Peloponnesia only to suffer great damage to his fleet as a result of a terrible storm. Darius is said to have taken out a huge whip and whipping the sea said to the god of the sea, Poseidon: “You will not interfere with my will.” Because of his pride, in 490 B.C., his army suffered a huge disaster at the battle of Marathon at the hands of the Athenians who chose freedom over tyranny. The Greeks said Darius lost because of hubris. (sign of pride/arrogance) The reason the financial world went wacko is also because of hubris on the part of these people who thought they were invincible.

That hubris, once again, develops through environmental conditioning. You can be blinded into taking terrible risks with no thought of harm to others because you are reinforced to believe that you are the vanguard of the future. Or if you are at a lower organizational level, you are filled with fear if you don’t go along with the elites. In the 21st century, environments are created with such power they can blind you to moral values at stake. The propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels was so powerful in Nazi Germany that even good Christian people were blinded into accepting and cooperating with the Holocaust. The Nazis suffered from great hubris.

If, in the 1980’s onward, you belonged to the banking fraternity which is close knit which feels itself superior and invincible and has success after success after success, pretty soon it is blinding to those who are part of it. You may otherwise be good persons, but here are surrounded by leaders and coworkers who feel themselves invincible, a new breed, and clearly making huge sums of money. This is heady stuff and you would have to be greatly countercultural to be morally sensitive and courageous enough to stand up to this pressure!

Postscript: As stated in the beginning of this paper, we are basically following the marvelous book by Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold (New York: Free Press, 2009) for the financial tale. The ethical part is my own. Buy Fool’s Gold. You’ll like it.

Chapter V - The Magnitude of Our Economic Crisis & the Moral & Religious Problems it Brought to Light

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PART I – The Magnitude of the Economic Crisis

It is important for us common folk, you and me, religious and lay leaders to understand how in 2008-2009 the U.S. suddenly ceased to be the economic leader of the world. We are a democratic country and we have to make sure our officials will clean up this mess. They can only do this if we understand what happened. So let us begin.

In 1991, something unbelievable happened in world politics, namely, the Soviet Union collapsed. What Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire” fell in upon itself and its collapse was caused by the Russian government leaders themselves. In the year 2008, the United States suddenly ceased to be the economic leader of the world. What caused this great crash of 2008 and the loss of American’s leadership, as well as a geopolitical setback for the West? Basically, American bankers led the way by lack of public virtue, by greed and by acting like Dives. In addition, the American government officials failed to regulate as they should. This is a far greater event than has happened in America in at least a century and maybe more.

1. The American financial system is seen as having collapsed. The American government regulatory framework is seen as an enormous failure to curb widespread abuses and corruption. Much of the world looks at us in this fashion. Perhaps that is some of the reason the International Olympic Committee did not choose Chicago for the 2014 summer games.

2. People argue about what caused this crisis and mostly they say it was housing prices and the subprime mortgage market in the USA. Others say it in a different way, namely, that when you have very, very low interest rates and an awful lot of money available, the temptation is to make more and more loans to less and less credit worthy clients. Examples: you are a lending agent at a bank and you get paid on the basis of how many loans you make. So at this low interest rate, you can make more money by giving mortgages to people who can’t possibly pay them back. And you also collect a bigger bonus or perhaps a 10% cut.

When the mortgage rates started to rise, thousands and thousands of these borrowers could not afford the rise in variable rates with subsequent delinquencies.

3. Americans have lost one quarter of our net worth in just about a year and a half since June 30, 2007 and no one sees a return to where we were before. Why? Because the single largest asset of Americans is equity in their homes. Total home equity in the United States in its peak in 2006 was $13 trillion and has dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and continued falling for some time. So many Americans have negative equity in their homes.

Retirement accounts are the largest household asset of Americans. These dropped by at least 22% from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008.
At the same time, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion. Pension assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion. Together these losses total a whopping $8.3 trillion. In other words, too many Americans have nothing saved for emergencies, large or small. And many retired people must return to work.

4. By November 2008, the S&P 500 was down 45% from its 2007 high.

5. This crisis reflects the greatest regulatory failure in modern history. Western capital markets will not return to full health for years. The U.S. financial system is seen by the world as having failed. This will stop the global shift towards economic deregulation.

6. The U. S. will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer because its military strength alone ensures this. But America has lost its place as economic leader in the world.

1. The longstanding brief that everybody wins in a single world market is no longer widely held. Much of the world blames the U.S. financial excesses for the global recession. So the U.S. model of free market capitalism is out of favor.

2. The world’s three largest economies, U.S., European Union and Japan will not, it seems, be able to generate a normal cyclical recovery. The global expansion of goods, capital and jobs started reversing. The exports started falling sharply. The World Bank says exports from China, Japan, Mexico, Russia and the U.S. fell by 25% or more in the year ending 2008.

Capital flows were plunging. Emerging markets are projected to receive only $165 billion in net positive capital inflow in the year 2009, down from $461 billion in 2008.

3. Immigrant workers are now returning home in waves. Japan and Spain are offering them cash to leave. Malaysia is forcing them out.

4. Countries in Africa have been hardest hit. Democratic Congo, as well as the Central African Republic are in political chaos. Central African Republic cannot pay its civil servants. It is literally falling apart. The Democratic Congo will be soon be unable to import food and fuel, namely, essentials. A World Bank study estimates that 53 million people living in emerging markets will fall back into absolute poverty in 2009. Then Russia and Iran are also hurt very, very badly. Iran has been losing money on every barrel of oil it sells. Russia is too dependent on a single giant source of income…oil and gas. Its economy, too, is in trouble.

5. Only China has prevailed. China’s growth, we are told, did not diminish. It is becoming clear that the U.S./China relationship emerges as the most important bilateral one in the world. The two nations have very similar geopolitical interests. Neither China nor America wants Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Neither wants Korea to become destabilized. Neither wants Pakistan to become a failed state.

SUMMARY: Free market capitalism, globalization and deregulation which had been rising for 30 years has now ended.

1. Free-market capitalism is in enormous decline.

2. In its place has come state capitalism, a system where the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain.

For example, it has been said that the economic capital of the United States is no longer New York City, but is now Washington, D. C. And with that, comes the injection of politics into economic decisions. A bad deal!

3. State capitalism, it is pointed out, has four primary agencies:

(a) National oil corporations – the 13 largest oil companies in the world measured by their reserves are owned and operated by governments, not multinational corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell or Total. These companies are: Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco; the National Iranian Oil Company; Petróleos de Venezuela; S.A.; Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft; the China National Petroleum Corporation; Malaysia’s Petronas and Brazil’s Petrobras. State owned companies control more than 75% of global oil reserves and production.

(b) State owned enterprises – Here governments don’t just regulate the market. These state owned enterprises help bolster political leaders. What are state owned enterprises? Think of Angola’s Endiama (diamonds), Azerbaijan’s AzerEnerji (electricity generation), Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom (uranium), and Morocco’s Office Chérifien des Phosphates. Then also think of Russia’s fixed line telephone and arms-export monopolies. Think of China’s aluminum monopoly, power-transmission duopoly, major telecommunications companies and airlines. Think of India’s national railroad.

(c) In some developing countries, large companies remain in private hands, but rely on government patronage in the form of credit, contracts and subsidies. Here you have corruption, bribery and everything that happpens when you drive out competition. For example, in Russia any large business must have favorable relations with the state in order to succeed. National champions are controlled by a small group of oligarchs who are personally in favor with the Kremlin. The companies Norilsk Nickel (mining); Novolipetsk Steel and NMK Hlding (metallurgy); and Evraz, SeverStal and Metallionvest (steel) fall into this category. In China, the same applies.

Variations of the privately owned but government-favored national champions have cropped up elsewhere: Cevital (agroindustries) in Algeria, Vale (mining) in Brazil, Tata (cars, steel and chemicals) in India, Tnuva (meat and dairy) in Israel, Solidere (construction) in Lebanon, and the San Miguel Corporation (food and beverage) in the Phillipines.

(d) The task of financing these companies has fallen in part to Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFS). These act as repositories for excess foreign currency earned from the export of commodities or manufactured goods. They are more than just bank accounts. They are state-owned investment funds with mixed portfolios of foreign currencies, government bonds, real estate, precious metals and a stake in lots of companies, foreign and domestic. The Kuwait Investment Authority, now the world’s fourth-largest SWF, was founded in 1953. But the term “sovereign wealth fund” was first coined in 2005, reflecting a recognition of these funds’ growing significance. Since then, several countries have joined the game: Dubai, Libya, Qatar, South Korea and Vietnam.

It is hard to argue with the view that all of this makes markets less competitive and less productive. Only free markets can produce durable prosperity. Please note that since the great collapse of 2008, governments of the world’s wealthiest countries are now intervening in their economies and taking ownership of private assets. The U.S. and European governments know that to maintain popular support they must promise to return these large enterprises and banks into private hands once they’ve been restored to health. Not so in other places.

We said above New York City was the world’s financial capital. It is now no longer even the financial capital of the United States. Washington is. Similar shift of economic responsibility is taking place throughout the world: from Shanghai to Beijing, from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, from Sydney to Canberra, from Säo Paulo to Brasilia, from Mumbai to New Delhi. And in London, Moscow and Paris, where finance and politics coexist there is the same shift occurring toward government.

The result: deep state intervention in the economy means a door is opening to bureaucratic ways to inefficiency and corruption. This is more likely to hold back growth.

Now there is much talk about “decoupling,” the process whereby emerging economies develop a domestic base to free them from dependence on consumer demand in the U.S. and Europe. Incidences of decoupling are found in Brazil, China, India and Russia.

PART II – The Spiritual Implications of Global Crisis

In the Catholic tradition, there was a Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. One of the documents was called “The Church in the Modern World.” And reflecting on Scripture, it says something very important for all of us.

“Christ’s redemptive work, while of itself directed toward the salvation of human beings involves also the renewal of the whole temporal order.”

This document insists that “the spiritual and temporal orders are so connected in the one plan of God that He, Himself, intends in Christ to appropriate the whole universe into a new creation, initially here on earth, fully on the last day.”

In other words, one of the spiritual messages we receive here is to try to integrate the following of Christ with wellbeing of the world’s economic systems and social systems and wellbeing of all human kind.

There was a lot of optimism in those early years when this document was written in 1964. Not so anymore! In that sense, the document (the Church in the Modern World) is outdated. It would be easy, but false to say that we each have to, in our own lives, simply become better followers of Christ. Of course, that is necessary. It is absolutely essential. There is nothing more important.

But, on the other hand, all the matters related to finances and economy are in trouble at a magnitude never seen in the history of the world. We see what happened when free market economy was joined with less government regulation and how the whole world was harmed. The development of economic theory in the last 20 years has been harmful to the human condition in so many ways which we are experiencing today. In 1964, no one had even thought of that happening.

We were moving toward globalization and it was thought that everyone would gain if we all went down that path. Not so.

On one hand, the ethical problems surrounding the economic collapse are so enormous that no one can get their hands totally around them at the present time. Theories are in conflict. Issues are extremely complex. Why didn’t economists foresee the financial meltdown? Economists live in silos which are ideological, regional, national and global. Yale University’s well known economist, Robert Schiller, thinks that the failure to foresee the financial meltdown was due to the economists themselves being afraid to speak up against the majority view. There is no one grand moral scheme that is concrete enough to be put into effect with very immediate results.

There are, however, very clear ethical or moral mandates which we should attend to right now, today, tomorrow and in the future.

The first moral mandate is to develop strategies to help economists and others in the financial industry overcome environmental conditioning and resist social manipulation. Many insightful people point to social manipulation or environmental conditioning as a principal reason for “going with the flow.” This conditioning was so strong, very few dared to do what they knew was ethically right.

The same quandary with regard to environmental conditioning affects other areas of life. We have all recognized, for example, the power of the social milieu of adolescents to achieve conformity. Too few kids feel capable of turning their backs on what we adults call political correctness.

Many also see the power which marketing has to change the thinking, even of adults and even values without our hardly being aware of it. And few of us, even here, have learned how to neutralize this.

Most of us have to see how important this is. It is an issue we used to call human respect. We need to see how it can impede our speaking out, especially in this issue of global economics and world politics. It is an urgent issue. We have pointed out how the principle of anthropology that the elite gain and maintain power by making sure their views prevail and others keep quiet.

The second moral mandate is that world leaders need to give great importance to and develop traditional public and private virtue. Most everyone will agree we have too many leaders of nations who are lacking in virtue, who are filled with bride, greed and arrogance. Many follow Machiavelli who said: a lie is only wrong when it does not succeed. And many others are simply blind to the realities. The call for virtue among national leaders in an international way would be enormously helpful.

Various great religions of the world including, especially Christianity, could help enormously by insisting traditional virtues and character count in every country and in every place.

And it isn’t just in the western world where this is needed. For example, in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is apparently dictator for life. In Burma, the military junta has again silenced their Nobel Peace Prize political activist. Yes, democratic gains have been in Burundi, Liberia, Tanzania, Ghana, Botswana and Mozambique. But 15 heads of African nations have held power 15 years or more and 25-26 for at least ten years. And that just is Africa. Look at the other major areas of the world, as well.

The third moral mandate is for economic leaders to repent. Too many for too long in the last 30 or 40 years have believed that self-interest (selfishness) will promote the common good. We have already seen Alan Greenspan espouse this in the past and so many others. Emeritus professor Charles Wilbur at Notre Dame University comments: “even more encouraging is the growing recognition that economies require ethical behavior in addition to self-interest.” People are now saying that even Adam Smith is of the persuasion that individual greed cannot be the basis for social good.
The fourth moral mandate is for all of us to relearn the importance of justice in our own everyday lives. Justice is not the most we can for one another on this planet. It is the least! What kind of justice?

Justice is not the most we can do for one another on this planet. It is the least! What kind of justice?

First, justice between individuals which is contracts and promises. The 18th century French writer, Montesquieu, who so influenced America’s founding fathers, insisted that public virtue was the glue that would keep a republic flourishing and that the greatest temptation in a republic would be prosperity. People would become greedy. They would not observe their contracts. They would cheat each other and would not care about anyone but themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville, who came from France to America, observed and went home and reported on his observations. He wanted to see if citizens could live without a monarch and realized that for them to govern themselves required a great deal of self-discipline. Once again, public virtue and private virtue.

Then there is distributive justice - allocating goods in such a way that the minimum needs of as many people as possible are met and opportunities for as many people as possible to achieve human flourishing are the goals to be sought after. In the old days, this amounted to, and still does, the right to work, the right to own property, the right to vote, etc. But today it is far more complex than anyone could have ever realized. Free market capitalism is out and state capitalism is in. We then need to realize the real dangers of state capitalism: with its lack of competition, its tendency to bribes, corruption and undue influence.

And, thirdly, there is social justice is particularly important because it calls us to look beyond ourselves to the needs of our neighbors, namely, the common good. It calls on governments to move towards meeting the needs of all.

We have seen how well intentioned movements such as the democratization of credit can go array if there are not men and women of character.

This is simply a very brief outline of some of the things we need to do, some of the places we need to go. Perhaps it might be appropriate to conclude with some thoughts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor martyred by the Nazis in World War II. In 1938, he published a little work called The Cost of Discipleship. He talked about cheap grace and expensive grace. “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Bonhoeffer could see the young man in every one in his time and might see the rich young man in each of us today when we refuse to be detached from possessions, when they become more important than character. Yes, we can remain in a cheap grace relationship with God, but it will only harm us and harm the common good. Bonhoeffer says: “He who loves God loves Him as Lord of the earth such as it is. He who loves the earth loves it as God’s earth. He who loves the Kingdom of Heaven loves it…as the Kingdom of God on earth.” In other words, we should use our material goods as God wants us to, namely, not our own but given only to us in stewardship for a short time. “Come Lord Jesus” into our lives, into our national economy and into our world.

Postscript: Much of the data in this chapter comes from three marvelous articles in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. They are: “The Great Crash, 2008” by Roger Altman, formerly U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary in 1993-1994. The second is: “State Capitalism Comes of Age” by Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group. The third article is: “Globalization in Retreat” also by Roger Altman. See also John Hughey, The Holy Use of Money (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986). Much of the data here is taken from these three articles. However, the moral reflections are my own.

Chapter Four - Ethical Boundaries Surrounding Wealth & Poverty - Final

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The people who lived in this country before us for hundreds of years surrounded their lives with ethical 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 on the other hand, pagan indulgence (coming to wallow in materialism). Remember the ad for Chase Bank: “I want it all. I want it now.”

Our 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.”

There are many excellent books written on this subject. Jane Hammerslough has written a marvelous book Dematerializing – Taming the Power of Possessions (2001). There is also a marvelous anthology of ancient and modern voices raised in praise of simplicity edited by Goldian VandenBroeck entitled Less is More (1996). And then there is Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity – Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich (1993). All of these are very good. And even more important than these is a similar work by Peter Danner An Ethics for the Affluent (1980). His ideas are principally followed here.

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

a. These authors all point out 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. In Danner’s view, 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, things were much more clear and simple:

 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. We have all experienced economic growth until recently.
 Today, control over the desire for power and political correctness is much more needed because of the strength of environmental reinforcement which is the power of the culture to influence us in ways we hardly even notice. 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 very subtle. You see pictures of an extravagant lifestyle and happiness set side by side over and over again. So much so that as soon as you think of happiness, you see in your mind the picture of an extravagant lifestyle.
 They do the same with pictures of the Church in a negative way.
 They show pictures of dumb old men in the Church and right next to them is harsh, stupid morality.
 So when you think of morality, you think of dumb old men in the Church wearing funny looking hats and clothes.
 And when you think of the Church, you think of dumb old men demanding morality.

2. So we have to work on a right balance (or moderation) between puritanical suppression of pleasure and wallowing in materialism.

 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 and yet there are preachers who claim just the opposite.
 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 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 was not 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.

5. In classical literature, there is the story of King Midas who asked the gods for a special gift. The gift? That whatever he touched would turn to gold. It was called “The Midas Touch.” The gods gave him the gift and he walked into the Great Hall for lunch and he picked up an apple and it turned to gold. And he picked up a roll and some roast beef and they both turned to gold. And he realized he could no longer eat anything…but then, much worse, his little daughter whom he loved so much came running in to see him and she ran into his arms and she turned to gold. His desire for gold sucked life right out of her. That’s a powerful story.

Chapter III - A Christian View of Scarcity and Plenty - Final

2009-12-04T09:52:00.000-06:00

Even before the economic downturn so many Americans sensed something wrong with our consumer society. They often felt a sense of spiritual unease knowing, as they do, we are consuming too many of the world’s resources and sharing too little with those less fortunate.

But within the past several decades when they looked for ways to address this, their alternatives were too often inadequate to the task.

Some turned to Karl Marx’s withering critique of capitalism. Granted, he was writing of the early industrialization of his 19th century Europe, yet despite the ultimate failure of his program, he had many useful, critical insights about the false consciousness of the wealthy vis-à-vis the poor. His moral outrage at the exploitation of workers strikes a sympathetic cord in the hearts of many. But his central notion of class struggle has taught too many people to hate the rich. No just society can be built on that hatred. John Francis Kavanaugh in Following Christ in a Consumer Society (1982) uses a Marxist critique to help focus on the power of the gospel to transform the lives of consumers. Unfortunately, the Marxist critique is a turnoff to many so they miss the point of Kavanaugh’s, otherwise, very excellent critique of a consumer society.

Dorothy Day in her autobiography The Long Loneliness (1952) was a dedicated Marxist, but then became a Christian and she writes: “If I could have felt that Communism was the answer to my desire for a cause, a motive, a way to live in, I would have remained as I was. But I felt that only faith in Christ could give the answer. The Sermon on the Mount answered all the questions as to how to love God and one’s neighbor.”

Similarly, others looked for ways to address a consumer society in the writings of humanistic psychologists.

For example, Abraham Maslow was convinced that humanistic psychology was a perfect replacement for the materialism of the age. Many Christians embraced Maslow’s teaching without realizing he wanted humanistic psychology to also replace not just materialism but also even ecclesial institutions such as the Catholic Church. He writes in his diary of a talk he gave in 1962 at Sacred Heart College in Newton, Massachusetts. “They shouldn’t applaud me. They should attack me. If they were fully aware of what I was doing, they would.”

Or take for example Carl Rogers who started the human potential movement. In 1960 he published On Becoming a Person, popularizing the idea that to become a person, one has to find the real me and get rid of all the false me’s that socialization, including materialism, created. Very unfortunately, Rogers set aside the whole marvelous Christian tradition on scarcity and plenty. His work did not have the impact he thought it would, namely, a liberating impact and instead, more often than not, made simply a narcissistic impact. Too often in my view the Christian message in those days was wrapped in outmoded terminology and the wrapping was confused with the gift.

So let us turn now to the power and glory of the Lord’s way to deal with material goods in times of scarcity and in times of plenty.

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 $60,000 a 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 lady 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 seemed close to hopelessness, as she lamented: “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 is close to losing hope.

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. The sadness they feel is all about having to live with less, not all about losing happiness. Remember that.

In addition, the flower lady and my friend need to realize that in some ways their lives were helped greatly by abundance. They had fun 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 impoverished 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? They do not know how to sacrifice. 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 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 gifts our Christian faith gives us that enable us to find happiness in good times and in bad, “for richer, for poorer.” The 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. Notice how 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 material emptiness or 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. “Man does not live on bread alone.” There is a longing in the depths of each of our hearts which can never be satisfied by material goods or by a higher 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 material emptiness or ontological poverty. Yes, the evangelical spirit of poverty 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 by a marketing world that entices and tempts us. It is 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 is 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.

Affluence tempts us to believe if we love our children, we will give them the best, namely, more material things. But only materialism makes us believe that is the best. The best is really calling them to a life of virtue and moral greatness.

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 buy too much on credit, to forget to save for rainy days. After all, only suckers do those things. And this attitude doesn’t just involve material goods. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Only suckers believe otherwise. So we are 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 so far, 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, yours and mine, a big problem, namely, a lack of a gospel spirit of poverty.

If we look into the scriptures, we will see certain ideas about poverty:

 In the Old Testament in early Israel, the journey to the Promised Land by the Nomadic Hebrew people found everyone being, more or less, equally poor.
 On coming into the Promised Land and especially when Saul became king and others followed, there was an increase of wealth among the upper class and dire poverty elsewhere. Amos, the prophet, cries out against oppression of the poor, the denial of basic dignity to them, unjust demands for debt repayment. Other prophets followed suit. The Lord does not forget the cry of the poor.
 There is another theme in the Old Testament, namely, that poverty and disaster are the result of Israel’s unfaithfulness to the Lord.
 In the Wisdom literature, there is a middle state between excessive wealth and excessive want, a state most helpful for virtuous living. We should not have too much, less we be tempted to rely on ourselves and not on God and have too little and be tempted to curse God.
 The person with this spirit of poverty is one trusts the Lord in good times and in bad. This person furthers God’s holy purposes.

Many authors, when speaking of spiritual poverty, point to three steps that can be seen as spiritual poverty grows in our hearts to maturity. Let us look at the three steps in this process:
 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, 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 at 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 holding possessions in common and, even there, the surrender of private possessions was not mandatory.

There is also 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, what does the spirit of Christian poverty do for us?:
 The spirit of Christian poverty asks us to “consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air.” It asks us to trust the goodness of God in all ways.
 Christian poverty asks us to be open to the needs of others. Dives’ sin was not that he mistreated Lazarus, but that he just did not notice him or even care.
 In other words, our desire for wealth has to be moderated by our willingness to share.
 The only things we ever keep are those we give away.

In summary, spiritual poverty gives us a number of important messages:
 Mother Teresa pointed out that the poor of the world have a sacramental meaning. Here, in the poor, we encounter Christ. The poor are those with physical needs and those with spiritual needs.
 Spiritual poverty cautions us about too many material goods that can corrode our souls and make our commitments difficult. The widow’s might is a powerful message.
 Genuine spiritual poverty can help us in our current economic crisis.

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.”

Postscript: for further study, read A Good Life of St. Francis of Assisi, also John McKenzie’s, Dictionary of the Bible under the heading poverty or riches. See also Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1978). Also Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964)

Chapter II - The Thrift Culture vs. the I Want It All Culture (Final)

2009-11-05T13:26:00.002-06:00

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. They taught us if you wanted to go to this school, you had to save and pay up front. We did and felt good about it.

Yes, thrift and industry were virtues everyone needed in order to be successful. If you worked hard and were thrifty, you could make something of yourself. 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 for we were told vivid stories of families so poor that the kids took turns eating every other day. We never thought of ourselves as any other than middle class in hard times. And we knew that thrift and hard work were 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 Americans. 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 is a subtle change from a state of wanting more salary, more goods and more services to expecting more money, more goods and more services. We began to expect that this would continue on and on and so 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. 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 recede more and more. 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 a month. (Priests were paid a pittance!) 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. Chase Bank had not yet started its ads: “I want it all. I want it now.” But that is what was happening. 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 salary, more goods and more services. It means expecting more salary, more goods and more 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 better 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. A very poorly dressed fellow standing next to me in the grocery store pulled out a $20 bill and spent it all on lottery tickets. 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 was all before the economic collapse. Members of what the Commission called the lottery class (I call it the “I want it all” 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 the early 1900’s, (history calls this the Progressive Era) 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 in those days 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 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. That is all mostly gone now.

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 take out 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 is not a nest egg at the credit union, but there is a credit card.

Around 1960, banks and other institutions issuing credit cards or bank cards 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.

Now credit card folks really did build a financial model for getting people to move from thrift (healthy fear of debt) with its social stigma for people always in debt to “it is OK to have a heavy debt load.” Barbara Defoe Whitehead says it this way. “The credit card industry was the great innovator in this how to get people into debt and keep them there.” Consumers now bought more than they could afford and were happy doing so. People’s self-image changed from being stogy old saviors like Ben Franklin into “shop till you drop” savvy buyers.

The credit card folks (once they achieved the magic trick of I want it all) 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. This is unsavory!!

And, of course, then they discovered the student market. These were kids who did have jobs, did 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 started as a good idea way back in the early 1900’s when poor immigrants needed access to small loans (unsecured consumer loans). The banks at the time began issuing them (with regulators allowing higher interest rates so they could make a profit, but lower rates than the loan sharks). Credit unions were another good facet of democratization of credit. So were layaway plans and insurance. There was now a difference between good debt and bad debt. 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. Democratization of credit still is a good idea if used wisely.

And now we have been 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 is time to go 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 is better to limit going out to eat and it is much better to have family meals. That is a plus. In these times, it is 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 is much better to pay down our credit card balances. We learn to get along with less – entertainment, excursions, clothes, etc.

It is 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 for them 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 this: if we learn to live within our means, we will be learn to live with less. And if we live with less, we will be far happier.
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. At the last judgment as described in Matthew 25, the questions that will be asked of you are all about self-donation. I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.
3. The third theme is that who you are is much more important than what you have. You are first and foremost a child of God, a member of a family. You are one of God’s people, together with others, called and sent to bring the Good News.

It is a great time to discover and foster family life, togetherness, caring, and sharing. It is time to return to Ben Franklin’s ideas of economic freedom. Economic freedom is freedom from the worry of mounting bills and no way to pay them off. Immigrants quickly bought his idea of frugality and industry, namely, working hard, saving wisely and spending modestly so as to achieve a state of wellbeing liberated from the worries, burdens and anxieties that so filled the lives of the very poor in his time and the overly debt ridden in our time. We have to feel good about saving and bad about overspending.

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!

Chapter One - I Want It All. I Want It Now (Final)

2009-11-05T13:21:00.000-06:00

Do you remember the commercial of Chase Bank which ran over and over again in 2007: “I want it all. I want it now.”

Few of us, in that year, realized how dangerous this was. Our economic leaders surely did not tell us. Our politicians surely did not want us. And our preachers surely did not pay much attention to it.

Every year, our homes increased in value. And every year, we wanted more goods and services and came to expect more goods and services. Our salaries continued to rise. Our economy continued to flourish. We were all encouraged to spend, spend, spend with credit easily available.

It was a very seductive time. Most people vaguely knew they were spending too much but, like an adolescent who has three traffic tickets unpaid with failure to appear in court and a warrant out for his arrest, they felt that if they just did not pay attention to it, it just might go away.

Our leaders really did fail us in this regard, fail us very badly, political leaders, economic leaders and spiritual leaders. And when the collapse came in 2008 and 2009, it came with a vengeance, as we shall see very shortly. The world has changed and it has changed for all of us. We are no longer free to borrow, borrow, borrow. Credit is tight. We are no longer free to rack up huge bills in credit cards. We are no longer free to spend, spend, spend. Many are out of work, up to 10% of the work force. The world will not be the same as it was just a few years ago.

We are now being told, and rightly so, about something we forgot long ago, namely, that thrift is important, that our leaders and us, too, were engaging in what we now see in hindsight as some selfishness and greed which are wrong and that what we need is to restrain ourselves and rediscover thrift and moderation.

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 ways we can change ourselves with the grace of God.

Looking back, it is easy to see that we forgot to restrain ourselves, we forgot moderation and we forgot self-discipline. “I want it all…I want it now.” We thought that would be just fine. We were blindsided. We wanted to be free to spend as we liked. We wanted to be free from some of the moral restraints of the past (thrift, hard work, self-sacrifice, discipline).

But we were not the only ones who forgot. Our political and economic leaders shamelessly abandoned traditional moral restraints of fiscal responsibility. A little lying, a little cheating, a little stealing would not be so bad. We will see in a later chapter that there is a basic rule of anthropology: Leaders gain and maintain power, not only by money but by making sure their view dominates and prevails. We were lower on the economic ladder and, when our leaders kept assuring us that everything was just fine, their views prevailed. We believed them. We shall see how they themselves now admit, in their best moments, making the grossest of errors.

Let us try to put this in perspective. Do you remember when we were adolescents, what we wanted more than anything else is to be free from restraints? How many times did we say to ourselves: no one is going to tell me what to do? In our adolescent fantasy world at the time we believed we could perhaps lie a little, cheat a little, steal a little and get away with it. Cheating in school was common place. Cheating in sports was common place. Lying to our girlfriends or boyfriends was common place and petty stealing was universally visible, as any shopkeeper would tell us. It came as a shocking realization that sometimes we got caught lying. But we did not repent. Many of us just lied more to cover it up. It came also as a shocking realization that if we cheated in school we did not always get caught, but some day it might catch up with us and it did for many. And we remember those who continued to steal, sooner or later, almost always got caught.

And yet, as adolescents, many continued to lie, cheat and steal. And many adolescents, and those older, continued to prolong their immaturity by embracing freedom from sexual restraints. Following the mass media, there are those who engage in sex without feeling, and not just adolescents, boys ripping off girls, girls ripping off boys, pornography and all other manner of perversity. The result is often depression, loneliness and alienation. Here at Boys Town, we see this with the children who come to us. They are not happy having to embrace freedom without moral restraints.

It is very curious for this author to reflect on how this mantra of freedom from restraints, so prevalent in adolescence, moved into the political and economic realm of adulthood in financial matters. Here it simply means that the profit motive was allowed to be less restrained by any sense of justice or fairness, by government regulations, or by our consciences.

Most adults know instinctively that if we do not put taboos on lying, cheating and stealing that they will grow and flourish. But somehow in the economic sector, our leaders began to let the market (freedom from restraint) prevail and the heck with everything else. What mattered was profit. It did not matter if you lied a bit or cheated a bit or even a lot. Harbingers were ENRON where there was a massive corporate network of enriching those at the top and lying to those below. There was the collapse of World Com, but everyone thought it was an aberration. And then there was the collapse of Arthur Anderson and people began to say perhaps this is not an aberration.

This became a very malignant form of capitalism. It was not a healthy form of free enterprise which is based on justice, fairness, a free exchange of goods, private property and a condemnation of greed and malice. Free enterprise is good in unleashing free human creativity in the economic sector, the positive role of business with justice and caring.

But what began to emerge, as we shall see in later chapters, was a huge global economy where economic leaders and government regulators did not put visible limits on the economic sector in terms of justice and fairness. They started to believe: “I want it all…I want it now.” They were like adolescents, wanting freedom from restraints. They began to believe it just as adolescents did. 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 the fast buck.”

But less we be too hard on everyone, it is good to remember that basic principle of anthropology, namely: elites gain and maintain power, not only by money but by also making sure their view dominated and prevailed. The elites claimed, as they always have, superior intelligence, superior wisdom and the power to enforce silence to anyone who disagreed. It has always been difficult to tell truth to power. So few, if any, did.

If we did not have police pursuing robbers, there would be more robberies. If we did not have governmental restraints in financial areas, we would have more lying and cheating. And that is what happened. It all began with the insistence that we should have fewer banking regulations, more self regulation.

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 (freedom from restraint). Many nodded their heads in agreement. That sounded great to a lot of people. No mention of justice, fairness or regulation by others. 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 is like telling the night manager at McDonald’s that when he closes and counts the cash drawer, no one else will recount it. It will all be on the honor system and no further checking. No business owner, in his right mind, would allow that. But that is the beginning of what we did in banking. “Let us use the honor system.” When the honor system is used in schools, it is the teachers who have the honor and the students who have the system. It is important to remember that, even in banking.

What were the ideas behind this lessening of regulation and voluntary oversight? 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 the self-interested.” 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 price them properly. He failed to mention selfishness, greed, fraud and the neglect of justice and fairness. In other words, he failed to mention public and private virtue. Justice is about giving everyone their due. Fairness means you have to think about more than your own advantage. You cannot say the heck with everyone else. You have to treat others the way you want to be treated. But that does not make a lot of sense when you believe the commercial of Chase Bank: “I want it all…I want it now.”

Too many people believed that. It was nothing more than greed. Subtle, yes, but greed nonetheless and no one was reminding us of that. It was nothing more than greed. Instead of saying I want it all, if we are honest and conscientious, we should be saying I would like to have my fair share and we need to make sure others have their fair share, too. Instead of saying I want it now, we should be saying: I need to save. I need to discipline myself. If I want more, I have to pay for it later and I have to be fair with others.

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

Here in our country it was this greedy 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 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 with, up until now, little thought of paying it off.

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 at certain colleges is what they call “free money.” The money comes to you. 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. 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.

Several years ago a variety of church leaders, with general concerns for the poor, argued that “redlining” is immoral and rightly so. They also argued that credit should be available to the poor. This was also a good idea. In their enthusiasm, they forgot to mention that it should not be given to people who cannot pay it back. They meant we should make credit available to the poor so they do not have to go to loan sharks. Going to loan sharks is a bad idea. Making credit available is a good idea as long as it does not trick the poor into taking out loans they cannot pay back! Politicians picked up on the good idea, but it mutated very quickly into a big mess in such a way that many of the poor cannot pay back their loans. Politicians and churchmen forgot that a noble goal will be worthless if not implemented properly.

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 the next chapter, let us look at how we went from a nation of savers, namely, a thrift culture to a nation of debt ridden slouches. That Chase ad pretty well sums it up. “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 an appropriate 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 salary records 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: You instinctively knew that as financial elites you gain and maintain power, not only by money but by making sure your view dominated and prevailed. That is irresponsible on your part. You tried to live with no sense of responsibility, no moral restraints.

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 we not 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…are owners of all kinds of 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.

Chapter VIII

2009-08-17T14:43:00.001-05:00

Where Do We Go From Here?
Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION:

It should be clear from everything said in the prior seven chapters that Americans overspent, have become too dependent on that spending for our wellbeing and have, in some ways, succumb to the dangers of consumerism and affluence which simply means expecting, not just wanting, but expecting more goods and more services year after year after year. The current economic downturn is not just a minor bump in the road. It is the major milestone in the last 100 years. America has lost its economic prominence and many, many Americans are hurting financially and emotionally.

We can seize the moment in this economic downturn to orient our lives as individuals, as families and as a nation. This can be done in the following ways:

1. Many of us have lived departmentalized lives, with one part of us dedicated to materialistic pursuits and the other part dedicated to the service of God and the love of our brothers and sisters. In a sense, we have lived in two silos. The first step in these tough economic times is to break those silos apart, to put less emphasis on material goods and to make the goal of union with God and others in God our primary unitary goal with all else subordinate to it. We cannot serve both God and mammon!

Let us compare our options:

(a) Our culture says: our identity is determined by what we have, what we buy. Our faith tells us that our identity is determined by who we are and the people we are, how we are related to God and our neighbor, our family, our brothers, our sisters.

(b) Our consumer side says: that buying is good and will make us happy. Our Christian side will say that buying needs to be moderated, will not make us happy, but what will make us happy is loving God and caring for others. It involves prayer and the sacraments.

(c) Our consumer side will say that the solution to life’s problems lies in spending, in purchasing material things and even such things as vacations and trips. Our Christian side will say that the solution to life’s problems lies in trust in God, in values, hard work and education.

(d) Our consumer side will say that a good life is a materially successful life. Our Christian side will say that a good life is a good family life and a life of virtue and service.

(e) Our material side will say the primary goal of life is to garner material possessions. Our Christian side will say the primary goal of life: love the Lord with our whole heart and soul and love our neighbor as ourselves.

2. Bringing ourselves to a spiritual equilibrium or a state of spiritual health means that material things of our lives that serve us 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.

3. It should be very clear that just as we need to live more frugally that the poor need to be helped to live more humanly.

We must consistently reject the mantra: “I want it all. I want it now.” We must work hard to loath 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 mammon.

We pursue the good life, even the prosperous life, but we put God first. We refuse to abandon life at any stage of its development. We do not believe in socialism. We do not believe in unfettered capitalism.

4. 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.

5. The Lord is our goal. Our real wealth is our family and relationships! Faith, hope and charity are our priceless possessions. Praise 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.

Chapter VII

2009-08-17T14:20:00.002-05:00

How Did We Get Into This Financial Mess?
Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION:

There are lots of books and articles explaining the financial collapse, first in the banking system and then failure of so many firms resulting in loss of jobs, savings and even hope for the future. For you and me who read this, the crisis is found in the terrible financial damage done to you household and mine and to small and big businesses resulting from the housing collapse and the credit market collapse. The authors point out that it was America’s bankers and businessmen, on one hand, and our government failing to regulate these credit markets which has put the American model of free market capitalism under a cloud.

The financial system collapsed. The government regulators failed to curb widespread abuses and corruption. America has lost its economic primacy in the world, just as you and I have lost much in terms of jobs, savings and hope. This economic crisis is global and it will go on longer than most of us think. America has to now focus inward because of unemployment and all our troubles. And much of the world blames American financial excesses of our bankers, and rightly so and our government’s failure to regulate and rightly so. The good will towards President Obama mitigates some of this, but not very much.

What I am trying to do here is to help you understand how we got into this mess because it will help you personally get out of this mess, get your spiritual priorities right, free you from anxieties, and help you vote right so that we can put government in who can help lead us forward in a just and honest way. This is a gigantic task.

1. So let’s begin with the question: How did all this trouble get started? Lots of people have written a lot, but perhaps the most insightful way to look at it is to read a book by award winning Financial Times journalist, Gillian Tett, entitled Fool’s Gold. The basic narrative outline written here is following that text. I even sometimes paraphrase it. The ethical analysis and spiritual advice is mine. It is highly recommended that you buy the text itself. It is such worthwhile reading. It tells the story of how it all started at the beginning with bankers at J.P. Morgan who were looking for new “products” to peddle to make more money and how they came up with an exotic financial product known as credit derivatives. We
We will see how derivatives involved currency trading and then just about every aspect of the business known across the globe. We’ll describe some of it here. It is important we understand the great banks and financial institutions of the world were involved: Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Barclay’s Bank of London, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and insurance giants such as AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and many others.

2. Gillian Tett points out that this economic collapse was not triggered by a recession or war or other events. It was self-inflicted by the banking community, starting in America, and the failure of our government oversight bodies to regulate those bankers. It also says rightly that the blame cannot be put on just a very few bad, greedy, ugly individuals, although there were some of those. The blame must be put on the entire investment system, as well as the watchdog regulatory structures of government and lack of oversight, plus plenty of greedy bankers who sat in their silos and abandoned the virtues of prudence, moderation, balance and any real concern for the common good. A huge spiritual failing. Instead, they relied on complex mathematical models which were based on a “ridiculously limited set of data” and which, they held, were an infallible guide.

3. Now this is an important point. Because these things were so arcane and hard to understand, these financial gurus did what, in anthropology, is called exercising the function of elites. Tett says: “Elites try to maintain their power, not simply by garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed.” Bankers sat in their silos. They said: we’ll make lots of money. Everything is OK. Don’t think anything is bad. And those elites dominated everyone below them so as not to ask questions. Regulators sat in their silos placing blind faith in the creed of risk dispersion. There is no need for more regulation, they said, and need for even less regulation. And anyone who disagreed with them was laughed to scorn. Congress sat in their silos. The whole financial community was in its own great big silo separated from the rest of society. Many smaller investment firms and trust funds cannot be blamed for believing the “big fish” would not lead them this far astray.

So let us start at the beginning.

4. In the early 1980s, J. P. Morgan, along with several other famous banks jumped into the new fangled derivatives field which then exploded rapidly. Some ten years later, by 1994, the total notional value of derivatives contracts on J. P. Morgan’s books was estimated to be 1.7 trillion in derivatives. Activities were generating half of the bank’s trading revenue. If you make .02% on each contract it is a small amount but it adds up to huge sums with great volume.

It is important to note that most members of the banking and investment world had absolutely no idea how derivatives were producing some phenomenal sums, let alone what so called swaps groups (another kind of derivative) actually did. Those who worked in the area intended to revel in its era of mystery. These bankers referred to their experiments as “innovation”, meaning the invention of new ways of generating returns. Peter Hancock, the leader of the group, often said: “You will have to make at least half your revenues each year from a product which did not exist before.”

5. A derivative is, on the most basic level, a bet on the future value of an asset. It is a contract whose value derives from some other asset such as a bond, a stock or quantity of gold. Those who buy and sell derivatives are each making a bet on the future value of that asset. The bet can be one of two kinds…either a high risk long shot bet on price swings to make huge profits…or a way to protect yourself against undesirable price swings. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with derivatives if used prudently and supervised wisely.

Here’s an example Tett uses. Let’s say that on a particular day the pound to dollar exchange rate is such that one British pound buys $1.50. So Joe is going to make a trip from England to the United States in six months and he wants to be sure that he can buy dollars at that rate just before the trip. So he might enter into an agreement to exchange 1,000 pounds at a bank in six months time at $1.50, no matter what the actual exchange rate is then. And he agrees the trade must happen no matter what the rate of exchange at the time. That is a future. There is nothing wrong with futures if used prudently and supervised wisely.

Or he may agree to pay a fee (let’s say $25) to have the option to make the exchange at the $1.50 rate which he would decide not to exercise if the rate actually became more favorable.

Versions of derivatives trading go all the way back to clay tablets from Mesopotamia in 1750, futures and options trading. In the 12th and 13th century, English monasteries that raised sheep entered into futures contracts with foreign merchants to sell wool up to 20 years in advance…in the 17th century, Holland’s tulip prices began to rise substantially. The merchants frantically bought and sold tulip futures leading to a bubble that ended in a spectacular crash.

In 1849, the Chicago Board of Trade began to allow buying and selling of futures and options on wheat and corn, cattle and hogs, etc. Farmers often lock in a specific price for grain “for September delivery.”

6. In the 1970s, a bold new era of derivatives innovation was inspired to bring derivatives not just to commodities, but to currency trading, to homes, etc. The value of foreign currencies, (which had been pegged to the dollar) after World War II, became free floating. That led to unpredictable swings in exchange rates. Inflation in the U.S. peaked at 13.2% in 1981 and it made investors try to find ways to protect themselves from high interest rates.

The prime rate in the U.S. rose to 20% in June 1981. So now you could buy derivatives which offered you the right to purchase currencies as specific exchange rates in the future.

Peter Hancock’s group at J. P. Morgan specialized in another creative version of derivatives known as “swaps.” Let’s take a simple example of two home owners, owner A and owner B. They both have a $500,000 ten year mortgage. And owner A has a fixed rate of 8% and owner B has a floating rate. If owner A thinks that rates are going to go down and he doesn’t want to pay 8% which is fixed and owner B thinks they are going to go up so he would like to have a fixed rate of 8%, they could swap their payments for a while or for as long as they agreed to.

Then take the case of IBM in 1979. They had lots of Swiss franks and Deutschmarks (they sold bonds in those currencies). And IBM didn’t need so many of those and needed a lot of cash in dollars. The World Bank said it would issue World Bank bonds in dollars, own the bonds, give the dollars and IBM would pay the obligations to bond holders and IBM would swap Franks and Deutschmarks to World Bank without having to sell them.

Note, too, that after the financial crash of 1929, bringing the Great Depression to America and the world, there was a popular backlash against Wall Street and the Glass Steagall Act was passed forcing banks to split off their commercial banking business from the capital markets operation (trading of debt and equity securities…derivatives). Stern government regulation!

The crucial point about derivatives is that they can, on one hand, help investors reduce risk or they can create a great deal more risk. Everything depended on how they were used and the motives and skills of those who traded in them. So J.P. Morgan’s New York headquarters could not (because of the Glass Steagall regulations) play capital markets but its London office could because England had a more hands off attitude towards regulation. The London traders had greater power and freedom and they could make a lot of money fast, take far greater risks and they could walk if anything terrible happened. Few of the higher ups at Morgan knew how the swaps team trades worked.

Morgan was one of the very few banks with a top AAA rating and that assured clients that the bank could stand by its trades. By the early 1990s, the swaps department accounted for almost half the bank’s trading revenues.

7. The head of the swaps groups once explained to a reporter from Fortune that his group was like “the spaceship Galileo heading for Planet Jupiter.” “It would be something in which you would get beyond binary risk and into a combination of risks such as interest rates and currencies.” Hancock gave an example of an oil company which was afraid of oil prices dropping and interest rates rising. To hedge, it would buy an oil price floor and an interest rate cap…but maybe the company would like something a little cheaper: “In that case, we could do a contract that would pay out only if oil prices are low and interest rates are high at the same time.”

8. By the early 90s, bank regulators knew that many of their rules had been drafted before the explosion of derivatives innovation. They, for example, determined levels of reserves banks must have if they were engaging in derivatives activities. But the problem was the regulators couldn’t get good estimates of the risks involved and so many kept saying everything is fine.

Now there was an industry body to represent the swaps world and it was called the International Swaps and Derivatives Association. And the first thing the ISDA did was conduct a survey of the market. And in 1987, ISDA guessed the total volume of derivative contracts was $865 billion. That shocked western government officials. So in 1987, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission wanted to regulate interest rates and currency swaps in the same way that it monitored commodities derivatives. The ISDA lobbied Congress and won. So government regulation did not happen. A sad day.

It was a crazy period because the ISDA now said that the rules should be written by the industry itself and upheld by voluntary mutual accord. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, liked voluntariness because he truly believed that if everyone followed their own self-interest everything would go fine. He’s a big follower of Ann Rynd whose books were popular in the 1950s, recommending what she called the “virtue of selfishness.” He believed: if everybody is selfish, everything will work out well. I know that sounds dumb, but Alan Greenspan believed it and so did lots of others because it fit their purposes…make a lot of money and the heck with everybody else.

Remember a basic rule of anthropology: elites gain and maintain power not only by money, but also by making sure their view (Greenspan and Bernanke) dominated and prevailed.

9. By now all the great banks and stock market firms not only of America, but the world were caught up in the derivatives movement: Chase Manhattan, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Bear Stearns etc.

And don’t forget about the mortgage market which became huge. The assumption of the elite was that home prices would continue to rise as they had, more or less, ever since World War II. We talked earlier in this series about the democratization of credit. Groups like ACORN and other well intentioned groups who wanted to help the poor thought it would be a good idea if the poor could borrow money and own a house. The problem was that to borrow, the money lenders had to become a lot less fussy about demanding that borrowers prove they had the income to repay the loans. The money lenders gave loans they knew they should not give. That is morally wrong because the poor get hurt even worse. Tett mentions that they even were offering “teaser” loans with very low initial rates (below 2.5%) and these rose in stages to be quite high, often well above 10%. Well, many of these families were taking out teaser loans and they could barely make the 2.5%, but neither they nor the lenders worried about the risk because it was assumed that they would simply refinance the loans at the end of the teaser rate period.

10. And they all assumed that the incredible rise in home prices would continue, when, lo and behold, in 2006 in Las Vegas and Miami and San Francisco and then Southern California, home prices stalled. And this began to trigger a wave of subprime defaults and some began abandoning their mortgages when their house was worth less than they owed on the mortgage. Some banks then, interestingly enough, turned to the derivatives market to reduce their risk. They purchased credit default swaps which promised to redeem any default losses on the mortgage bonds. Tett points out that in January 2006, folks launched an index for tracking these offerings and their values. It was sort of like the Dow Jones and was called ABX. “Why didn’t someone (either regulators or people in the business) blow the whistle?” And the answer comes from anthropology. The elites gain and maintain power not only by money, but by making sure that their view dominated and prevailed. Their view was: this will all work very well. So be quiet!

11. In early 2006, small groups began spotting something odd: some of the data in the mortgage database suggested the pace of defaults on risky mortgages was starting to rise. This seemed strange and did not fit what they thought were the normal economic rules. At the same time, banks and other lenders were passing out lots and lots of mortgages which were becoming riskier and riskier. These loans were repackaged into more and more DCOs in order to make up for declining profit margins. And these were bundled and the products were sold creating huge masses of super senior risk – and guess what. They brought insurance against the super-senior risk from places like AIG. Remember that in 2004, the Security Exchange Commission’s five members voted unanimously to lift the leverage ratio control, namely, the controls on the amount of assets a brokerage house could hold on its balance sheet relative to its core equity. The UBS folks in Europe developed mathematical models that said super-senior would never lose more than 2% of its value, even in the worst cases. Nonsense! This defied all prudence and common sense.

In 2006, home prices across America started to slide. In October, the famous home builder, Kara Homes, filed for bankruptcy.

12. In June 2007, a crisis hit a hedge fund connected to Bear Stearns…J. P. Morgan now threatened to call in its loans. Disaster was near. In mid-July, another tsunami appeared as Deutsche Industrie Bank (IKB), a medium size lender in Dusseldorf, Germany, started to go under. Would anybody help supply new sources of funds? Nobody did until the German government stepped in. As with Bear Stearns bailout, this was only a temporary reprieve.

On August 6, 2007, American Home Mortgage Investment Corporation filed for bankruptcy. Now the commercial paper market was starting to get jittery.

13. Then the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Central Bank of Canada and the Swiss National Bank started to also get jittery. The Federal Reserve kept making statements that the problems were “contained.” Remember what elites do. They control what people believe. Investors were dumping anything that might contain default risk. They were heading for the safest assets around. Countrywide, America’s largest independent mortgage lender, on August 15, 2007, said its rate of foreclosure on subprime loans was roaring upward. Now real trouble came as many banks stopped lending money to any other banks or institutions that looked at all risky.

14. On August 31, 2007, then President George Bush stood in the Rose Garden with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Adjustable mortgage rates were climbing and defaults were rising enormously. Democratization of credit failed so many! The then President Bush tried to calm the nation saying: “This market has seen tremendous innovation in recent years, as new lending products made credit available to more people. For the most part, this has been a positive development…this has led some homeowners to take out loans larger than they could afford based on overly optimistic assumptions about the future performance of the housing market. Others may have been confused by the terms of their loan or misled by irresponsible lenders.” The President only offered some simple band-aid solutions. Then in September, in England, the fifth largest British lender called Northern Rock announced it had gone to the Bank of England to seek emergency support. Then on October 11, just as Citicorp and J. P. Morgan were trying to create a Superfund, the famous Moody’s cut its ratings on $32 billion worth of mortgage backed bonds which were issued in 2006 and had carried a medium risk rating. They said they might downgrade $20 billion more of mortgage backed bonds that carried a AAA stamp.

15. The entire credit structure was built on the guess that AAA was ultra-safe and AA almost rock solid. Now this was all crumbling.

At the beginning of 2008, UBS, Merrill Lynch and Citibank all reported huge write-downs on credit assets, totally about $53 billion just for those three banks.

Then Bear Stearns found itself in horrible shape and J. P. Morgan Chase cut a deal to buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share with the Federal Reserve taking $30 billion of Bear Stearns’ assets. Remember that in October of 2007, Bear Stearns stock had been trading around $130 a share. Timothy Geithner, New York Federal Reserve Chairman, pulled this deal off of $2 a share! He is now Secretary of Treasury in the Obama administration! Yes, Geithner was part of that elite!

In February 2008, AIG finally admitted it did not have the reserves it would need to meet claims. It announced $43 billion of write-downs of super-senior assets, even more than at Citicorp and UBS. Lehmann Brothers then collapsed on Sunday and at the prospect of AIG collapsing, the money market panicked…Tett notes calmly: “The three events produced the perfect market storm.” The markets went into a freefall.

The next logical step, if this crash continued, was there would be no money coming out of ATM machines. On the 16th, the Federal Reserve said it would give an $85 billion loan to AIG in exchange for almost 80% share of its company. Note the Federal Reserve had just refused that aid to Lehmann Brothers which was now gone. On Monday, the 15th, just before AIG deal, Bank of America was pushed to buy, by the feds, Merrill Lynch. Finally, on October 13, 2008, Treasury Secretary Paulson called nine American bank heads into the U.S. Treasury and they were each given a piece of paper the feds demanded they sell shares of their bank to the government and they were forcefully told to sign. Secretary of Treasury Paulson said: take it or leave it. Either you accept voluntary infusion of federal funds or you’re out on a limb by yourself. They accepted the funds and the rest is history.

16. Commercial paper was drying up. Credit was drying up. ATMs would have dried up had the Federal government not stepped in.

17. Summary and Conclusions:

A. Many people have wondered how these very bright young people trading in derivatives and making subprime mortgages and taking huge risks with other people’s monies…their conscience did not bother them for what they did was ruin million of Americans’ dreams and deflate America’s greatness in the eyes of the world…Remember, these young people were trained in some of our finest universities. They were told not to worry about moral principles which were all relative anyway. They possess bright intellects-can understand complex business transactions. They have mastery of high level mathematical formulas.

A big part of the answer why conscience didn’t bother them lies in that basic principle of anthropology we have repeated over and over again: “Elites try to maintain their power not simply garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed.” It is what the behaviorists call environmental conditioning and that is easy to understand. Most of us live in a bubble and what is inside the bubble conditions us to think the way we think, believe and act unless we are countercultural. For example, if you are a teenager and live in the bubble of MTV, rock stars, rappers, drugs, sex and alcohol, you are going to believe that is “the normal way of life.” To a teenager, you have to live that way. The elites in the teenage world maintain that supremacy.

To not believe what the elite says means you need to be slightly countercultural. A person with strong religious convictions and relationship to God and His people could overcome that environment, but others cannot.

If you live in a silo of bright banking people and your purpose is to make as much money as possible and the elites around you and above you make sure their view dominates and prevails (There is nothing to worry about. Everything is OK.) Then you will not realize that what you are doing is a violation of prudence, moderation, responsibility, balance and common sense. A violation of virtue! What you will not realize is that you are becoming very greedy and selfish and are going to harm others. What you need to overcome this silo effect is a Power greater than the power of the elites. Most traders and bankers had their private doubts, but they were swayed by environmental conditioning by the spirit of their organization. Or it was simply too complex to understand and you could not be reasonably expected to figure it out! If you questioned the rightness of the thinking of the elite, in your bank or government agency, you would probably be fired or at least not promoted. All of this should provide business schools with the realization that there has to be an enormous effort made in ethical training, in environmental conditioning and anthropology required of students if this is not to happen again. Without virtue all ventures collapse.

B. Many of the banking, business and government elites believed in what Ann Rynd, as we saw above, called “the virtue of selfishness.” They believed that if anyone acts on self-interest everything will work out well. Alan Greenspan believed it and so many others did because it fit their purposes…that ethical theory has to be abandoned (namely, that all persons should seek their own self-interest and all would go well). It has to be abandoned immediately. It is wrong and destructive of human flourishing. It is based on the denial of original sin.

C. The bankers and investors in this drama often describe themselves as feeling invincible, charting new territory, applying new financial services without a touch of humility. They were suffering from what the Greeks called hubris or pride/arrogance. There is an old adage: Pride always comes before the fall and that certainly is true here.

What is hubris? It is the belief that you can do no wrong and that nobody will challenge you. Remember the story of Darius, the great Persian King in the 5th century B.C. who, when Athens decided to stand up and declare its independence from him, Darius decided to punish them, gathering a great Naval Armada and crossing over to Peloponnesia only to suffer great damage to his fleet as a result of a terrible storm. Darius is said to have taken out a huge whip and whipping the sea said to the god of the sea, Poseidon: “You will not interfere with my will.” Because of his pride, in 490 B.C., his army suffered a huge disaster at the battle of Marathon at the hands of the Athenians who chose freedom over tyranny. The Greeks said Darius lost because of hubris. (sign of pride/arrogance) The reason the financial world went wacko is also because of hubris on the part of these people who thought they were invincible.

That hubris, once again, develops through environmental conditioning. You can be blinded into taking terrible risks with no thought of harm to others because you are reinforced to believe that you are the vanguard of the future. In the 21st century, environments are created with such power they can blind you to moral values at stake. The propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels was so powerful in Nazi Germany that even the good Christian people were blinded into accepting and cooperating with the Holocaust. The Nazis suffered from great hubris.

If you belonged to the banking fraternity which is close knit which feels itself superior and invincible and has success after success after success, pretty soon it is blinding to those who are part of it. You may otherwise be good persons, but here are surrounded by leaders and coworkers who feel themselves invincible, a new breed, and clearly making huge sums of money. This is heady stuff and you would have to be greatly countercultural to be morally sensitive and courageous enough to stand up to this pressure!

Postscript: As stated in the beginning of this paper, we are basically following the marvelous book by Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold (New York: Free Press, 2009) for the financial tale. The ethical part is my own. Buy Fool’s Gold. You’ll like it.

Chapter VI

2009-08-17T14:07:00.005-05:00

The Magnitude of Our Economic Crisis &
Appropriate Religious Response
Val J. Peter

PART I – The Magnitude of the Economic Crisis

In 1991, the unbelievable happened, namely, the Soviet Union collapsed. What Ronald Reagan called “the evil empire” fell in upon itself and its collapse was caused by the Russian government politicians. In the year 2008, the United States suddenly ceased to be the economic leader of the world. What caused this great crash of 2008 and the loss of American’s leadership, as well as a geopolitical setback for the West? Basically, American bankers and American government politicians who failed to regulate as they should. This is a far greater event than has happened in America in at least a century and maybe more.

A. America loses its supremacy in the world

1. The American financial system is seen as having collapsed. The American government regulatory framework is seen as an enormous failure to curb widespread abuses and corruption.

2. People argue about what caused this crisis and mostly they say it was housing prices and the subprime mortgage market in the USA. Others say it in a different way, namely, that when you have very, very low interest rates and an awful lot of money available, the temptation is to make more and more loans and bigger and bigger loans to less and less credit worthy clients. Examples: you are a lending agent at a bank and you get paid on the basis of how many loans you make. So at this low interest rate, you can make more money by giving mortgages to people who can’t possibly pay them back. And you also collect a bigger bonus or perhaps a 10% cut.

When the mortgage rates started to rise, thousands and thousands of borrowers could not afford the rise in variable rates with subsequent delinquencies.

3. Americans have lost one quarter of our net worth in just about a year and a half since June 30, 2007 and the trend continues. Why? Because the single largest asset of Americans is equity in their homes. Total home equity in the United States in its peak in 2006 was $13 trillion and has dropped to $8.8 trillion by mid-2008 and continued falling.

Retirement accounts are the largest household asset of Americans. These dropped by at least 22% from $10.3 trillion in 2006 to $8 trillion in mid-2008.
At the same time, savings and investment assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion. Pension assets (apart from retirement savings) lost $1.2 trillion. Together these losses total a whopping $8.3 trillion.

4. By November 2008, the S&P 500, the U.S. market indices, was down 45% from its 2007 high.

5. This crisis reflects the greatest regulatory failure in modern history. Western capital markets will not return to full health for years. The U.S. financial system is seen as having failed. This will stop the global shift towards economic deregulation.

6. The U. S. will remain the most powerful nation on earth for a while longer because its military strength alone ensures this. But America has lost its place as economic leader in the world.

B. Globalization in retreat

1. The longstanding brief that everybody wins in a single world market is no longer widely held. Much of the world blames the U.S. financial excesses for the global recession. So the U.S. model of free market capitalism is out of favor.

2. The world’s three largest economies, U.S., European Union and Japan will not be able to generate a normal cyclical recovery. The global expansion of goods, capital and jobs started reversing. The exports started falling sharply. The World Bank says exports from China, Japan, Mexico, Russia and the U.S. fell by 25% or more in the year ending 2008.

Capital flows were plunging. Emerging markets are projected to receive only $165 billion in net positive capital inflow this year (2009) down from $461 billion in 2008.

3. Immigrant workers are now returning home in waves. Japan and Spain are offering them cash to leave. Malaysia is forcing them out.

4. Countries in Africa have been hardest hit. Democratic Congo, as well as the Central African Republic are in political chaos. Central African Republic cannot pay its civil servants. It is literally falling apart. The Democratic Congo will be soon be unable to import food and fuel, namely, essentials. A World Bank study estimates that 53 million people living in emerging markets will fall back into absolute poverty in 2009. Then Russia and Iran are hurt very, very badly. Iran has been losing money on every barrel of oil it sells. Russia is too dependent on a single giant source of income…oil and gas. Its economy, too, is in trouble.

5. Only China has prevailed. China’s growth did diminish, but not by much. It is becoming clear that the U.S./China relationship emerges as the most important bilateral one in the world. The two nations have very similar geopolitical interests. Neither China nor America wants Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Neither wants Korea to become destabilized. Neither wants Pakistan to become a failed state.

SUMMARY: Free market capitalism, globalization and deregulation which had been rising for 30 years has now ended.

C. What does this new world look like?

1. Free-market capitalism is in enormous decline.

2. In its place has come state capitalism, a system where the state functions as the leading economic actor and uses markets primarily for political gain.

For example, it has been said that the economic capital of the United States is no longer New York City, but is now Washington, D. C. And with that, comes the injection of politics into economic decisions. A bad deal!

3. State capitalism has four primary agencies:

(a) National oil corporations – the 13 largest oil companies in the world measured by their reserves are owned and operated by governments, not multinational corporations such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell or Total. These companies are: Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Aramco; the National Iranian Oil Company; Petróleos de Venezuela; S.A.; Russia’s Gazprom and Rosneft; the China National Petroleum Corporation; Malaysia’s Petronas and Brazil’s Petrobras. State owned companies control more than 75% of global oil reserves and production.

(b) State owned enterprises – Here governments don’t just regulate the market. These state owned enterprises help bolster political leaders. What are state owned enterprises? Think of Angola’s Endiama (diamonds), Azerbaijan’s AzerEnerji (electricity generation), Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom (uranium), and Morocco’s Office Chérifien des Phosphates. Then also think of Russia’s fixed line telephone and arms-export monopolies. Think of China’s aluminum monopoly, power-transmission duopoly, major telecommunications companies and airlines. Think of India’s national railroad.

(c) In some developing countries, large companies remain in private hands, but rely on government patronage in the form of credit, contracts and subsidies. Here you have corruption, bribery and everything that you get when you drive out competition. For example, in Russia any large business must have favorable relations with the state in order to succeed. National champions are controlled by a small group of oligarchs who are personally in favor with the Kremlin. The companies Norilsk Nickel (mining); Novolipetsk Steel and NMK Hlding (metallurgy); and Evraz, SeverStal and Metallionvest (steel) fall into this category. In China, the same applies.

Variations of the privately owned but government-favored national champions have cropped up elsewhere: Cevital (agroindustries) in Algeria, Vale (mining) in Brazil, Tata (cars, steel and chemicals) in India, Tnuva (meat and dairy) in Israel, Solidere (construction) in Lebanon, and the San Miguel Corporation (food and beverage) in the Phillipines.

(d) The task of financing these companies has fallen in part to Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFS). These act as repositories for excess foreign currency earned from the export of commodities or manufactured goods. They are more than just bank accounts. They are state-owned investment funds with mixed portfolios of foreign currencies, government bonds, real estate, precious metals and a stake in lots of companies, foreign and domestic. The Kuwait Investment Authority, now the world’s fourth-largest SWF, was founded in 1953. But the term “sovereign wealth fund” was first coined in 2005, reflecting a recognition of these funds’ growing significance. Since then, several countries have joined the game: Dubai, Libya, Qatar, South Korea and Vietnam.

All of this makes markets less competitive and less productive. Only free markets can produce durable prosperity. Please note that since the great collapse of 2008, governments of the world’s wealthiest countries are now intervening in their economies and taking ownership of private assets. The U.S. and Europe governments know that to maintain popular support they must promise to return these long enterprises and banks into private hands once they’ve been restored to health. Not so in other places.

We said above New York City was the world’s financial capital. It is now no longer even the financial capital of the United States. Washington is. Similar shift of economic responsibility is taking place throughout the world: from Shanghai to Beijing, from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, from Sydney to Canberra, from Säo Paulo to Brasilia, from Mumbai to New Delhi. And in London, Moscow and Paris, where finance and politics coexist there is the same shift occurring toward government.

The result: deep state intervention in the economy means a door is opening to bureaucratic ways to inefficiency and corruption. This is more likely to hold back growth.

Now there is much talk about “decoupling,” the process whereby emerging economies develop a domestic base to free them from dependence on consumer demand in the U.S. and Europe. Incidences of decoupling are found in Brazil, China, India and Russia.

PART II – The Spiritual Implications of Global Crisis

A. Economic theory in the last 20 years has harmed human flourishing

In the Catholic tradition, there was a Second Vatican Council. One of the documents was called “The Church in the Modern World.” And reflecting on Scripture, it says something very important for all of us.

“Christ’s redemptive work, while of itself directed toward the salvation of human beings involves also the renewal of the whole temporal order.”

This document insists that “the spiritual and temporal orders are so connected in the one plan of God that He, Himself, intends in Christ to appropriate the whole universe into a new creation, initially here on earth, fully on the last day.”

In other words, one of the spiritual messages we receive here is to try to integrate the following of Christ with wellbeing of the world’s economic systems and social systems and wellbeing of all human kind.

There was a lot of optimism in those years when this document was written in 1964. Not so anymore! In that sense, the document (the Church in the modern world) is outdated. It would be easy, but false to say that we each have to, in our own lives, simply become better followers of Christ. Of course, that is necessary. It is absolutely essential. There is nothing more important.

But, on the other hand, all the matters related to finances and economy are in trouble at a magnitude never seen in the history of the world. We see what happened when free market economy was joined with less government regulation and how the whole world was harmed. The development of economic theory in the last 20 years has been harmful to the human condition in so many ways which we are experiencing today. In 1964, no one had even thought of that happening.

We were moving toward globalization and it was thought that everyone would gain if we all went down that path. Not so.

B. The moral problems generating the economic collapse

On one hand, the moral problems generating the economic collapse are so enormous that no one can get their hands totally around them at the present time. Theories are in conflict. Issues are extremely complex. Economists live in silos which are ideological, regional, national and global. There is no one grand moral scheme that is concrete enough to be put into effect with very immediate results.

On the other hand, that should not stop us from moving forward. How? There are very clear moral mandates which we should attend to right now, today, tomorrow and into the future.

The first moral mandate is that what is needed among world leaders is traditional virtue. Most everyone will agree we have too many leaders of nations who are very lacking in virtue, who are filled with pride, greed, arrogance. And many others are simply blind to the realities. So the call for virtue among national leaders in an international way would be enormously, enormously helpful. For example, in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe is apparently dictator for life. In Burma, the military junta has again silenced their Nobel Peace Prize political activist. Yes, democratic gains have been in Burundi, Liberia, Tanzania, Ghana, Botswana and Mozambique. But 15 heads of African nations have held power 15 years or more and 25-26 for at least ten years.

Various great religions of the world including, especially Christianity, could help enormously by insisting traditional virtues and character count in every country and every place.

The second moral mandate is for economists to repent! Too many economists believe that self-interest (selfishness) will promote the common good. They need to do penance, perhaps not in sack cloth and ashes, but penance. They need to agree that selfishness should not rule.

The third moral mandate is for all of us to relearn the importance of justice.

Justice between individuals (which is contracts and promises).

Distributive justice - allocating goods in such a way that the minimum needs of as many people as possible are met and opportunities for as many people as possible to achieve human flourishing are the goals to be sought after. In the old days, this amounted to, and still does, the right to work, the right to own property, the right to vote, etc. But today it is far more complex than anyone could have ever realized. Free market capitalism is out and state capitalism is in. We then need to realize the real dangers of state capitalism: with its lack of competition, its tendency to bribes, corruption and undue influence.

Social justice is particularly important because it calls us to look beyond yourself to the needs of our neighbors, namely, the common good. It calls on governments to move towards meeting the needs of all.

The fourth moral mandate is to call ourselves to greater virtue (not just our leaders). For those of us who are Christians, our relationship to the Lord has to be deepened so that we serve God and non mammon. It has to be so deepened that we, every day, work on it, do not put it in a silo outside of what we do in the market place.

The fifth moral mandate is to realize our moral categories and traditional teaching are inadequate for how we can address this global crisis from moral perspective. The economic collapse is global, just as we have never seen that before.

This is simply a very brief outline of where we need to go. Let us conclude with thoughts from a very powerful holy person, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor martyred by the Nazi’s and who in 1938 published a little work called The Cost of Discipleship. He talked about cheap grace and expensive grace. “Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

Bonhoeffer sees the rich young man in each one of us. We refuse to be detached from possessions. Yes, we can remain in a cheap grace relationship with God, but it will only harm us and harm the common good. Bonhoeffer says: “He who loves God loves Him as Lord of the earth such as it is. He who loves the earth loves it as God’s earth. He who loves the Kingdom of Heaven loves it…as the Kingdom of God on earth.” In other words, we should use our material goods as God means them, namely, not our own but given only to us in stewardship for a short time. “Come Lord Jesus” into our lives, into our national economy and into our world.

Postscript: Much of the data in this chapter comes from three marvelous articles in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. They are: “The Great Crash, 2008” by Roger Altman, formerly U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary in 1993-1994. The second is: “State Capitalism Comes of Age” by Ian Bremmer, President of Eurasia Group. The third article is: “Globalization in Retreat” also by Roger Altman. See also John Hughey, The Holy Use of Money (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986). Much of the data here is paraphrased from these three articles. However, the moral reflections are my own.

Chapter V - Moral Boundaries Surrounding Wealth & Poverty

2009-06-19T16:21:00.001-05:00

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.

2009-06-12T15:56:00.001-05:00

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.”

Chapter III - The Thrift Culture vs. the Lottery Culture

2009-05-22T14:00:00.002-05:00

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!

2009-05-08T16:48:00.002-05:00

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.

Introduction to a New Eight Part Series

2009-05-01T16:23:00.001-05:00

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.

The Discipline of Prayer

2009-04-07T09:14:00.001-05:00

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)

The Spiritual Disciplines: Door to Liberation

2009-03-27T16:57:00.000-05:00

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)

The Discipline of Study

2009-03-20T09:20:00.000-05:00

Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION: Twenty-five years ago, Richard Foster wrote a marvelous book entitled Celebration of Discipline – The Path to Spiritual Growth. It has sold more than a million copies so it is very, very popular. He is a Quaker and writes in a marvelous ecumenical fashion. Hope you enjoy this. Most of what is written is paraphrased directly from Foster. So the good stuff belongs to him and the other stuff belongs to myself.

Pastor Foster says: “The purpose of the Spiritual Disciplines is the total transformation of the person. They aim at replacing old destructive habits of thought with new life giving habits. Nowhere is this purpose more clearly seen than in the Discipline of study.”

1. St. Paul tells us we are transformed through “the renewal of the mind.” (Romans 12,2)

 How is the mind renewed?
 By applying our mind to those things that will transform our minds.
 St. Paul writing to the Philippians: (Phil 4,8 “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely and gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise think about these things).
 The Discipline of study is the primary vehicle to bring us to “think about these things.”
 Many Christians remain in bondage to fear, anxieties and superstitions and foolishness simply because they do not learn the Discipline of study.
 They pray in the spirit, sing with gusto, live in obedience to the Lord and yet their lives remain unchanged. Why? Because they have never taken up one of the central ways God uses to change us: study.
 Jesus makes this clear. “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8,32) …good feelings will not set us free…ecstatic experiences will not free us…getting “high on Jesus” will not free us. Without a knowledge of the truth, we will not be free.
 This principal is true in every area of human endeavor. It is true in biology and math. It is true in marriage and other human relationships. It’s especially true in reference to our spiritual life. Many are hampered and confused in their spiritual walk by simple ignorance of the truth.
 Many have been brought into a cruel bondage by false teaching. Jesus said of the Pharisees: “You crossed the sea and the land to make a single convert. And when he becomes a convert, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (Matthew 25,15)

2. What is study?

Study is a specific kind of experience, careful attention to the mind so we are able to move in a certain direction.

 The Old Testament instructs the Israelites to write the laws of God on gates and doorposts, put them on their wrist so that “they shall be always in front of your eyes.” (Deuteronomy 11,18)
 The purpose of the instruction of Moses is to direct our mind repeatedly and regularly toward certain ways of thought about God and human relationships.
 A prayer wheel has the same objective. So does a rosary.
 Of course, the New Testament replaces laws written on doorposts with laws written on our hearts. And the New Testament leads us to Jesus, our inward teacher.
 Our ingrain habits of thought, which we have formed, will conform to the order of the thing being studied.
 What we study determines the kind of habits that are formed.
 That’s why Paul urges us to focus on things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely and gracious.

How is the process that occurs in study distinguished from mediation?

 Mediation is devotional.
 Study is analytical.
 Mediation will relish a word.
 Study will explain it.
 They sometimes overlap, but they’re two different experiences.
 There are “two books” to be studied: verbal and nonverbal.
 One is the world of books and lectures.
 The other is the book of nature, the careful observation of events and actions that are nonverbal fields of study.
 When we study, for example, what happens in a tragic situation we can learn a great deal.

3. There are four steps in study.

a. The first step is repetition…you may laugh at the old teaching method of repetition, but you need to know that repetition, even without understanding what is being repeated, does affect the inner mind if repeated enough…changing behavior…that’s why so many forms of spirituality emphasize the regular rehearsal of the deeds of God…and some forms of spirituality correctly train the individual to repeat certain affirmations regularly. (For example, thank you Lord for loving me.)…this trains the inner mind and will eventually modify behavior…this principal has known for centuries, but only recently has received scientific confirmation.
b. The second step in study is concentration…we have to concentrate on what we are studying. And when we do, learning is vastly increased…concentration centers the mind…the human mind has an incredible ability to concentrate…
 We live in a culture that does not value concentration, but values distraction…some read a book, play a game and watch TV at the same time. You can’t learn much doing that. There’s no concentration.
c. Comprehension is the third step in the Discipline of study…Jesus reminds us it is not just truth that sets us free, but knowledge of the truth. (John 8,32) So we read something over and over again and all of a sudden we understand what it means.
d. The fourth step in study is reflection. Comprehension defines what we’re studying and reflection defines the significance of what we are studying. To reflect on the events of our time leads us to the inner reality of those events. Jesus spoke of ears that do hear and eyes that do not see. When we ponder the meaning of what we study, we come to see and hear in a new way.

4. The Discipline of study demands humility. Study cannot happen until we are willing to be subject to the subject matter, as a learner, not as a teacher. Arrogance excludes a teachable moment.

5. We must understand there’s a big difference between the study of scripture and the devotional reading of scripture.

 In the study of Scripture, a high priority is placed on what it means, namely, interpretation.
 In devotional reading of Scripture, high priority is placed on our applying it, namely, what does it mean to me.

The Apostle Peter found some things in the epistles of “our beloved brother Paul” that were “hard to understand.” (2 Peter 3:15) If Peter found it so, so will we. We will need to work at it. Daily devotional reading is certainly commendable, but it is not the same as study.

6. Where is the best place to study? Almost anywhere as long as it is away from the distractions of home. To leave our house or apartment sets us free from the phone and domestic responsibilities and sets our mind into a learning mode. Perhaps a library…perhaps a Barnes and Noble…perhaps a retreat center…study requires large blocks of time.

7. What shall we study? It depends on what you need. I know one of the greatest needs among Christians today is simply studying large portions of Scripture. Consider taking a major book of the Bible such as Genesis or Jeremiah or John and read it straight through. Jot down notes and impressions. Another way is to take a smaller book like Ephesians or Romans and read it through each day for a month.

Also, think about studying some of the great classics in Christian literature. Here are some examples:

 The Confessions of St. Augustine.
 The Imitation of Christ by Thomas á Kempis.
 The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence.
 For pleasure, read The Little Flowers of St. Francis by Brother Ugolino.
 A heavier, but worthwhile work is Blaise Pascal’s Pensées.
 How about Martin Luther’s Table Talks?
 A heavier one is Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
 The Journal of George Fox.
 The better-known Journal of John Wesley.
 William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life.
 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship.
 C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
 Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life.
 Juliana of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.

8. Then think about studying what Foster calls nonverbal books…The Study of Nature.

André Gide tells the story of a time he observed a moth being reborn from its chrysalis during a classroom lecture. He was so pleased with its beauty he showed it to his professor who replied with a note of disapproval: “What! Didn’t you know that a chrysalis is the envelope of a butterfly? It’s perfectly natural.” Gide says: “I knew my natural history, but he could not see it was marvelous. It was a thing of beauty and a joy.” Gide’s professor had only amassed information. He had not studied.

 The first step to the study of nature is reverent observation.
 The next step is to make friends with flowers and trees and little creatures that creep upon the earth. Perhaps the stories of St. Francis taming the wolf of Gubbio and preaching to the birds are not so far fetched.
 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski advises us: “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leave, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.”

Study is well worth our most serious effort.

The Discipline of Solitude

2009-03-16T09:07:00.000-05:00

Val J. Peter

INTRODUCTION:

Once again, what is being shared here in the following pages is Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline - The Path to Spiritual Growth which was written 25 years ago and has sold more than a million copies. This is mostly a paraphrase so the good things attribute to him and all the rest is mine.

1. Foster starts off by telling us that “Jesus calls us from loneliness to solitude.” Loneliness is a familiar phenomenon to just about everyone. It doesn’t mean simply being alone; loneliness means that we have the feeling that no one cares, no one is near. We might as well not exist. And the fear of loneliness turns into the fear of being alone. That’s a mistake, but it’s one that petrifies people. Loneliness is the little child who says no one ever plays with me. Loneliness is the college freshman who says: I live in the freshman dorm. Everyone comes and goes. No one notices me. No one cares. In high school, I was the center of attention. Now I’m a nobody. A highly placed executive sits in her office quite dejected, powerful, and yet no one seems to care. An old man is in a skilled nursing home, but he doesn’t feel like it’s a home. He’s waiting to go home.

It is this fear of being alone (different from solitude) that makes us turn on the TV as soon as we get up in the morning, leaving it on all day. It is this fear of being alone that drives us to noise in the crowds. We talk on and on, even if our words are inane. We have cell phones that bring us instant news or video or movies. T. S. Eliot describes us our culture when he writes:

Where shall the world be found,
Where shall the word resound
Not here
There is not enough silence.

Do we only have two choices, namely, loneliness or clatter/noise? Is there a middle ground called inner solitude and silence which can be cultivated, which can set us free from loneliness and fear, on one hand, and clatter and noise on the other? Is there a middle ground between the inner emptiness of loneliness and the utter banality of clutter and clatter? Yes. It is solitude and silence, inner fulfillment.

Solitude is really and truly a state of mind and heart more than it is a place. Solitude of heart can be maintained pretty much at all times. Being in a crowd or being alone has little to do with inward solitude and attentiveness to it. You can be a desert hermit and never experience solitude. You can be in the midst of a crowd and never experience solitude. If you possess inward solitude, you do not fear being alone for you know you are not alone. If you experience inner solitude, you know that fear of being with others is nonsense for they cannot control you. You can settle into a deep inner silence in the midst of noise and confusion whether you are with a whole bunch of people or all by yourself. You can always carry with you solitude of heart.

Foster says: “Inward solitude has outward manifestations”

 Jesus lived in inward “solitude of the heart” as He frequently experience outward solitude.
 He began His ministry by spending 40 days alone in the desert. (Matthew 4,1-11)
 Before He chose the Twelve Apostles, he spent the entire night alone in the desert. (Luke 6,12)
 When He was told that John the Baptist had been killed by Herod, He “withdrew from there in a boat to a lonely place apart.” (Matthew 14,13)
 After the multiplication of the loaves and fishes feeding 5,000, Jesus “went up into the hills by Himself.” (Matthew 14,23)
 Following a long night of work: “In the morning, a great while before day, He rose and went out to a lonely place.” (Mark 1,35)
 When the apostles returned from their first mission of preaching and healing, Jesus instructed them: “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place.” (Mark 6,31)
 After He healed a leper, Jesus “withdrew to the wilderness and prayed.” (Luke 5,16)
 With Peter, James and John, He sought the silence of a lonely mountain for the Transfiguration. (Matthew 17,1-9)
 As He prepared for His most holy work, Jesus sought the solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane. (Matthew 26,36-46)
 It was a regular practice for Jesus to seek out solitary places.
 It should be the same for us.

2. Now let’s look at some spiritual heroes who know what makes for inner solitude.

a. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book Life Together has one chapter called “The Day Together” and the chapter after that called “The Day Alone.” Both are essential for spiritual success. This is what he says: “Let him who cannot be alone, beware of community…let him who is not in community beware of being alone…each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation and despair.”
b. The inseparable connection between inner solitude and inner silence:

 All the masters of the interior life speak of the two in the same breath.
 The Imitation of Christ, which was the unchallenged masterpiece of devotional literature for 500 years has a section entitled “On the love of solitude and silence.”
 Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the two inseparable in Life Together.
 Thomas Merton does the same in his book Thoughts in Solitude.
 Foster says: “Spiritual Disciplines are things that we do. We must never lose sight of this fact.” It is one thing to talk piously about the solitude of the heart, but if that does not somehow work its way into our experience, then we have missed the point of the Discipline…all those who have come into the living silences have done certain things, have ordered their lives in a particular way so as to receive this “peace that surpasses all understanding.”
 Foster says there are steps into the solitude and the first one is to take advantage of “little solitudes” that fill our day. The early morning moments in bed before the family awakens…a morning cup of coffee before beginning the day’s work…the solitude of bumper to bumper traffic during rush hour…driving to the store…turning the corner and seeing a tree or flower…with your children “let’s play a game and see if everyone can be absolutely quiet for five minutes until we reach the airport”…the little walk from the subway to your apartment…step outside before bed and taste the silent night.
 Foster says also we can develop a “quiet place”…a spot in our house, a spot in the church, a spot in the park.
 Foster also recommends about four times a year we withdraw for three or four hours for the purpose of reorienting our life goals. You can do this easily in one evening. Stay late at the office, do it at home, find a quiet corner in the public library.
 Thomas Merton says: “It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them…solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.”
 Foster writes: “Don’t you feel a tug, a yearning to seek down into the silence and solitude of God? Don’t you long for something more? It is the Discipline of solitude that will open the door.” You are welcome to come in and listen to God’s speech and His wondrous, terrible, gentle loving, all embracing silence.” (Catherine de Haeck Doherty)

2009-02-27T14:54:00.000-06:00

Just before Easter, almost every year, there will appear an article in a major American magazine written by a scholar who says Jesus did not rise from the dead. The article will inform us he was not the Son of God, but he was a very nice person.

To prepare you for whatever is coming this Lenten and Easter season, by way of attacks on our beliefs, I am attaching a little review I did of a marvelous book by Craig Evans entitled Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels.

I hope you enjoy reading it. I have shared it with others who have liked it a lot. Many, many thanks.

Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels

2009-02-27T14:52:00.000-06:00

By Craig A. Evans, Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Novia Scotia, 2006

Val J. Peter

Introduction

We live in a post modern world and one of its characteristics is a distaste and distrust of what has been handed down to us from times past. This includes the study of Christian origins. Some today claim that the Gospels are “unreliable, full of myth and legend, and so biased that knowledge of what Jesus really said and did cannot be recovered.” Evans shows this view to be incorrect, off the mark, “excessive and unwarranted.” (p. 234)

There are two groups of these folks that our author wants us to look at and holds conversation with.

A. First are some post-modern scholars who would like us to believe that:

1. Jesus was illiterate;
2. Jesus had no interest in scripture;
3. Jesus had no interest in eschatology (eschatology means: at last God’s rule is making itself felt on earth as the prophets had promised);
4. Jesus certainly did not think of Himself as Israel’s messiah or in any way divine.

These scholars get headlines in the daily press. Regular Christians who read these stories don’t have a background in ancient languages such as Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic or even Greek. They are sometimes easily led to believe these dubious claims. Our author, Evans, says that many of these scholars don’t know all those languages either, and in this book, shows that these four claims about Jesus to be very unlikely indeed, not worthy of credence. A mature judgment of such an accomplished scholar as Evans cannot be ignored. Most of these claims about Jesus are based on the following five extracanonical Gospels, which are said to support portraits of Jesus mentioned above and quite different from what we find in the four Gospels of the New Testament. Actually, there are thirty or so documents identified as Gospels or Gospel like writings. These five extracanonical Gospels are:

1. The Gospel of Thomas.
2. The Gospel of Peter.
3. Egerton Papyrus 2 (or the Egerton Gospel).
4. The Gospel of Mary.
5. The Secret Gospel of Mark. The most recent is the Gospel of Judas.

• The Gospel of Thomas, in comparison with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is late, not early. It is secondary, not authentic. Contrary to what a few scholars say, the Gospel of Thomas originated in Syria in probably not earlier than the end of the second century. More than 100 years later than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is an esoteric writing, purporting to record the secret (or “hidden”) teachings of Jesus, teachings reserved for those qualified to hear these teachings. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus encourages His disciples to find “the interpretation of these words.” If they find it, they will “not taste death.” The Gospel of Thomas places emphasis on knowing and knowledge whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke and John place emphasis on faith. The word for knowledge is gnosis. Christian writers of the second, third and fourth century called those who claimed to possess this secret or hidden knowledge Gnostics. Gnosticism was not a neutral variety of general Christian belief, but essentially a different and opposing religion that simply borrowed terminology from the New Testament Gospels and changed its meaning. Evans conclusion: “The Gospel of Thomas does not offer students of the Gospels early independent material that can be used for critical research into the life and teaching of Jesus. Reliance on this writing can only lead to a distorted portrait of the historical Jesus. John Dominic Crossan’s book entitled The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant published in 1991 gives a distorted picture.
• The Gospel of Peter, which describes a talking cross, is late and incredible. In fact, the fragmented document that we have may not be the Gospel of Peter at all. The document that we have may date to the fourth and fifth century, 300 or 400 years after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is not advisable to use it for Jesus research.
• The Egerton Gospel. Evans shows that the available evidence at this time favors the likelihood that the Egerton Gospel represents a second century combination of elements from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rather than primitive first century material on which Matthew, Mark, Luke and John depended.
• The Gospel of Mary. “This writing, however it is to be understood, reflects a setting no earlier than the middle of the second century. We find in it nothing that with any confidence can be traced to the first century or traced back to the life and ministry of the historical Jesus and the historical Mary Magdalene.” (p. 94) Dan Brown’s popular novel The DaVinci Code relies on this gospel of Mary. It is fiction.
• The Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery done in 1958 by the scholar Morton Smith at the Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean wilderness. It is a forgery, a modern hoax. An analysis of the handwriting betrays the telltale signs of fogery.

Professor Evans conclusion: Apart from the all-too-human desire to challenge authority, it is hard to explain why scholars give such credence to these documents that reflect settings that are entirely foreign to pre-A.D. 70 Jewish Palestine and at the same time reflect traditions and tendencies found in documents known to have emerged in later times and in places outside of Palestine.

B. Then there are the scholars in the 20th century who have said Jesus was:

1. A Pharisee.
2. An Essene.
3. A prophet.
4. A great moral teacher.
5. A philosopher.
6. A charismatic holy man.
7. A magician.
8. A cynic (the modern equivalent of a hippie).

For example, Crossan says that Jesus was a “peasant Jewish Cynic” and that Jesus and His followers were “hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies.” This is misguided and misleading. There is no archaeological or literary evidence of Cynic presence in Galilee in the early part of the first century when Jesus lived…no evidence whatsoever, so scholars exaggerate the similarities and ignore the profound differences.

The evidence is compelling that the New Testament Gospels:

• Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are our best sources for understanding the historical Jesus.
• The New Testament Gospels are based on based on eye witness testimony and truthfully and accurately relate to teaching life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

There was evidence early on that the works of Jesus were considered on a par with scripture. In this Jewish context, this is quite remarkable. As a rabbi, His sayings were cherished. In ancient times, oral tradition (the ability to remember and recite accurately) was much more important early on than it ever would be in our age where today written documents are on computers, in libraries and easily accessible.

Given such a high regard for Jesus’ words it is not likely that the early Christians freely invented sayings and attributed them to Jesus. Let’s take an example. There were questions and issues that the early Church had to face (after Jesus was gone) and the Church didn’t make up sayings of Jesus to answer them. These were disagreements over the question of circumcision (Should Gentiles be circumcised?), eating meat sacrificed to idols (Was that ok?), spiritual gifts (Was the ability to speak in tongues better than charity?), Jewish gentile relations and the qualifications for Church office, but not one saying of Jesus speaks to any of these questions. This shows that gospel writers were not in the habit of making things up and putting them in the mouth of Jesus. Thus there is every reason to conclude that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teaching, life, death and resurrection. The true story of the historical Jesus is exciting and inspiring. The true story is the old story in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is far more compelling than “the newer, radical, minimalist, revisionist, obscurantist and faddish versions of the Jesus story that have been put forward in recent years.” (p. 235) Archaeological discoveries, by and large, have tended to confirm the reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and disprove novel theories.

Some of the founders of these new theories use the example of a modern game of telephone where you tell four or five people and the story gets all distorted. That is true today, but other researchers in the history of Jewish teaching and learning have come to an opposite conclusion and have shown how early Rabbinic teachers expected their students to memorize and pass on faithfully what was taught. What was taught could be adapted and expanded, but not distorted. Thus, there was significant continuity between the original oral teaching of Jesus and the later written gospels. That is different from our day.

C. A fresh look at healings and miracles.

Some of these modern scholars have neglected Jesus’ works of power, His healings and His miracles. They want us to think of them as nonsense and non-existent.

What does our author, Evans, have to say about this: “How can we really hope to understand who Jesus was and what his ministry was all about if one of the most distinguishing features about Him – His miracles – are not taken into account?”

Today, scholars are more open to talking about the miracles of Jesus because they rightly recognize that the task of the historian is to describe what people reported and recorded. It isn’t the historian’s task to engage in science and metaphysics. In other words, it is enough that historians acknowledge that Jesus’ contemporaries observed what they believed were miracles; historians should not try to explain exactly what Jesus did or how he did it. This shift in thinking in recent years is welcome. (p. 139)

Jesus was not just a great teacher. People followed Him because of His reputation as a powerful healer.

Everyone agrees that the essence of Jesus’ proclamation was the Kingdom of God…the rule of God. In the thinking of Jesus, the onset of the kingdom of God means the collapse of the kingdom of Satan. The collapse of the kingdom or rule of Satan is seen in the exorcisms and healings. The exorcisms or healings cannot be ignored or discounted. They are important if we are to understand fully the significance and importance of Jesus’ bold proclamation that the rule of God has indeed arrived and that it is time to repent and embrace it. (p. 141)

Let us look at Exodus 8: 18-19: “The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast. And the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” Moses and Aaron were not magicians, pulling off clever tricks. They possessed no power, for no human power, no matter how well trained in the magical arts (and Egypt was the capital of magic), could do what Moses and Aaron were able to do. The magicians rightly concluded that what was at work in Moses and Aaron, the two Hebrew brothers, was “the finger of God.” This is the idea in Jesus’ saying that if he cast out demons it is “by the finger of God,” the same power that had worked long ago through Moses and Aaron. This is an astonishing claim. He claimed the greatest power God had ever worked through a human being was at work through him.

D. Here are some ancient non-Christian views of the Christian movement:

• Christians were regarded as lawless because they either did not obey the law of Moses or did not worship Cesar or the Gods of Rome.
• They were even accused of cannibalism, which was probably a misunderstanding of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper.
• Tacitus (writing in the early second century A.D.) described Jesus as the founder of a “pernicious superstition,” an evil that originated in Judea and eventually took hold in Rome itself, “where all things horrible and shameful collect and are practiced.”
• His contemporary Suetonius (early second century) viewed Jesus as an instigator of unrest, which may have been related in some way to the decision made by Emperor Claudius in the middle of the first century to expel Jews from Rome.
• Pliny the Younger, Governor of Bithynia (early second century) wrote to Emperor Trajan stating that Christians recited “a hymn antiphonally to Christus as to a god.” He goes on to say that they “bound themselves with an oath not to commit any crime, but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, breach of faith and embezzlement of property entrusted to them.” His description suggests that the Christians he interrogated were slaves.
• Jewish rabbis from about the same time viewed Jesus as a false prophet who practiced magic and led Israel astray.
• Josephus who was not a rabbi, but (lived in the first century) described Jesus as a “doer of amazing deeds, a teacher of persons who receive truth with pleasure.”
• The Gnostics (that is, “Knowers”), who absorbed some trappings of Christian teaching, viewed Jesus primarily as a revealer—not as the Messiah.

E. Why is it that some studies of the Gospels seem to give us a new portrait of Jesus every spring, just in time for Easter.

The more unusual the portrait of Jesus, the more it departs from the traditional view of Jesus, the more attention it gets in the media today. Why are scholars so prone to make up or fabricate a new Jesus? What methods and assumptions predispose scholars to distort the record? The answer is pretty straight forward:

• We no longer live in modern times. We live in post modern times.
• One of the characteristics of modern times was that reason should prevail. We should use it to settle arguments. Not so anymore. One of the characteristics of post modern times is that not reason but power should prevail to settle arguments. Whoever has the greatest power through the media can settle arguments and convince people through fancy wizardry no matter how far fetched and fake.
• Another characteristic of post modern times is called the hermeneutic of suspicion. (Don’t trust authority.) This simply means that we should suspect that any text, including Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not what really happened, but what really happened is hidden cleverly from our eyes and we need to find out what the hidden stuff is and expose it.

Let us take some examples. Lately it has become fashionable to speak of multiple “Christianities” and lots of lost Gospels. Some authors want us not to know what really happened. Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities (2003) and Misquoting Jesus will enlighten us. Another example is one of the characters in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code declares there are some 80 Gospels circulating in the first century…simply preposterous…a lie. The whole confusion is made worse when scholars attempt to smuggle second century writings into first century supposedly proving that Christianity was indeed quite diverse from the beginning (it really wasn’t) and that all these Christianities are more or less equal.

What is the response of Evans? At the beginning, there was only one Christianity, one core of beliefs that Jesus (Israel’s Messiah and God’s Son) had died on the cross for the sins of humanity and that on the third day, He had been raised as the world’s Savior.

There were, however, disagreements, not ever about core beliefs, but over questions pertaining to the validity and application of the Law of Moses, either with regard to Jews or to Gentiles. It was a thorny issue never completely settled in the early Church and it led to a decline in membership in the Church from Jewish Christians and a lasting division.

Remember that during Jesus’ ministry, Pharisees were critical of Him because Jesus did not seem to take the Jewish laws of purity and Sabbath so seriously. In fact, He often ate with sinners. As Israel’s Messiah, so went the reasoning of the Pharisee, shouldn’t Jesus be more careful to observe faithfully the law of Moses, a law for which many devout Jews such as the Maccabees gave their lives. Jesus replied that what defines a person is what comes out of his heart, but not what goes into his stomach. He said as for picking grain and eating it on the Sabbath, didn’t David and his men eat the consecrated bread on the Sabbath. He said the Son of Man who received heavenly authority was Lord of the Sabbath.
This satisfied some Pharisees after the resurrection and they joined the Jesus movement since they were known for their belief in the resurrection.

Let’s get back to Barth Ehrman. Our author, Evans, correctly points out that Ehrman started out as a fundamentalist with rigid ideas about verbal inspiration. Once he discovered that the Bible was not dictated word for word by God whispering in the ears of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he lost his faith and became an agnostic, a non-believer. It was nothing more than a human book. As a fundamentalist, he believed that if you could find one mistake in the Bible, than it was totally disproven. He did not accept literary forms and so many other instruments of modern scholarship. Thus, he was led astray. Robert Pierce is another good example of a fundamentalist who became an agnostic, a non-believer. He found parallels in other ancient text so Jesus could not have said what is attributed to Him or the event did not happen. Nonsense! Robert Funk in Honest to Jesus was also a fundamentalist who became emotionally devastated by new scholarship. James Robinson started as a Calvinist with a very conservative view and ended up a skeptic.

Our author, Evans, cites these folks as typical of what he calls brittle fundamentalism. “Show me one mistake in the Bible and I will throw out the whole thing.” The reliability, Evans says, of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John does not hinge on a brittle fundamentalist view of inerrancy of scripture. The truth of the Christian message hangs on the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus and our chance to share in it.

It is important to remember that lost Christianities are not first century, but second century. Ebonite’s were second (not first) century Jews who believed in Jesus, but rejected some of His claims. The Ebonite Gospels were apparently revisions of Matthew that brought the gospel story in line with their views. Marcion was a second century extremist who said the Old Testament God was different from the New Testament God. The Church rejected His ideas. Gnosticism did not arise until the second century and not one of the Gnostic texts that we possess in part or in whole dates before the middle of the second century, namely, the Gospel of Thomas, which was not written before 175.

• All of these moved away from the one Christianity of the first century attested to the teaching of Jesus in the first generation of His followers.

Now let’s look at popular texts today. Why are they so popular? Our author Evans says this: “These folks start to read the agnostics and the skeptics who used to be fundamentalists and conservative. That shakes up folks today.

• Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Inaccurate and stories made up.
• Michael Baigent’s equally foolish The Jesus Papers. (A fake death. Jesus really didn’t die. It was faked. He wrote letters to the Jewish Sanhedrin after that.
• Barbara Thiering’s The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church…She says the Dead Sea Scrolls are in code and she knows how to decode them.
• Dolores Cannon, who is a psychic and has written Jesus and the Essenes: Fresh Insights into Christ’s Ministry and the Dead Sea Scrolls, says through progressive hypnosis, she goes back to one of her previous lives when she was an Essene and knew Jesus. In other words, a long lost spirit can tell you all you need to know. Don’t bother relying on scholars.
• Then there is Chretien de Troyes (died 11/85) who wrote The Romance of Perceval: The Legend of the Holy Grail. Americans know this in the version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Germans and French have their own version of it also. It is myth and legend. There is no historical evidence of the existence of the cup Jesus drank from, not is there any evidence that the Knights Templar, who served primarily as armed escorts to and from Europe and the Holy Land ever had a connection to the Holy Grail or found hidden documents or lost treasures.
• Then there is Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln who wrote Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). They want us to believe that they did research and discovered the truth: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, had children and these children reached southern France and married into noble families from which emerged the French Merovingian kings. The Knights Templar and Priory of Sion, a secret society supposedly founded in 1099, knew all of this and did all in their power to keep it secret to protect the descendents of Jesus and Mary. Grand masters of the Priory of Sion included (so they claim): Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo. The whole thing is a hoax. The hoaxers themselves have admitted it finally. They have written pseudohistory.
• Let’s take one more example of Dan Brown’s foolishness, namely, Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait of the Last Supper (1497). Dan Brown says the figure to the right of Jesus…is beardless and has a full head of long flowing hair…It is St. John…but Dan Brown says it is Mary Magdalene. Art historians say it is the apostle John and are correct. In the time of Leonardo, youthful men were portrayed in art with beardless faces and long tresses. See for example Leonardo’s portrait of John the Baptist…Raphael’s portrait of St. Sebastian.
• Let’s now look at the Gospel of Philip written in Coptic and discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 and composed as early as 150 A.D. The author of the Gospel of Philip is not trying to suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers. He only wants to elevate Mary Magdalene to the level of the other disciples. On page 63 of the codex 2, we read “The companion of the […] Mary Magdalene. […] her more than […] the disciples […] kiss her […] […] on her […]. The brackets indicate holes in the text. Some of the text can be restored to say: The companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her […]. Hucksters say on her mouth or lips. That possibility makes people believe that it really happened. Foolishness. The same point is made in the Gospel of Mary. It dates from the same period and is Gnostic. The story here is that Peter is jealous of Mary Magdalene because Mary Magdalene has a right to contribute to the teaching of the community. Modern writers want us to believe that there was a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene when, in fact, there was none.
• Dan Brown’s character in the Da Vinci Code Sir Leigh Teabing is a variable fountain of misinformation. In the novel, he wrongly credits the contents of the Bible to Emperor Constantine (fourth century A.D.); claims that the emperor pressured Christian theologians into viewing Jesus as divine, instead of human; and claims that there were eighty Gospels, many of which the emperor ordered burned. He wrongly says that the Dead Sea Scrolls tell the “true Grail story” and depict the ministry of Jesus. All of this is utter nonsense since the Dead Sea Scrolls contain no Christian text or references whatsoever.
• Finally, there is the 2006 book by Michael Baigent called The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Baigent says he is an expert in the field of arcane knowledge and says that Jesus survived His crucifixion and wrote letter in which He denies His divinity. Where does he get this information? He says he heard it from an old man in the 1980’s about a conversation this elderly man had with another elderly man in the 1930’s. The older elderly man said he saw in the 1890’s, but which no one can produce. Would you believe a story that someone heard in 1980’s about someone who heard something in the 1930’s, who heard something in the 1890’s and there is nothing written. Nonsense…Nonsense…Nonsense.
• Then there is the 2006 book by James Tabor The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. He says that Jesus’ human father was a Roman soldier, perhaps Jewish by birth. He thinks the soldier’s tomb is in Germany. In the late second century, a philosopher by the name of Celsus wrote an angry work against Christianity. It survives in a work by Origen, a Christian scholar, in the middle of the third century. This angry Celsus made up the story that Jesus sojourned in Egypt, where he learned magic, returned to Israel, dazzled everyone with what appeared to be miracles, claimed to be God and so forth. Celsus says that Blessed Mary, the mother of Jesus, was impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera. Evans says: “In my view, the allegation that Jesus’ real father was a man named Pantera (or Panthera) exploits Christians’ claim that Jesus was born of a “virgin” (Greek, Parthenos). It was nothing more than a play on words. Pantera was the closest sound-alike name, and was a name of soldiers, so Jesus’ conception was suggested to be not that of a virgin, a parthenos, but that of a soldier, a man named Panthera. We have here nothing more than slander and lies. There is no archaeological evidence whatsoever and no probability.”
• Another book to look at is Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ published in 2004. It presents the very old notion that Jesus did not exist.

In Conclusion:

Post-Modern day claims that the Gospels are unreliable, full of myth and legend and so biased that the knowledge of what Jesus really said and did cannot be recovered are excessive and unwarranted. The author’s of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had one principle concern, namely, to publish the teaching and deeds of Jesus. His words and example were considered normative. It is not likely that early Christians would have freely invented sayings and then attribute them to Jesus. Gospel writers were not in the habit of making things up, so there is every reason to conclude from the evidence that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teaching life, death and resurrection.

There is one final question. Why unreliable claims such as we have seen here are so easily believed? Why would so many people think that Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code tells the real story? I believe the answer can be found in one of the principle characteristics of the 21st century, namely, the post-modern belief in skepticism and rejection of all dogmatic convictions. Evans has shown us that it is morally certain that the Gospels are very reliable. Moral certainty excludes the probability of their being unreliable.

So historical data shows that the New Testament has been preserved over the centuries, even though you can make up some fanciful story that is theoretically possible.

Finally, remember the evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical antiquity, which are widely accepted. Look at Livy (who lived from 59 B.C. to 17 A.D.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the fourth century. Testatus (who lived from 56 B.C. to 120 A.D.) and the oldest manuscript is from the ninth or tenth century. Thucydides (who lived from 460 to 400 B.C.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the tenth century. Herodotus (who lived from 484 to 425 B.C.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the tenth century. We have over five thousand (counting only Greek manuscripts) manuscripts from the New Testament from the second century. If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. In fact, historians have often been much more ready to trust the New Testament records then some of the theologians or scholars. Somehow or other, there are people who regard “a sacred book” as automatically under suspicion and demand more evidence.

In the post modern world, people want a tame Jesus, a Jesus who can be controlled, a Jesus who is non-threatening, a Jesus who values what they value and does not demand anything of them at all. In other words, a Jesus who is not Savior and Lord. Frankly, it is hard to escape the feeling that our post modern culture has taken Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?” and changed it into “Who do you want me to be?”

The Discipline of Meditation

2009-02-20T14:58:00.000-06:00

INTRODUCTION:

The beautiful material contained here is actually a paraphrase of Richard J. Foster’s chapter on meditation in his book Celebration of Discipline which has sold more than a million copies. I have added my thoughts, but his are more important. After reading this, I do believe that you and I and all of us will be attracted to meditation, especially in the Lenten season.

The Discipline of Meditation
Val J. Peter

“True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace.”
Thomas Merton

We cannot get very far in our serving the Lord without meditation. Meditation is something that happens in silence and most Americans think that silence is boring and that loud music and hurry and noise are what people need. Actually, those three keep us from getting closer to God in many ways. If we hope to move beyond the surface of our culture, including our religious culture, we are going to have to move into holy silence in the inner world of meditation and it’s a lot of fun.

In all the writings of holy Christians throughout the age of the saints and the great spiritual directors they all say, from time to time, we need to walk away from the noise and enroll in the school of silent prayer, namely, meditation.

Biblical Witness

The idea of meditation is contained in two different Hebrew words in the Bible and together they are used 58 times: listening to God’s word, reflecting on God’s works, reliving God’s deeds and thinking about God’s holy law and more. David in Psalm 119 says: “Oh how I love your law. It is my meditation all the day…I hold my feet from every evil way in order to keep your word. I do not turn aside from your ordinances for you have taught me.”

 We read in the First Book of the Bible: “And Isaac went out to meditate in the field in the evening (Genesis 24,63).
 Joshua, son of Nun, after Moses is dead takes over and the Lord tells him: “Be strong and courageous. You shall put these people in possession of the land that’s worth your ancestors to give you…you shall meditate on my words to Moses day and night.” (Joshua 1-8)
 Oh God, we meditate on your unfailing love. (Psalm 48,9)
 “I will meditate on all your work and views on your mighty deeds.”
 Psalm 119 is a psalm on meditation: “I meditate on your precepts (v15)…your servant will meditate on your decrees (v23)…then I will meditate on your wonders (v27)…I revere your commandments which I love and I will meditate on your statutes (v48)…I will meditate on your precepts (v78)…I mediate on you all day long (v97)…For I meditate on your statutes (v99).
 In Psalm 19, I meditate on your promises.
 In Psalm 143, I meditate on all your works.
 In Psalm 145, I will meditate on your wonderful works.
 In Psalm 39, my heart grew hot within me. As I meditated, the fire burned.
 In Psalm 19, the meditation of my heart may it be pleasing in your sight.
 In Psalm 104, may my mediation be pleasing to Him.
 The ancient priest, Eli, knew how to listen to God and helped the young boy Samuel listen to God speaking to Him. (1 Samuel 3, 1-18).
 The prophet Elijah spent much, much time learning how to know “the still small voice of God.” (1 Kings 19,18)
 The prophet Jeremiah discovered the word of God to be “a burning fire shut up in my bones.” (Jeremiah 20,9)

All of these were people who were very close to the heart of God and God spoke to them, not because they were high and mighty or were more learned than others but because they were more willing to listen.

 Jesus made a habit of withdrawing to be in meditation.
 “He withdrew by boat privately to a lonely place apart.” (Matthew 14,13)
 “Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness.” (Matthew 4,1)
 “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” (Matthew 6,5)
 “And after He dismissed the crowds, He went up the mountain by Himself…He was there alone. (Matthew 14,23)
 “In the morning while it was still very dark, He got up and went out to a deserted place and there He prayed.” (Mark 1,35)
 “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” (Mark 6,31)
 “But He would withdraw to deserted placed and pray.” (Luke 5,16)
 “Six days later, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and His brother John and led them up a high mountain by themselves.” (Matthew 17,1)
 “Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane and He said to His disciplines, sit here while I go over there and pray.” (Matthew 26,36)
 “He took with Him Peter and James and John and began to be distressed and agitated. And He said to them: I am deeply grieved, even to death. Remain here and keep awake. I am going a little further…” (Mark 14,32)
 “In his anguish, He prayed more earnestly and His sweat became like great drops of blood following down on the ground.” (Luke 22,44)
 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you. And these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them and I will make it known so that the law with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them. (John 17,26)

Hearing and Obeying

“Speak Lord your servant is listening.” That’s what meditation is all about.

When God sent His Son in the fullness of time, Jesus showed us in His imminent relationship with the Father how to live a life of hearing and obeying. “The Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing; for whatever He does, that Son does likewise.” (John 5,19)

“I can do nothing on my own as I hear a judge.” (John 5,30)

“The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does His work.” (John 14,10)

“He told us that He was the Good Shepherd and the sheep would know His voice.” (John 10,4)

“And that the Comforter would come, the Spirit of Truth who would guide us into all truth.” (John 16,13)

In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke tells us that after the Resurrection and
Ascension and Pentecost, Jesus continues “to do and teach.” If we but have ears to hear and hearts open to Him.” (Acts 1,1)

And if we look at the saints through all the ages, they say the same thing. There is a vast library of literature on Christian meditation by holy people, by believers throughout the centuries. And their testimony is amazingly the same over and over and over again. From Protestant denomination to Catholic, from Orthodox to Free Church, the holy ones urge us to “live in His presence in uninterrupted fellowship.”

The Russian mystic, Theophian the Recluse, says “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart and there to stand before the face of the Lord ever present all seeing within you.” The Anglican divine, Jeremy Taylor, says “Meditation is the duty of all.” And the great Lutheran martyr in our day, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was asked once why he mediated and he said, without pause, “Because I am a Christian.” We would be terribly foolish if we were to neglect such a gracious invitation to experience in the words of Madam Guyan “the depths of Jesus Christ.”

Richard Foster rightly says: “Please understand me. I am not speaking some mushy, giddy, buddy, buddy relationship. All such sentimentality only betrays how little we know, how distant we are from the Lord. St. John tells us in his apocalypse that went he saw the reigning Christ he fell at His feet as though dead and so should we.” Now, continues Foster, “I am speaking of a reality more akin to what to what the disciplines felt in the upper room when they experienced both intense intimacy and awful reverence.”

Everything that is foreign to the Lord we have to let go of. The Good Shepherd will lead us.

Understandable misconceptions

 It is a mistake to think that the meditation in the Eastern religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) is the same as Christian meditation. No, meditation in the Eastern religions is an attempt to empty the mind. Meditation in the Christian tradition is an attempt to fill the mind.

 Another misunderstanding is that meditation is too difficult and too complicated. Thomas Merton says: “Meditation is really very simple and there is not much elaborate techniques to teach us how to go about it.”

 Others say, wrongly, that meditation is archaic and out of touch with the 21st century. They are talking about the wrong kind of meditation as seen in Dostoevski’s novel The Brothers Karamazov where the character Father Ferapont is a rigid self-righteous person who, by shear effort, delivers himself from the world and then calls down curses upon it. That’s really bad. That is not what meditation is all about. Thomas Merton also says: “Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life.”

 The most common misunderstanding is to think that meditation is some sort of psychological manipulation. Sort of like yoga which drops your blood pressure, relieves your tension and makes you feel better. That stuff is all right, but it is not meditation. The purpose of meditation is not to give you a consistent alpha brain wave pattern. The inner reality of the spiritual world is available to all who are willing to search for it. Richard Foster rightly says: “Often I have discovered that those who so freely debunk the spiritual have never taken ten minutes to investigate whether or not such a world really exists.”

Different Kinds of Meditation

Over the centuries, Christians have used a variety of ways of listening to the good Lord as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, a variety of ways of experiencing the love of God in their world. They were all seeking intimacy with God and faithfulness to God. Here are some of the ways:

1. Meditation on the Bible…meditation is different from exegesis. Exegesis is the technical study of a text or an analysis of a text. Meditation is not exegesis…mediation on the Scripture is as simple as this: “Speak Lord your servant is listening.” What you want to do when you meditate on the Scripture is see with your mine’s eye the Lord speaking to you. Listen carefully. Take it into your heart and personalize the message. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: “Just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word or Scripture, ponder it in your heart as Mary did. That is all. That is meditation.”…Ignatius of Loyola reminds us to apply all four senses to the task and smell the seed. Here the lap of the water along the shore. See the crowd. Feel the sun on your head and the hunger in your stomach. Taste the salt in the air. Touch the hem of his garment.

Take, for example, Jesus’ saying to you: “My peace I give to you.” (John 14,27) Let Jesus fill you with His peace, your mind, your heart, your spirit…enter the story as an active participant. At one time or another, you are the protocol son, in another you are Mary Magdalene and another you are Peter.

2. Now this is a second kind of meditation. It is mediation on nature. Give yourself to the created order. Look at the trees. Take a flower. Allow its beauty to sink into your mind and heart. Listen to the birds. They are God’s messengers. Watch the creatures that creep over the earth. These are humble acts.

3. Another form of meditation is to meditate on the events of our time. Thomas Merton writes that the person “who is meditating on the Passion of Christ but has not meditated on the concentration camps of Dachau and Auschwitz has not yet fully entered into the experience of Christianity of our time.”

4. Richard Foster says another form of meditation is what the people in the Middle Ages called “re-collection” and what the Quakers called “centering down.” One example in re-collection is called palms down, palms up. By placing your palms down as a way to indicate your desire to turn over all concerns you may have to God. Inwardly, you pray, Lord I give you my anger toward John. I release my fear of my dentist appointment today. I surrender my anxiety for not having enough money to pay these bills. I release my frustration over trying to find a babysitter. Just say palms down. Release it. After several moments of serenity, turn your palms up as a symbol of your desire to receive from the Lord. “Lord, I would like to receive your divine love for John, your peace about the dental appointment, etc., etc. Whatever you need say palms up.

Concluding thought: As you begin meditation it might not mean a lot to you. It takes a while and you need to be patient. You are going against the tide. Take heart. It will work.

2009-02-13T16:20:00.000-06:00

This week, I am sharing with you an excerpt (paraphrased) from a very prominent Quaker minister, Richard J. Foster, who 25 years ago wrote the Celebration of Discipline, the path to spiritual growth. It has sold at least a million copies.

The chapter is on fasting. Our Quaker minister author says that fasting can help us shed out superficial habits and “bring the abundance of God into our lives.” This is written for adults in time for Lent. It is not written for our boys and girls.

Many ministers and laymen and women have found it very helpful. I hope it is helpful to you.

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)

Discipline of Fasting
Val J. Peter

“Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it. --John Wesley

Pastor Foster starts off by noting that fasting seems out of place, out of steps with our times and has been for many years. Between 1861 and 1954, a period of nearly 100 years, he didn’t find a single book published on the subject of Christian fasting. Recently, interest has redeveloped. Why this total disregard of fasting, a subject so frequently mentioned in the Scriptures and so ardently practiced by Christians through the centuries? First, fasting got a bad reputation as the result of extreme fasting practices of the Middle Ages. Take anything to excess and it looks ridiculous. “Whenever there is a form devoid of spiritual power, law will take over because law always carries with it a sense of security and manipulative power.”

The second reason why it is disregarded is the constant media propaganda that is fed to us, that convinces us that if we don’t have three very nice tasty meals a day, we will be close to starvation before 10:00 at night. No wonder people think fasting is obsolete and old fashioned. If you start fasting, people will say it is injurious to your health. All of this is utter nonsense based on prejudice.

Scripture has so much to say about fasting that we would do well to look once again at this ancient Discipline. The list of biblical personages who fasted reads like a “Who’s Who” of Scripture: Moses the lawgiver, David the king, Elijah the prophet, Esther the queen, Daniel the seer, Anna the prophetess, Paul the apostle, Jesus Christ the incarnate Son. Many of the great Christians thought church history fasted and witnessed to its value; among them were Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, David Brainerd, Charles Finney, and Pastor Hsi of China.

Fasting, of course, is not an exclusively Christian Discipline; all the major religions of the world recognize its merit. Zoroaster practiced fasting as did Confucius and the Yogis of India. Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle all fasted. Even Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, believed in fasting. Now the fact that all these persons, in and out of Scripture, held fasting in high regard does not make it right or even desirable, but it should make us pause long enough to be willing to reevaluate the popular assumptions of our day concerning the Discipline of fasting.

Fasting in the Bible

Throughout Scripture, fasting refers to abstaining from food for spiritual purposes so it’s not for dieting and it’s not a hunger fast to gain political power.

In Scripture, regularly fasting involved abstaining from all food, but not from water…the forty-day fast of Jesus. We are told “He ate nothing” and at the end, “He was hungry.”

But there is also a partial fast described in the Scriptures. For example, in the prophet Daniel, we read about a partial fast “I ate no delicacies, no meat or wine entered my mouth, nor did I anoint myself at all.” (Dan. 10:3)

And then there are some examples in Scripture of what is called an “absolute fast” from everything. For example, upon learning that execution awaited her and her people, Esther instructed Mordecai, “Go gather all the Jews…and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do.” (Esther 4:16)

Then we read that St. Paul engaged in a three-day absolute fast following his encounter with the living Christ. (Acts 9:9)

In most cases, fasting is a private matter, but sometimes there were public fasts. The only annual public fast required in the Law of Moses was the day of atonement. (Lev. 23:27) It was to be the day in the Jewish calendar where people were to be in sorrow as atonement for their sins. Gradually, other fast days were added to the Jewish calendar until today there are over 20. Fasts were called also in times of great emergency. For example, we read in Joel, the prophet, “Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly; gather the people.” When Judah was invaded, King Jehoshaphat called the nation to fast. (2 Chron. 20:1-4) In response to the preaching of Jonah, the entire city of Nineveh fasted. Before the trip back to Jerusalem, Ezra had the exiles fast and pray for safety while traveling on the bandit-infested road. (Ezra 8:21-23)

Sometimes there is a national fast. The King of Britain called for a day of solemn prayer and fasting because of a threatened invasion by the French in 1756. On February 6, John Wesley recorded in his Journal, “The fast day was a glorious day, such as London has scarce seen since the Restoration. Every church in the city was more than full, and a solemn seriousness sat on every face. Surely God heareth prayer, and there will yet be a lengthening of our tranquility.” In a footnote, he wrote, “Humility was turned into national rejoicing for the threatened invasion by the French was averted.”

Through history what could be called regular fasts also developed. By the time of Zechariah, four regular fasts were held. (Zech. 8:19) The boast of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable evidently described the common practice of the day, “I fast twice a week.” (Luke 18:12) The Christian document called the Didache prescribed two fast days a week: Wednesday and Friday. Regular fasting was made obligatory at the Second Council of Orleans in the sixth century. John Wesley sought to revive the teaching of the Didache and urged early Methodists to fast on Wednesdays and Fridays. He felt so strongly about the matter that he refused to ordain anyone to the Methodist ministry who did not fast on those two days.

On the other hand, there are simply no biblical laws that command regular fasting. Our freedom in the gospel does not mean license; it means opportunity. Since there are no laws to bind us, we are free to fast on any day. Freedom for the apostle Paul meant he was engaged in “fastings often”. (2 Cor. 11:27)

Is Fasting a Commandment?

Numerous people have tried to answer that question and there have been a variety of conclusions. One of the best arguments for fasting was penned in 1580 by Thomas Cartwright in a book entitled The Holy Exercise of a True Fast.

Many passages of Scripture deal with fasting. Two stand out in importance. The first is Jesus’ startling teaching about fasting in the Sermon on the Mount. His teaching on fasting here is in the context of His teaching on giving and praying. It’s like giving, praying and fasting are all part of Christian devotion. We have no more reason to exclude fasting from the teaching that we do giving or praying. Jesus states, “When you fast…”. (Matt. 6:16) He seems to make the assumption people will fast. Martin Luther said, “It was not Christ’s intention to reject or despise fasting…it was His intention to restore proper fasting.” Jesus does not say “if you fast”, neither does He say “you must fast.” He simply says “when you fast.”

The second critical statement of Jesus about fasting comes in response to the quest by the disciples of John the Baptist. The disciples of John and the Pharisees fasted. Jesus’ disciples did not. So people asked why and He replied, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then they will fast.” (Matt. 9:15) That is perhaps the most important statement in the New Testament on whether or not Christians should fast today.

The most natural interpretation of the days when Jesus’ disciples will fast is the present Church age. Jesus made it clear He expected His disciples to fast after He was gone. Perhaps it is best to avoid the term “command”, but Jesus clearly thought the children of the kingdom of God would fast. For the person longing for a more intimate walk with God, these statements of Jesus are drawing words.

The Purpose of Fasting

It is sobering to realize the very first statement Jesus made about fasting dealt with the question of motive. (Matt. 6:16-18) To use good things to our own ends is always a sign of false religion. How easy it is to take something like fasting and try to use it to get God to do what we want.

Fasting must forever center on God. Like the prophetess Anna, we need to be “worshiping with fasting”. (Luke 2:37) Every other purpose must be subservient to God. Like the Christians at Antioch, “fasting” and “worshiping the Lord” must be said in the same breath. (Acts 13:2) The great preacher Charles Spurgeon writes, “Our seasons of fasting and prayer at the Tabernacle have been high days indeed; never has Heaven’s gate stood wider; never have our hearts been nearer the central Glory.”

God questioned the people in Zechariah’s time. “When ye fasted…did ye at all fast unto me, even to me?” (Zech. 7:5) If our fasting is not unto God, we have failed. John Wesley declares, “First, let it (fasting) be done unto the Lord with our eye singly fixed on Him. Let our intention herein be this, and this alone, to glorify our Father who is in heaven…”

Once the primary purpose of fasting is firmly fixed in our hearts, we are at liberty to understand that there are secondary purposes in fasting. One of those secondary purposes is that fasting reveals the things that control us. This is a wonderful benefit to know. David writes in Psalm 69, “I humbled my soul with fasting.” Anger, bitterness, jealousy, strife, fear – if they are within us, they will surface during fasting.

Fasting reminds us that we are sustained “by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” (Matt. 4:4) Food does not sustain us. God sustains us. In Christ, “All things hold together.” (Col. 1:17) Therefore, in experiences of fasting we are not so much abstaining from food as we are feasting on the word of God. When the disciples brought lunch to Jesus, assuming He would be starving, He declared, “I have food to eat of which you do not know…My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, and to accomplish His work.” (John 4:32, 34)

Fasting helps us keep our balance in life. Quickly we crave things we do not need until we are enslaved by them. Paul writes, “All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything.” (1 Cor. 6:12) David writes, “I afflicted myself with fasting.” (ps. 35:13) Discipline brings freedom.

The Practice of Fasting

People today are largely ignorant of the practical aspects of fasting. We need to acquaint ourselves with basic information. Start slowly. Begin with a partial fast of twenty-four hours duration. Many have found lunch to lunch to be the best time. This means you would not eat two meals. Fresh fruit juices are excellent to drink during the fast. Attempt this once a week for several weeks. In the beginning, you will be fascinated with physical aspects of your experience. But the most important thing to monitor is the inner attitude of the heart. Outwardly, you will be performing the regular duties of your day, but inwardly you will be in prayer and adoration, song and worship. In a new way, cause every task of the day to be a sacred ministry to the Lord. Break your fast with a light meal of fresh fruit and vegetables and a good deal of inner rejoicing.

It goes without saying you should follow Jesus’ counsel to refrain from calling attention to what you are doing. The only ones who should know you are fasting are those who have to know. If you call attention to your fasting, people will be impressed and, as Jesus said, that will be your reward. You are fasting for greater and deeper rewards.

The following was written by an individual who, as an experiment, had committed himself to fast once a week for two years. Notice the progression from superficial aspects to deeper rewards.

1. “I felt it is a great accomplishment to go a whole day without food. Congratulated myself on the fact that I found it so easy…
2. Began to see that the above was hardly the goal of fasting. Was helped in this by beginning to feel hunger…
3. Began to relate the food fast to other areas of my life where I was more compulsive…I did not have to have a seat on the bus to be contented, or to be cool in the summer and warm when it was cold.
4. …Reflected more on Christ’s suffering and the suffering of those who are hungry and have hungry babies…
5. Six months after beginning the fast discipline, I began to see why a two-year period has been suggested. The experience changes along the way. Hunger on fast days became acute, and the temptation to eat stronger. For the first time I was using the day to find God’s will for my life. Began to think about what it meant to surrender one’s life.
6. I now know that prayer and fasting must be intricately bound together. There is no other way, and yet that way is not yet combined in me.”

Fasting can bring breakthroughs in the spiritual realm that will never happen in any other way. It is a means of God’s grace and blessing that should not be neglected any longer. Wesley declares, “…it was not merely by the light of reason…that the people of God have been, in all ages, directed to use fasting as a means:…but they have been….taught it of God Himself, by clear and open revelations of His Will…Now, whatever reasons there were to quicken those of old, in the zealous and constant discharge of this duty, they are of equal force still to quicken us.”

Now is the time for all of us to hear the voice of God.

A 21st Century Christian Way of Life

2009-02-04T08:34:00.000-06:00

Val J. Peter

Our world is very different from what went before. It should also be clear our response to it should be such that we Christians are able to be “in the world, but not of the world.”

This paper will not so much survey what is new in the world in the 21st century (we all live every day with MP3 players, IPods, the latest in cell phones, wildly gyrating gas prices and a collapsing economy) but rather show how being in the world we can be “not of the world,” in some ways quietly different and slightly countercultural.

Let us start with a second century view of Christians as they saw themselves. This is a letter by an unknown early second century Christian writer to Diognetus which speaks eloquently to us about Christians, who these Christians were, what they did and how they were, in some ways, quietly different, slightly countercultural:

“Christians are indistinguishable from other men, either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based on reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it be Greek or foreign.

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they are only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor on all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives. They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on level that transcends the law.

Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference is their answer to insult. For the good they do, they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they rejoice as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred.

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As a visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen.”

In the last chapter, we talked about the need to pass on to our children our Christian faith and morals as traditionally understood yet clothed in post modern garments. In this chapter, we will examine in greater detail the contrast between this Christian view and the post modern view that pervades our society. There are many things that will make us indistinguishable from our contemporaries, but there are some things that will make us distinctive. By pointing this out, we hope you will come away with a concrete plan of action for your own family, school and church.

To be true to their calling, Christians need to follow the Lord even it means being seen as holding a different world view, starting with how we view ourselves. In our secular world, the self is the unfettered individual in isolation. The focus is inward, not outward. We Christians, true to our vocation, begin not with a sense of isolation, but with a sense of belonging, a sense of relationship, a sense of the redemptive. So if Christians are asked how they define themselves and are asked to explain who they are and what is this thing called the “self,” their answer is: “The self is relational. It is not in isolation. It begins with relationships.”

When someone says: “who are you” the response of a Christian is this: I know who I am. I am a child of God, the Father who created me, the Son who redeemed me and the Holy Spirit who empowered me. Blessed Mary is our mother. The saints are our brothers and sisters. In addition, I am the son of Carl and Anne Marie Peter. I have two brothers and a sister and a vast number of uncles, aunts and cousins.” Yes, that is the proper way Christians define themselves.

So you and I are defined first by the relational dimensions of the human person as son/daughter, brother/sister, father/mother, nephew, grandson and all of these. The divine family of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the human family are what define us first and foremost. Your goal and mine is union with God and others in God. That is why God created you and me.

Through the many chapters of this book, we have seen something earth shaking began to occur after World War II. At the close of this book, it can now be described as a subtle shift in the definition of self, moving from the communitarian, relational and family definition to a definition that looks inside the person as an individual, to the needs and wants of that individual. In other words, the secular world would suggest you are you first and foremost an isolated person, an inner self with inner needs. The gospel, on the other hand, suggests you are first and foremost a member of the divine family with God as creator, redeemer and sanctifier with a dad and a mom, brothers, sisters and grandparents. Our secular culture believes you are an individual. Our religious faith starts with the belief you are a family member. The first is lonely. The second is a matter of belonging.

How did this change occur? As we have seen after World War II, there was an enormous amount of economic prosperity. During the Depression and World War II, there was great need to tough it out and to sacrifice in extraordinary ways. That reinforced our Christian notion of belonging. We stressed the good we had in common and most tried to make an individual contribution to our family, both the human family and the divine family. God put us on earth for this purpose. We were clear about that. Heaven was our goal.

When the Depression and World War II ended and affluence set in, this need for each other seemed less urgent, less apparent. Along with this lack of urgency came an increased impatience, perhaps even intolerance of family dysfunction, which we had chosen to overlook before. We began to stress what was wrong with our families instead of what was right. Affluence does not mean that we have more needs and wants. It is the subtle shift from wanting more to expecting more…even from our families. So we began to see our families as less functional then they ought to be. Stress was now on what was wrong in relationships. We expected an easier life.

With the rise of affluence, came a group of humanistic psychologists (as distinguished from experimental psychologists and behavioral psychologists) who had the following view:

• Your family is a mess. It is an increasingly depressing experience to look at family relationships and define yourself that way. You need to embrace the idea that self-actualization is your goal. You need to look inward instead of outward for your identity. Your emphasis should be on the internal authority of the self, not on the external authority outside yourself. If your family is a mess and you look at family relations to define yourself that will be an increasingly frustrating. Yes, look inward.

• As you look inward, you will find yourself defining fulfillment inwardly as the realization of your potential and not outwardly as you did in the Christian scheme, namely of loving one another, of helping one other, of worshiping the Lord and all meeting some day in heaven.

• If you look, you will find inside yourself a multiplicity of needs, feelings, wants. In some sense, this multiplicity can take the place of your many dysfunctional relatives. Cater to these needs and feelings.

Jung said in so many words: As you go inside yourself, you meet archetypal figures. As you develop interest in your inner-self, you will have less interest in your brothers, sisters, parents and family. It is a move towards narcissism.

After World War II, Catholics also witnessed a surge of vocations. Many soldiers returning from the war had seen enough death, destruction, hatred and revenge to long for a monastic routine of prayer and solitude. Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain was their inspiration. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was their search, too. Faith life was identified with the interior life. After the fall of Nazism, faith life was not a search for peace and justice because the Cold War had now begun and peace and justice seemed even farther removed than before.

So when Maslow, Erickkson, Rogers and others came upon the scene with their insistence on the centrality of the therapeutic, Christian faith in America began to wander off the beaten path that Christians had taken through the centuries and often turned to the therapeutic more than to the redemptive. Of course, this was a huge loss. Some interpreters of Vatican II made this trend formidable. Why? Vatican II told us to open ourselves to the insights of modern psychology and sociology. But Maslow, Erickson and others were being read uncritically, yes uncritically, by these in interpreters. If you start to define yourself as a bundle of internal needs, then the ascetical practices (prayer, mortification and fasting) so essential to gaining freedom for union with God and others in God started to diminish in importance and even vanish. Many interpreters following Maslow, Erickson and others were saying that certain ascetical Christian practices (mortification and fasting) and feelings, (guilt and shame) are out of bounds and bad by definition. Out of style are self denial, the Divine Office, penitential practices and especially fear of the Lord. The notion of sin diminished and in its place there were only errors or mistakes. We did not sin so much. We made mistakes. The remedy for sin is repentance, but if there are fewer sins there is less need for repentance. And the remedy for mistakes is therapy/education. And if there are more mistakes, then there is greater need for therapy. This was a conscious attempt on the part of some humanistic psychologists to do away with the relationship with God. They acknowledged it as such. Yes, to due away with the relationship with God is to deny the existence of sin and personal moral responsibility.

Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the self began, at times, to be defined as thoroughly good and happy. According to Eric Berne and Thomas Harris, the Child inside us is basically happy, fun-loving, energetic and filled with good things. The only thing that makes the Child inside us bad is Parent contamination, Parent data that comes from the outside and fills us with guilt, shame and a sense of sinfulness.

It is easy to see the progression, the developmental pattern, evolving. Many in America began to move away from a Christian perspective of redemption to a more humanistic therapeutic perspective. August Comte in the 19th century debunked Christianity as not being fulfilling or not truly human. He was a prophet of our times.

Yes, at some point after Vatican II (1960-1964), the search inward, the search for identity and the need for fulfillment began to skew the renewal of the Catholic Church in America. Catholics were told to open the windows to modern society and there were many things we needed to be open to. But we could have been more critical, more discerning in what was worthwhile and what was not when we opened the windows. Sand and dirt came in, together with fresh air.

Our task is to recover or rediscover, if you like, the incarnational and redemptive Christian view where relationships take precedence over our inner self and where one looks outside of one’s self to find meaning and fulfillment. Our goal is union with God and others in God. If the pursuit of this goal makes us slightly countercultural, then so be it. We need to regain our family focus, our community focus, our church focus and move away from an almost narcissistic self-focus in our Christian lives. The self-esteem movement hurt us more than it helped us. “Have I loved myself enough today” is not a good place to start. The move inward also coincided with the anti-authoritarianism of the time. In the past, our moral lives had rules, external rules, The Ten Commandments which, if we searched our hearts, we would find already there. In the past, this was healthy and helpful. But now there was only internal authority, not external authority and that often went hand in hand with more family dysfunctionality. Now there were only internal rules, not external rules and they were the rules of developmental psychology often gone astray. I dislike saying that because so much in developmental psychology was so very healthy and so good. But it is true and it needs to be said.

Once again, it is important to note that many of the advances in psychology and sociology were very, very good indeed, but not all of them. And to be countercultural, we need to distinguish between the good and the bad. And we need to follow St. Paul’s advice: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil by doing good.” Certain experiences are enormously harmful to human flourishing, to human freedom. No matter how hard we try, they will not be healing experiences.

If the self is the measure of all things, then the gospels have to undergo pruning because they call for self-denial for taking up one’s cross.

In addition, people discovered that simply getting in touch with one’s past and naming it does not always or necessarily bring health. Christians would say that the healing comes at the point when we are able to turn this past over to God and to experience true repentance, true reconciliation, true feelings of acceptance and newness of life.

It is the Christian who says: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and Thee.” It is the secular humanist who says: “Our father has sinned against heaven and me.”

So the description our humanistic psychologists gave of our needs and wants is valid only as long as it remains descriptive and not prescriptive. It describes many of our inner needs and wants, but it does not give us a moral path.

It is quite wrong to say the self is innocent until it has contact with others and then it is contaminated by parents, by family and by social contact. It is a denial of original sin, a doctrine which teaches self is not wholly innocent at the start. In this scheme of things, social justice is a matter of “sinful institutions,” or “sinful structures.” It is a matter of sinfulness outside ourselves. Karl Marx believed that. Lenin did too. Communism tried that with singular lack of success. They were wrong.

The self is not totally innocent. That was an old Pelagian view. Neither is the self totally corrupt. That was an old view found in some of St. Augustine’s writings. The Church has taught clearly the self is wounded and needs spiritual healing. And the healing cannot happen in splendid isolation. The self is capable of great virtue and, of course, great viciousness, too.

Viktor Frankl, whose book Man’s Search for Meaning has touched the hearts of so many and sold more than 12 million copies says it this way:

“We may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but
only these two – the race of the decent man and the race of the
indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into
all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or
indecent people. In this sense, no group is of pure race – and
therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the
camp guards.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and
exposed its depths. It is surprising that in those depths we
again found only human qualities which in their very nature
were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from
evil which goes through all human beings, reaches into the
lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the
abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.”

That means that if social justice is to come into our world, changing sinful structures is important, but changing the self is just as important.

The founders of the American Republic insisted that we cannot have a truly democratic society without self-discipline, self-denial and private virtue in the4 service of others. If everyone only has self-interest as the highest priority, democracy will not flourish. Private virtue, the spirit of sacrifice for the sake of others, is important if America, as a true republic, is to survive and prosper. More and more people today recognize this truth about private virtue being an important component of a free democratic society. What has been forgotten for a long time but, as a result of our worldwide economic downtown, is slowly coming to our consciousness is that this is equally true in business and commerce. When the attitude of “we can do no wrong” combines with greed, the world economy gets better only for a short time and then collapses. The world will not get better unless the greed and the arrogance and the lying and the cheating stop. A healthy economic system is impossible without honesty, humility and integrity. If you recall, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations insisted that if everyone simply pursued their own private good (their own self interest or selfishness), then the common economic good would be taken care of. Balderdash. History, past and present, shows it does not work that way. The scriptures are clear about it, too.

Two examples come quickly to mind. I had lunch recently with an Executive Secretary here at Boys Town. I asked her why three years ago she quit her job at a national mortgage firm to join us. She paused and explained ever so slowly: “I was tired of falsifying salary stubs for home loans.” A 21-year-old grad told an auto dealership his salary would only allow him to borrow $9,000 and he liked the $12,000 auto. “No problem” said the dealer. “We will just use someone else’s paystub.” That happened a few short days ago, too.

If business men and women engage in these tactics, they have made no advances from the days of Alexander the Great who sought great wealth by war, pillage and plunder. Many historians think that the growth of commerce was an enormous advance over the view of the ancient conquerors. But commerce is an advance only to the degree that private virtue rules in commerce, as well.

Take away private virtue and commerce can be as rapacious and as destructive as Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great. We need to change ourselves. We cannot do it by ourselves. We need the grace of God. That sounds slightly countercultural. It sounds like the loyal opposition.

The Lord has told us: “Take up thy cross and follow Me.” This means that to be faithful to the Lord we have to, not only express ourselves appropriately but also to deny ourselves appropriately to gain freedom.

In our long Christian tradition, there are two practices that make us counter-cultural. The first is the practice of virtue and the second is the practice of self-denial and self-restraint.

The 2nd century Christian writer quoted at the beginning of this chapter quite rightly said we Christians are only slightly counter-cultural. We have already seen what this means for defining the self. We now see our identity consists of really and truly called by God and sent on mission as we come into the world.

This means we Christians need to begin with an affirmative response to God’s call: “Come follow Me.” Our call echoes the call of God to Abraham and Sarah. It echoes the call of God to Sampson whose response was: “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” And, of course, then there was Joshua: “As for me and my family, we will serve the Lord.” In the long Christian tradition, this commitment to serve the Lord is called devotion. And devotion is described over the centuries as an act of the will whereby we surrender ourselves to the service of God. It is an in-depth decision which sometimes comes gradually and other times quickly. Sometimes it slowly builds up and then bursts upon us. The rest of the world does not notice this happening in our lives, but we notice it profoundly because our hearts are now flooded with joy.

In reflecting on this, St. Thomas suggests there are two kinds of things to notice that bring us to this dedication of our lives to God. (page 72)

It should be clear that our becoming the Lord’s good servant means that we are entering into a new profound relationship with God. The direct effect of devotion is joy. When the world sees a joyful Christian, it often calls that person simply a happy personality and nothing more. But there is so much more to it than the world can see.

Once one decides to follow the Lord then the question arises: what does the following of the Lord entail? The gospels unanimously respond: “Take up thy cross and follow Me.” Be a good Samaritan, the gospels tell us: “Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the sick, clothe the naked, love your neighbor as yourself. The scriptures tell us we cannot do this by ourselves. We need virtue, grace under pressure, spiritual courage. And we need moral muscle which is strength.

To grow in friendship with God also requires considerable self-mastery on our part, the purpose of which is to gain freedom to serve God and neighbor. The scriptures are filled with admonitions in this regard. There is the story of the king who, before he does battle with an opposite king, has to sit down and figure out whether he has strength enough and forces enough to conquer. Or the person who wants to build a house who has to figure if he has the resources to do so. And at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, there the fool who built his house on sand and the winds came and the storms, his house was washed away and it collapsed and what a fall it was.

It is through repeated acts of virtue with works of charity and works of self-denial that hope grows in our lives. Real hope is nothing more and nothing less than the deep seeded confidence that things will work out, developed by daily trusting in God over long periods of time. Hope is the profound realization God is in charge and we will make it through with trust in Him. Our primary role model for this kind of hope is Blessed Mary. In other words, as we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, deny ourselves, say no to our anger, hatred, revenge and laziness and just plain selfishness and live through rocky times, hope springs up, grows strong and energizes our emotional and spiritual lives.

If we give up our practice of prayer, our practice of fasting and self-denial, our devotion to God grows very cold, slowly but surely. And then we abandon the practices which the anonymous 2nd century writer said make us visibly different from others.

In summary, we need to integrate our ancient traditional, ascetical practices whose goal is to give us freedom to serve the Lord. Yes we need to integrate those with the best insights of postmodern psychology so that we may be in the world, but not of the world.

New Year's Resolutions

2009-02-02T08:24:00.001-06:00

New Year’s Resolution – January 2009

We asked our very little boys and girls in Wegner School to share with us their New Year’s resolutions. We share them also with you because they were an inspiration to us and I know they will be an inspiration to you. Please keep our children in your prayers. They, like all of us, need God’s help.

1. The year of 2009, I am going to try to mind my own business. I won’t use things I hear about my peers against them to annoy them. This will help me not be so rude to them.

2. The one goal that is going great for me is being warm and welcoming. Oftentimes, I tend to be glum in every bad situation. But I’ve done great with this resolution this year. I have to admit in the past I was not warm and welcoming because I was jealous in one way or another. I feel better now.

3. My New Year’s revolution (he meant resolution) will be to stay out of the principal’s office. And I have to say it is going very well because I know now what is right and what is wrong. When I first got here, I was used to a lot of office referrals. Now I’m getting better.

4. My New Year’s resolution is to get a 4.0 in school. I am trying to get all A’s and show extra effort in all of my classes. I want to do this because some day, when I leave grade school and go to high school, I would like to go to college. I would like to make something of myself.

5. My New Year’s resolution is that I want to do my best not to run away and not go compliant. If I learn to face my troubles, I’ll be a better person instead of running away.

6. At my old school, I did a lot of bad things like arguing with other kids and different teachers and also I used to skip school. So when I came to Boys Town, I want you all to help me keep my promise not to do those things.

7. My spiritual goal in 2009 is to make my First Holy Communion. I will accomplish this by studying hard, praying well and learning from Ms. Stovall who is teaching me.

8. My News (sic) Year resolution is when I finally leave the 7th grade and enter the 8th grade, I would like to be off card in my class and I’m already off to a good start. One of my teachers said soon I will be testing for the 8th grade. If I can make it, it will mean so much to me.

9. I am trying to develop better behavior. I want to have fun at Boys Town because I am in the 7th grade and I am staying until high school graduation. I am trying to do better and have more fun.

10. My resolution is to get better and not have homework demerits. I goof around at home too much and don’t get
my homework done.

11. My New Year’s resolution is to avoid going to the principal’s office. It is going good so far because I am accepting my consequences and moving on with my day.

12. My New Year’s resolution is to use some good strategies so I don’t blow up so often and throw things.

13. My New Year’s resolution is a hard one and that is to achieve emotional health so I can go home.

14. I will try to curse and swear less and not use so many bad words.

15. My New Year’s resolution is to do so well that I do not have real bad consequences. I want to be able to go home successfully.

Wishes From Boys Town Donors Across America

2009-01-07T16:54:00.000-06:00

At Christmas we ask donors to write a little note of encouragement to our boys and girls. We share some of those donor’s thoughts and words with you. They are an inspiration to us all.

1. We don’t know each other, but just imagining what you must be like makes me want to reach out to you. I was an orphan myself. My circumstances, like yours, were painful. But when I trusted the Lord, good things happened.
--Helen, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania

2. I agree presents are nice, but love is better. I send you my love at age 87.
--Martha, Johnson City, Kansas

3. Put a smile on your face and see if you can give others the opportunity to smile at you.
--Bruce, Columbus, Ohio

4. You are in a wonderful place with people who love you and surround you all the time with care. I started my life as an orphan and was raised by my grandparents. Succeeding in life, I married and own a small town newspaper. God has watched out for me 78 years. He will watch out for you. Please trust Him. --Kitty, Devine, Texas

5. Call on the Holy Spirit to help you do the best you can. I care about you and I pray for you.
--John, Fairhope, Alabama

6. Please talk with God every day. He will walk with you even on your worst day. I know from experience. --Sue, Clinton, Oklahoma

7. May you learn to know and love Jesus born at Bethlehem and trust Him. I never knew my father, but I knew my Father in heaven.
--Grandpa, Bay City, Texas

8. Hope you have a wonderful, bright future.
--Pat, Phoenix, Arizona

9. I love you and want for you to know that I carry you in my heart.
--Edna, Naples, Florida

10. Please know you are loved and cared for. God is good.
--Horace, Mercer Island, Washington

11. I hope your Christmas is special. I have nine grandsons so I have learned to appreciate boys of all ages. I believe Boys Town is a place where children are loved and cared for and I wish you a very Merry Christmas.
--Anne Marie, Mississippi

12. We are very happy all of you kids are with people who care. We try to do our share of caring,too, to bring happiness to you Boys Town children. You are a gift from God.
--Arthur & Danielle, Bronx, New York

13. Be thoughtful of others, good and happy and you will find others will do the same for you. Merry Christmas.
--Lawrence, Pearl City, Hawaii

14. I remember Eleanor Roosevelt saying: “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery and today is a gift.”
--Joan, Casselberry, Florida

15. Let Jesus meet all your needs and fulfill all your desires. No one cares for you more.
--Susan, Willimantic, Connecticut

16. You are surrounded by all the love in the universe so take pleasure in the simple splendors of God’s people and God’s nature.
--Alfred, St. Paul, Minnesota

17. May your future be better than you ever dreamed.
--Celeste, San Mateo, California

18. May better days be ahead for you.
--Grandma Judy, Long Island, NY

19. May the holiday be filled with wonder for you.
--Janet, Coalinga, California

20. Know there are others who care about you beyond Boys Town and our prayers will help you through difficult times.
--Madeline, Redding, Massachusetts

20. I am sorry for any pain you have suffered. The Lord is mighty and delights in you.
--Bernice, Colorado Springs, Colorado

21. I’m glad you have a good home at Boys Town where people care for you and share their love with you.
--George, Palmdale, California

22. I hope your holiday is filled with goodness. Share it with others.
--Eleanor, Plympton, Massachusetts

23. I give you this in memory of my beloved father. May your dreams come true.
--Lydia, Camden, New Jersey

24. May joy touch your heart.
--George, Millville, New Jersey

25. I thank God for all my blessings in the midst of my sickness as a retired teacher.
--Joyce, Milan, Georgia

26. I know God loves you and so do I.
--Kathy, Huntington Beach, California

27. Always keep your faith in the Lord. I do even though I am very ill and old.
--Beverly, Salem, Wisconsin

Christmas Reflections - 2008 # 2

2008-12-31T07:49:00.000-06:00

At Christmastime we ask our boys and girls to share with us their thoughts in this Holy Season. We pass them on to you with the hope that you will be encouraged to pray for our children and to choose goodness and happiness in your own lives.

1. If I could give a gift to someone in my family for Christmas, it would not be bought with money. It would be a changed me. I would show my mom a changed me, yes. It wouldn’t be the old foolish me running around robbing people burglarizing. Instead it would be a newer improved me that has replaced his ignorance with confidence so that he can do right, a new me that accepts feedback. He can do whatever he puts his mind to, positive things and not negative things that got me here.
--Gabriel

2. If I could give a gift to someone in my Boys Town family, it would be a gift that came with time. It would be a success story, my success story about how I came to Boys Town as what society calls a criminal, a thief and a thug. And instead of sticking to old ways, I change for the better. Merry Christmas Boys Town. --Joe

3. If I could give any Christmas gift whatsoever, I would give my family honesty. I would tell the truth about everything that I used to lie about. I would give my parents the trust in me that I believe it worthwhile. I would be able to be trusted, even with small things. I lost a lot of trust. I need to regain it. --Shannon

4. The worst Christmas I ever experienced was 2006. I was in placement because of my actions. And the best Christmas I ever had was all my Christmases at Boys Town. I have learned here the true meaning of Christmas. --Tazzi

5. The best Christmas I ever experienced was my first Christmas at Boys Town. I have never seen so many presents. I was appreciative for everything I received. Whatever presents I unwrapped, I always had a smile on my face. I thank Bruce and Janele for the presents. --Manuel

6. One gift I would give to my family back home would be to give my dad a brand new toolset and a couple of dollars. Another thing I would give him is a brand new winter coat, hat and gloves. And a gigantic hug and a pair of new boots.

If I could give a Christmas gift to my Boys Town family members, I would give all of them a huge gigantic hug and spend a whole lot of time with them trying to get to know them better and better each and every day. --Reagan

7. The worst Christmas I ever experienced was the first without my dad. I felt so empty. There was no possibility for me ever to have a family again.

The best Christmas I ever experienced was my second Boys Town Christmas with my Family-Teachers, the Baumgarts. This was my best Christmas because for the first time I felt like just maybe my hope and dream was coming true to have a family together. --Kahli

8. The best Christmas I ever experienced was here at Boys Town because I had a family to wake up to and was happy to give my help and to have the love and happiness surround me. It was the best Christmas I have ever experienced. --Tyler

9. I have never had a bad Christmas. Throughout my foster care, I have experienced many different Christmases. Each one has taught me more about family and how I need to be appreciative for family, not only about family but about the Baby at Bethlehem, as well. --Cristle

10. The best Christmas I ever experienced was in 2006, my first Boys Town Christmas. It was the first time that Christmas wasn’t about gifts. It was the day spent with family. I found I didn’t need presents to be happy. I saw I had a family to spend a real Christmas with. It opened my eyes and I became a grateful and caring person. --Chris

11. Since being here, I have noticed all of us deal with many life issues. Maybe some not as big as others. But I think that I would give everyone the opportunity to live in a loving safe home. I believe all families at Boys Town and around the world should possess the qualities of being loving and safe.

The best Christmas I believe is yet to come. I’ve had many beautiful and fun Christmases, but I think that when I get to have a family of my own that I will make the best Christmas ever.
--Jackey

12. Lately here at Boys Town, I have been getting in a lot of trouble. There have been many family meetings on my behavior and it is to the point where it seems the girls are in my house are babysitting and that’s not right. I am very close to all of them, Melissa, Alicia, Sara and Cheyenne. And I know I have let them all down. The best Christmas gift I can give them is my word, my word that I am sorry, my word that I am here to change. I want to do better. Lastly, I can give them my love. That’s all that matters in the end. --Name Withheld

13. A gift I would give my family back home is a gift to my sister. It is the gift to understand that nothing is always fair. I want her to understand things happen for a reason and they are not always her fault. I want to take the pain away she is felling. I want to give her the gift of reassurance to let her know that God will make things better at the end. --Natalya

14. If I could give any Christmas gift to my family, I would give them my presence by being there. I have not always been there for them and with them. I believe that the gift of my being there would be greater than any materialistic thing. I have not been able to actually live and stay with my family since I was 13. This would be my gift. --Kenny

15. To my Boys Town house, I would give the gift of sharing. I care about my housemates. We all need help, some more than others. But just being there for them would be a good thing to encourage them to do good when they are feeling down. --Reshaun

16. A gift I would give my mother is the satisfaction to let her know I will be staying at Boys Town until the day I graduate. Her dream for me was to be at Boys Town to complete high school. I am going to stay. --Gustavo

My Best and Worst Christmas

2008-12-29T16:40:00.000-06:00

The boys and girls of Boys Town love Christmas just as much as you do. In so many ways, we are just like you…except for one thing…we don’t have much of a family.

We ask you and we plead with you, try to make Christmas a family day in your own home. Please read these reflections with your heart and go the extra mile. God bless you and Merry Christmas.

1. My best Christmas was when I was four. My mom shared her last Christmas with me before she passed. And I remember how joyful our family was, hanging up ornaments on the tree. --Molly

2. The worst Christmas was when I lived with my dad and his mean girlfriend who doesn’t believe in God nor does she celebrate Christmas. I was in the 5th grade and was excited to put up the tree my dad got for me and we put it in the living room so I could decorate it. When my dad’s girlfriend saw the tree, she yelled at me, told me how stupid it was and said I had to put it in my bedroom so she wouldn’t have to look at it.
3. The worst Christmas I experienced was when my mom and dad got a divorce. Yes, it solved the fighting, but it left three little girls without their father to spoil them in the Christmas season. He did not even want to be around us for Christmas. --Mary Anne

4. The best Christmas I ever experienced was my first Boys Town Christmas. I was in Kyle and Joya’s home. Joya was really creative. She used flower code names as our names for us girls so we couldn’t peek at our presents. We all shared with each other. We were having fun without arguing or doing things to offend each other. I hope this year’s Christmas will be just as memorable. --Jodi

5. The worst Christmas I experienced was when I woke up and found out that mom and dad weren’t getting along and we were not going to grandma’s for Christmas…the best Christmas I ever experienced was actually every other Christmas except the one listed above because I’ve learned you cannot let people ruin your happiness. You should be thankful for things you get. Remember, it is the day Jesus was born and He loves us no matter what kind of struggles we are going through. --Gina

6. My worst Christmas I ever experienced was when I was four. My family was very poor. My dad had to pawn my mother’s wedding ring to buy us toys. That’s what he said, but instead he took the money and went and got drugs. The next day, my mom started crying at the Christmas table when my dad was out with his friends. I didn’t get gifts, not even a tender hug. --Christina

7. The worst Christmas I ever experienced was last year because I didn’t think about my family and how they felt. I just thought about myself and it was the worst because I argued with my parents all the time.

I haven’t had a best Christmas yet, but I think this one will be it because now I’ve learned to think about others and about the true meaning of Christmas. --Barbara

8. My best Christmas was when my brother came home from Iraq. It was my brother’s first home visit. He got off the plane. We hugged each other. We got home. We went to grandma and grandpa’s and opened presents. Just sitting by him on the couch made me feel good. I really didn’t care about presents because my big brother was home. --Maria

9. My best Christmas was the time I was six and my grandfather came to my house at 4:00 in the morning. He was dressed like Santa and had all my presents. And Santa and I ate cookies together. Later when I was nine years old, I found out it was him. --Chris

10. My worst Christmas I ever spent was when my father died and I spent it without him. I was only 11 years
old. It was so very sad. --Johnny

11. The worst Christmas I ever had was last year. I was locked up and in juvenile hall for Thanksgiving and
Christmas. --Eric

12. My best Christmas was last year. My whole family was there and a lot of people I had not seen in a long
time. We cared for each other. Gifts were the last thing on my mind. I was in Missouri at my aunt’s house. Everybody had fun. Everything was perfect. --Jasmine

13. The worst Christmas I experienced was several years ago in Lincoln with my dad’s family. They had
problems with drugs and popping pills. My dad drank a few beers, popped pills and broke into my grandma’s neighbor’s house, stealing a computer, laptop and other valuable things. We waited for about an hour not knowing where he was. He finally returned and about 45 minutes later, two cops showed up, arrested him and took him off in handcuffs. I cried my eyes out on Christmas Day as my dad got taken away. Christmas is supposed to be joyous, happy, spiritual family time and that ruined everything. --Tommy

14. My best Christmas was here at Boys Town. Even though I wasn’t home with my family, I have people
around me who really care about me. No one argues. Everyone is happy. I have caring Family-Teachers and housemates. They lift me up when I get sad. --Fred

15. The worst Christmas I ever experienced scared me for life. My mom and dad started to argue. It got out of
control. My dad beat my mother and every Christmas I have flashbacks to when that happened. I try to forget, but it never leaves my mind. --Regina

16. My worst Christmas was last year. I was making really bad decisions. I constantly chose fun over family.
I was present at Christmas dinner, but I wasn’t really acknowledged. I was with my family, but alone because of my own choices. --Brittney

17. I have had a lot of good Christmases, but the one I remember real well is when I was nine years old. I was
with my foster parents at the time and my sister and brother were with me. It was the first Christmas I was with my sister and brother and the only time I was with them. It was great. --Melissa

18. My best Christmas was the one coming to Boys Town. I was able to be with people who were respectful
and respected me, people who loved me and I loved them. I felt total love. It was great. --Pam

19. The best Christmas I ever had was when I went home and it was just mom and me. We were all we had, but
we cared for each other. We watched movies. We opened presents. We had so much fun. We loved each other. --Arnaldo

20. The worst Christmas was when I was in Pipestone, Minnesota. We traveled to Iowa to see my grandma
who did not like me. She told me to go sit in the basement until it was bedtime. It was Christmas morning when we arrived and I could hear them having fun upstairs. It was my worst Christmas.
--Name withheld

21. My best Christmas I have experienced was right here at Boys Town. The Christmas homes were a blast.
I’ve been here four years and I love every minute of it. We go to so many different places. We meet different people. Everyone is in a good mood. We have fun. I didn’t have to be afraid of being hurt. I got the gift of having many friends. --Cecilia

Christmas Reflections 2008

2008-12-18T16:15:00.000-06:00

We asked our boys and girls to write about what they would give some for Christmas, perhaps a gift that did not cost money, but would be very expensive because it came from the heart. We share these reflections with you because we know they will touch your heart as they have ours.

1. If I could give a gift to someone in my family for Christmas it would not be bought with money. It would be a changed me. I would show my mom a changed me, yes. It wouldn’t be the old foolish me running around robbing people, burglarizing. Instead it would be a newer improved me that has replaced his ignorance with confidence so that he can do right, a new me that accepts feedback. He can do whatever he puts his mind to, positive things and not negative things that got me here. --Gabriel

2. If I could give any Christmas gift whatsoever, I would give my mom a gift of thanks because if she did not hear about Boys Town from an old friend, I would not be the kind of loving person I am today. I would give, also, to my parents the gift of love. They never gave up on me even after many struggles. I would give a gift of thanks to the Lord who led me here to get me better. --Terri

3. The gift I would give my mom would be peacefulness. I have always made her worry every single Christmas. I was always in the streets during the holidays. I wouldn’t spend time with my mom, the person who gave birth to me. And now I am sorry and want to give her peacefulness. --Manuel

4. If I could give a Christmas gift to my Boys Town family members, I would give all of them a huge gigantic hug and spend a whole lot of time with them trying to get to know them better and better each and every day. --Reagan

5. If I could give any gift to someone back home, I would give a gift to my grandma. I would give her the promise that I would never lie, cheat or steal again. I would show her that by living my life to the fullest and best and being successful. Along with that gift, I would give her the promise I would not end up being an alcohol like some members of my family. That would be my promise. --Kahli

6. If I could any gift to my Boys Town family, I would give the holiday spirit and help them have a better Christmas, even when they cannot be home. I would help them understand it is a blessing to be at Boys Town for Christmas. --Tyler

7. If I could give any gift to the Lord, I would give faith. God has done a lot for me. It is the best thing I could do to give to the Lord. --Tim

8. If I could give any gift to someone in my family back home, I would give my guardian freedom from all his pain which he lives with physically and emotionally. That way he would not have to feel he let me down by not raising me right. Please God, heal him of his pains and sorrows. --Tom

9. For my family at Boys Town, I would give everyone I’ve met here a gift. It would also be to a friend who feels she’s lost it all because she lost her mother and no strength to deal with it. I just pray the Lord will bless her with that strength. --Joe

10. My family is a scattered few. I don’t know where my mom or dad are or even where my two younger brothers
are. We are scattered because of my mother’s actions which were inconceivable for me, but I was taken at 12. I would love to give all of them happy memories to replace all of the painful memories of our past. --Jackey

10. Since being here, I have noticed all of us deal with many life issues. Maybe some not as big as others. But I
think that I would give everyone the opportunity to live in a loving, safe home. I believe all families at Boys Town and around the world should possess the qualities of being loving and safe. --Joan

11. I don’t think all gifts need to be bought. A lot of my family I have not seen in a long time because I was either in
lockup or here at Boys Town. I am spending Christmas back home with my family. The gift I can give them is myself, my time, my thoughts and my love. All of that cannot be bought. It all comes from my heart and it is not replaceable. That is the best Christmas gift anyone can receive. --Jasmine

12. A gift I would give my family back home is a gift to my sister. It is the gift to understand nothing is always
fair. I want her to understand things happen for a reason and they are not always her fault. I want to take the pain away she is feeling. I want to give her the gift of reassurance to let her know that God will make things better at the end. --Natalya

13. A gift I would give to a girl in my house is the gift of self-esteem, to let her know she does not need a guy in
her life to be beautiful or to feel worthy of something. I want her to know that God loves her just the way she is and the way God made her. I want her to have the gift of knowing that if she puts her mind into something good and wants to change then she really can. I love her and many other people do, as well. --Alice

14. If I could give any Christmas gift to my family, I would give them my presence by being there. I have not always
been there for them and with them. I believe that the gift of my being there with them would be greater than any materialistic thing. I have not been able to actually live and stay with my family since I was 13. This would be my gift. --Kenny

15. I would give my Family-Teachers a vacation wherever they would be pleased to go. They take so much time out
of their own personal lives because they care about me and the other young men in our house each and every day. They help us. They show me how to be a better man in life and in society. What they do does not go unnoticed to me and I thank them. --Joseph

16. I would give the gift of love and obedience to my mother this Christmas because I know it was hard for her to
to raise three boys. I would give her peace and comfort and I would do something with my life so that she could feel she did not fail as a parent. --Rashaun

17. To my Boys Town house, I would give the gift of sharing I care about my housemates. We all need help, some
more than others. But just being there for them would be a good thing to encourage them to do good when they are feeling down. --Randy

18. A gift I would give my mother is the satisfaction to let her know I will be staying in Boys Town until the
day I graduate. Her dream for me was to be in Boys Town to complete my high school. I am going to stay. --Gustavo

19. I would also give my Boys Town Family-Teachers great happiness that I have changed and telling that I
want to stay here for four years in high school. And they will be so happy to know that I want to change. --Jerry

20. If I could give a gift I would give my grandma my high school diploma to show her that I made it through high
school and to show her that I’m a changed person. I know that my grandma wants me to be better than anyone in my family. I want to show my grandma that I can be the first one to finish school and get a high school diploma so I set a goal. My goal is to make my grandma proud of me when she comes to my graduation. --Daniel

21. I would give my Family-Teachers a vacation to wherever they want to go for all of the things they did for me and
other people in my home. They are great Family-Teachers and I love them with all of my heart. I’m not saying they are the best because they are my Family-Teachers. I’m saying it because they want the best for us and want us to be successful in life. They changed my life around. I am thankful for my Boys Town family. --George

22. If I could give any gift to someone in my own family back home, I would give my brother the gift of sobriety. He
has difficulty accepting some of the things that not only happened to me but also to him and he needs sobriety. It would be my gift.

Something I Didn't Want to Do But You Forced Me and I'm Happy

2008-12-17T16:38:00.000-06:00

We asked our boys and girls to reflect on the many times in their lives that they have been “forced” to do things they didn’t want to do and, after they did them, they’re very glad that you made them do it. This is a lesson we all have to learn in life and we share them with you to encourage you and to inspire hope in our youth.

1. At age 14, I was sent to drug treatment, but as time passed I got tired of being clean and wanted to go back to drugs. So I faked it. Got out and after a month ended up running away and getting high. I was tired of the drug lifestyle, but still wanted it. Then I found out my grandmother was getting locked up because she and her friends were high and ran a car into a house. Then my mom came back in my life and she was starting to get clean. That’s when I decided what I wanted to do with my life. For the first time, I wanted to go back into treatment and this time really get on the right path. More and more every day, I was liking the sober life. I was happier than I had been in a long time. If I continue to take it day by day and go to meetings, I can stay on the road of recovery. Thank you.
--Maria, age 16 (Name changed)

2. My mother used to tell me to go to school. I never listened. She would call the police on me and make me go to school, but that still didn’t work. I ended up in jail. I didn’t want to follow their instructions, but I did. I learned to listen to what people had to say. I didn’t like it at first, but now I found out that it works really well. Every time I was in trouble, God found a way for me and I thank Him for that.

3. When I came to Boys Town, I weighed 339 lbs. They said I had to do summer weights, football camp, 44’s and a lot of running. It was not fun, but I liked the coaches because they said: “Pete’s got a lot of heart” and I guess that means I don’t give up easily. I put forth my energy…since May 12 I have lost over 100 lbs., to be exact 108 lbs. in six to seven months. I couldn’t believe it. You made me do it and I’m sure glad you did because now I am on the football team and I’m thinking of going into the Army.
--Pete, age 17 (Name changed)

4. They said that we all had to go out door to door for the Ollie Webb Center, a place for handicapped children, and sell Ollie Webb’s honey at $5 a bottle. It seemed not good at all. I didn’t want to do it, but our Family-Teachers made us do it. I had a negative attitude because I figured no one would buy the stuff. Most people hate it when kids come to their door. I was not willing to waste my time. I was wrong. I found out I liked it. I found out that people like it…when I got here, I heard I had to attend church one time a week. At home, I never attended church. They made me participate. I even had to write down sermon notes and guess what? I found out I liked it. What I learned was this. On the flip side of having a negative affect is having a positive attitude. When you have a positive attitude, things you don’t like go a lot faster and a lot better. So I can correct myself in the future.
--Collin

5. I am a Native American and come from the reservation. My mom told the people here that Julie is a good kid, but she has to learn right from wrong. Guess what? I began to realize that God sent me here to learn some lessons. God put me on this earth. I learned to do His deeds and His deeds are to help people. I had food all my life, but growing up on the res was not easy, for kids fight everyone and there is a lot of drinking. And yet I’m glad I came from the res and not the hood or some other place because I have a family who loves me. I am glad Boys Town helped me.
-- Julie (Name changed)

6. I was born an orphan and raised in an orphanage in Russia. I was lucky enough to come to America to a very loving, caring family but I didn’t realize that until I left them. I was always getting in trouble, sneaking out at night and doing drugs and drinking, everything I wasn’t supposed to do. But that wasn’t the worse part. I was disrespectful to my family. I have had anger management problems and would always hate to admit it. Boys Town made me admit it and I’m glad they did. I sometimes say I don’t like Boys Town just to look cool. But everybody does that. It does help people and it surely helped me.
--Name withheld

7. My dad walked out on my mom when she was pregnant with me. He wanted me to go away and my mom to have an abortion. She did not want it. I didn’t do well by my mom and ended up in treatment facilities. I felt like God was ignoring me. I even felt like God had spit in my eye. To make a long story short, I came to Boys Town and I started to like it. One of the main things Boys Town has taught me is that God helps us on His time, not ours.
--Boy, age 17 (Name withheld)

8. One thing I didn’t want to do, but did anyway was straighten out my life. Everyday I would get in trouble and start talking C…to random people. I was locked up four times. I stole lots of drugs. A friend wanted to steal a car that had keys in it. I got scared and ended up not taking the car. That was a good decision. I’m glad I didn’t do it. I ended up in jail for other things. And at Boys Town, I am straightening up my life. I can act like myself now instead of acting tough. People like me more when I act like myself instead of someone I am not. I am not perfect, but I am better and I’m glad I am. I always think back on my old days and I am super glad for getting better.
--Gina, age 17

Something I Did Not Want To Do But Am Grateful I Did

2008-12-16T16:40:00.000-06:00

We asked our boys and girls to write down their thoughts about how others pushed them very hard to do something they did not want to do and they got better. We share those stories with you that they may be a motivator for you, as well.

1. I am going to tell you something I never told anyone. I did not want to come to Boys Town because I always thought bad about this place. I thought the Family-Teachers would be jealous and judgmental and they would make fun of us for being here. I was scared of just coming here because my neighbors would say I was a bad girl. But I have changed my mind. It is a good way to learn new things. Yes, there are people who watch you day and night here, but they are just there to make sure you are doing what you are supposed to do and not faking it to make it. What I have learned here is that I am special in my own way. I have learned to be grateful for how I am cared about here. I am grateful for a lot of integrity…Melissa

2. I am 13 years old and I am still afraid of the dark. I do not want to take the trash out at night. I think someone is going to pop out of the bushes when my back is turned and hurt me again. I remember one night here a car came up beside me when I was taking out the trash and I was scared out of my pants. I wanted to run. I thought the car was going to kidnap me. (I had no clue why I thought this because I was at Boys Town and I know this place is safe.) I only knew I was scared. I was crying uncontrollably. To this day, I remember how scared I was. Now that I have been at Boys Town a long time, I am glad that I don’t have to be afraid…Anna

3. After being here for a while, I became more open to help that my Family-Teachers were willing to give me. They made me feel welcomed and cared for. They worked with me and my family. I began to do what I thought was impossible for me. I began to change. I began to learn. I began to study. I began to become a better person, a better daughter. I learned that I was not in control, that I was just a child. I learned that God has a bigger plan for my life than I had for myself. He sent me here for a reason and I needed to follow the Lord…Kortnie

4. When I was told I was going to Boys Town, I freaked out. By this time, I went through a phase called “I don’t care anymore.” So I was running away and doing things I wasn’t suppose to be doing. I was put in a program by Sarpy County Court System. It was called C.A.R.E. aka house arrest. I wasn’t following the rules. When I was told that I had a choice of either going to Geneva or Boys Town, some of the other kids in jail had been to Boys Town and told me it was the best thing they had ever done in their life and they were sorry they messed up. That’s why I came…Emma

5. At Boys Town at first I went to church and would sit with adults and catch a few words of the sermon, not many, but I still continued to go. As I kept going, I began to be able to sit still in church and soon I began to think more about God and what He meant to me. I realized that after I left church no matter how cloudy the day or how hot or how cold, I would feel good and clean as if I had just given my soul a shower. There are still days when I am down but if I can just catch a half hour of prayer, I feel so much better…Sharaya

6. Something I didn’t want to do was live in a house full of females as harsh as it may seem. Living with five other girls…we were all from different places. I really thought it would be a piece of cake. Wrongo! I realized after the first month it was not going to be easy and that my patience was being tried a lot. The other girls knew it was hard for me to look at things from a feminine perspective because I didn’t have any sisters and I was raised around five older brothers. So I looked at things from my brothers’ perspective, a male perspective. But the girls were patient with me and have been teaching me how to get into feminine things, like a dress. I had never worn a dress until I came here. And they have been patient. In fact, I am not used to being around females. Now I am grateful for sticking with it. And I live in a house of females and I now have a feminine perspective and it feels great…Name withheld

7. My mother and I never got along. I basically hated her. I wanted nothing to do with her. I got the impression she was honestly trying to ruin my life. I would make a mistake, fail a test or miss a curfew and she would ground me. She always gave me lectures. Then one day she sent me to Boys Town. Was I ever angry at her. I hated her. I threw it in her face every time I talked to her. We had nothing to share with each other. We never tried to work out our relationship. I wanted nothing to do with her. But then this all started to change. I believe God opens our eyes and I thought I hated my mom but I discovered, through God’s help, I could not live without her. She is my life. I found things that make me proud of my mother. And now I am grateful for her…Heather

8. I have dreams to become someone important, but that doesn’t mean I am ready to become that person. Boys Town has made me realize I cannot change and I cannot fulfill these dreams unless I start becoming that person. I haven’t started yet…Name withheld.

9. There were many times in my life where I had things I did not want to do and I am grateful I did. One of them is the image of a scrawny little girl with a dirty face and tattered clothes. She timidly walked into the place I had been forced to do community service. I saw her face. I looked at her eyes and slowly became aware how much I really had in my life. I spent the whole day serving food to the homeless. I saw hundreds of people in this condition or worse. I felt nothing for them until I saw this little girl. She struck me so much like myself. The only difference was that she had not put on a facade for many years like I had. This girl had nothing. She had no food, no new clothes, no education, no family to support her. The thing that amazed me the most was after all the harshness life handed her, she still met me with a smile.

I sat with this little girl for over an hour after I had done my community service. She shared with me stories of her life and we ate and laughed. She did not seem like a little girl anymore. She had been through too much even to be perceived as small in any way. I learned so much about her. She showed me the true meaning of being grateful. She was truly my guardian angel at the moment. She showed up right when I most needed her.

I continued to find her around the shelter getting food. I brought her gift baskets and toys. When I offered a place to sleep, she slowly began to drift out of my life. One day she apologized to me for having to leave. I never saw her again and her memory is forever in my mind. I will always remember the moment of my life that was affected by this one person so much. She made me grateful for being able to give her a friend. She made me grateful for life. She made me grateful to God for putting her in my life. This experience left me with hope and purpose. I pray for her each and every day. She has meant so much to me. And it all came to me because I was doing something I never wanted to do…Elise

A Sacrifice You Made Me Make and I am Happy That You Did

2008-12-15T15:54:00.001-06:00

We asked our boys and girls to sit down and write about a sacrifice which we “made them make.” Now it’s something they didn’t want to do, but after they did it they were very thankful they did. It’s such a big lesson to learn. And it is repeated so many times, even in our own adult lives. Thanks for listening.

1. One thing I did that I didn’t want to do was come here to Boys Town. I was locked up in juvenile detention. I sure didn’t want to come here, but it was better than lockup.

They made me go to school and all of a sudden I was proud I didn’t skip school. They helped me stay away from drugs and alcohol. I wanted to do drugs and alcohol and now I’m glad I don’t. I wanted to gangbang. They didn’t let me do that and now I am glad I don’t. All of that is past. I try my hardest to keep it that way and will do so until death with God’s help. I want to do something with my life. I want to be like regular people and have a normal life. To me, that means have a regular family, a wife to be faithful to, kids, a house, a job. I want to be a barber and have my own barbershop. I even have the name for it: “Aaron’s fades and braids.” I’m happy you made me do this. --Aaron, age 16

2. I wasn’t going to school. I was running around all day using drugs and alcohol and then trying to sneak back into my house when mom didn’t know it so I could go to bed without getting a lecture from her. I was charged with breaking and entering and burglary and went to court. My probation officer gave me a drug test that I flunked. Next thing I know, I am in Boys Town. I felt betrayed by myself more than anyone else. It was very hard. It took me a long time to change my stubbornness. I like it here. I am doing so well. I feel so much better. --John, age 17

3. I didn’t want to come here because I heard bad stories from kids who didn’t make it here who ran away, but I had no other choice. So I fought it. As a Native American, I thought they would force me to cut my hair. That was part of my identity. I didn’t want to change who I was. But when I came, I met Native American Family-Teachers. I couldn’t believe it. They said if my hair was that important as a Native American, I could keep it that way as long as it was clean. Everything kind of worked out on its own and I began to be happy and I am glad I am making something for myself. I am blessed to have this. --Name withheld

4. When I came they made me join Junior Reserves Officers’ Training Corps. I didn’t want to. I thought I was making a fool out of myself. People would be looking at me and saying how bad I looked in my dbu’s (dress battle uniform). They made me rappel 70 feet up and drop down to the earth. I noticed I lost my fear of heights. Then I lost my fear of doing good. When you at last see what it was before you said you did not like, you change your mind. When you think you don’t want to do something, you need to give it a chance. You need to say to yourself: don’t judge a book by its cover. I am happy I am here. --Matt, age 17

5. I did not want to do cross country. They said I either had to play football or do cross country. They made me run farther and faster than I wanted to, farther and faster again, farther and faster again. And guess what? I started to like it as I got better. I placed 2nd at the Wahoo meet, the Arlington meet and the Boys Town meet for JV’s. I went to conferences and districts. Cross country let out of me the gift God had given me. I have three more years to improve. I hope to place at State. --Chris

6. Beautiful notes fade as the brass quartet finishes their piece. The crowd cheers. We even receive a standing ovation. We stand up and give each other a high five. In the midst of the musicians was me, one of the trumpets. When I was very young, I heard Louis Armstrong play the trumpet. That was it for me. It was very hard. I wanted to quit at times. Playing the trumpet is not as glamorous as it appears, especially in the beginning. You’re criticized terribly. No one comes to your performances. You are forced to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. The reason no one comes to the performances is the simple fact that you aren’t very good. I can’t blame them. But then you start to get good and you thank the Lord you continued. When I wasn’t very good, I wanted to quit. I thought: oh that other trumpeter is so much better than me. But my mother heard this and told me: “You’re always going to have someone better than you.” With that in mind, I continued. I thank God I continued. --Marcus

7. When I was back home, I was not faithful to the Lord, not serving Him with my actions. I was in juvenile detention, then I was forced to go to the Boys Town Residential Treatment Center where I was locked up. There I started to learn to love God with my actions. I realized at one point that God was blessing me and bringing me closer to Him. God was seriously becoming part of my life and I could see the change. Going from aggressive and assaultive behaviors left no trust with my parents. I have come this far with a foundation of trust with my parents and no aggression. Without God, I would not be anywhere. So my final thing to say is: with the power of God anything is possible. It will shatter any wall, will defend every believer and protect every soul, especially me. --Dalton

Christmas Reflections

2008-12-15T15:51:00.001-06:00

Christmas Reflections

We share these Christmas reflections with you because Christmas is a time for family. No matter what else we say, we know that if we put a smile on our face and try to love one another and kneel before the baby Jesus at the crib, we will have a great Christmas. I hope these reflections touch your heart.

1. The best Christmas I ever experienced was when I was ten. My grandma came all the way from Utah to visit us for Christmas. She loves us very much. My mom made a big dinner and was happy. Most important of all was that my mom and dad did not fight. I got the bike that I wanted. It was a very fun Christmas.
--Joe, age 16

2. The best Christmas I experienced was a few years ago when my family wasn’t split up. It was the best because there seemed to be more there. The reason I say this is because I would give the world to spend Christmas with my family and show them how grateful I am now.

--Joey, age 16

3. If I could give any Christmas gift to someone at Boys Town, I would give to John something he has never had. I would give him a best friend to care about him. That best friend is me. I do this because his whole life, no one has cared about him. Because he had no friends, he has done a lot of cruel things in his life. I give him friendship and caring from my own heart.

--Jonathan, age 16

4. The best Christmas ever was last year. It was the first Christmas that I could feel and say I had a family that was there for me in the Christmas Season. It was my first Christmas at Boys Town. I felt that all my friends and those who cared about me stood by me and gave me a Christmas I will never forget ever.
--Patricia, age 15

5. The worst Christmas was last year. Boys Town is a fun place to be for Christmas, but I made it bad because my real family was not here. I was selfish. I had only tears. I didn’t try. That is why it wasn’t the best for me.
--Name Withheld

6. The worst Christmas I ever experienced was when I lost my grandpa because he was the one who brought our family together.
--Nina, age 15

7. There were so many good ones, but one that really sticks out that I wish I could go back to is this…When my grandparents were alive and everyone in my family was together having a good time and enjoying each others company, giving presents to each other and no one fighting. There was no one forgetting the true meaning of Christmas. It was the last Christmas with all my grandparents.
--Maya, age 16

8. My worst Christmas was the Christmas of 2006. I went to church, but it was too hurried. Most of all, to me it felt like God was not present. Many things were wrong. I was not sober and I barely remember it. I wish I could have done better.
--Name Withheld

9. The worst Christmas was when I decided not to let my family have a happy and joyful Christmas. We went to church on Christmas Eve. I decided to whip out my cell phone and Ipod while in Church and pay no attention to the Lord. I didn’t listen to my mom or dad telling me to put them away. I argued with them and really embarrassed my parents. I ruined their Christmas.

--Name Withheld

10. The best I ever experienced…so far…(even though we are not quite at Christmas) I would say is this one. I say this because I have never thought of Christmas as an Advent or as a religious time to grow in Christ. This year Boys Town has helped me to become closer to God, stronger in my faith and a better person just in a few weeks leading up to Christmas.

--Chelsey, age 15

11. My best Christmas was last year when we got to put on our pajamas, eat real good food and open presents at Boys Town. Everyone cared about each other. It was a blast. I like the Boys Town Christmases we have her.
--Elizabeth, age 14

12. The worst Christmas I ever had was last year. I was stuck in a hospital with a bunch of people who didn’t believe in love. They only worried about what they would receive. They got what they deserved, which wasn’t much.
--Name Withheld

13. Last year was my best Christmas. I went home for Christmas and I was very excited. I wanted to help prepare everything for Christmas. I wanted to go to my aunt’s house and help her cook. I was in the kitchen after dinner, doing dishes, cleaning up and everyone was pleased with me. I thank Boys Town for the Christmas we had the week before. Boys Town helped me to understand Christmas and to enjoy all because you are with people you love.
--Angie, age 17

14. If I could give any gift to someone in my Boys Town family, I would give it to Maria (not her real name). Her parents strive for her to be something she is not. They tell her all the time how fat she is. In reality, she is not. Behind the scenes, I see how much this hurts her. Many don’t think it affects her too much, but I know it does. I would give her the gift of acceptance by her parents. No matter what they believe, nobody can be perfect. She is not fat either. She is my friend.
--Kim, age 17

15. My best Christmas was last year because my Family-Teachers threw a birthday party for me. I have never had a birthday party before in my whole life. It was really a lot of fun.
--Name Withhel

2008-12-11T14:59:00.000-06:00

In this month of December, weekly encouragement becomes daily encouragement.

During the Christmas season we have so many good things our boys and girls have written we will share them with you every day until we have exhausted them all.

I hope they brighten your day. I hope they light your lives in the darkness of December.

How to Make Our Christmas Season a Positive One

We asked our little children in Wegner School what positive things they could do to make the season a positive one. We also asked them to list negative behaviors that they will try and stay away from and how they will do this in the Christmas Season to make Christmas happy. We share some of their thoughts with you.

This Christmas I will do the following positive things:

1. This Christmas, I promise to respect my mom and her decisions.

2. This Christmas, I promise to be nice to my sister, even when she puts me down. That will be hard.

3. I promise to stay sober while I am at home, even when everyone else is drinking.

4. I promise to pray more in this Season because I know it will help me.

5. I promise to try and make my little brothers and sisters happy.

6. I promise to be respectful and thankful for the gifts I receive...whether they are big or little.

7. I promise this Christmas Season that I will listen to my mom and dad so that we have a happy Christmas. I promise to follow my auntie’s instructions and feedback and even volunteer for things around the house.

8. I promise I will get all my homework done and will not make excuses. I will have pleasant facials.

9. I promise to remember the real reason that we celebrate Christmas.
10. I promise to build healthy relationships with my family.

Behaviors that I will try to stay away from during the Christmas Season:

1. I will let my step mom yell at me without yelling back.

2. I will not throw snowballs at cops.

3. I will not go into the streets and gang bang. I will stay away from my former gang formers.

4. This Christmas, I will try not to shoplift from stores as we used to do.

5. I will try not to throw my little brother, Harley, in the snow.

6. I promise not to talk to my mom rudely.

7. I promise not to be a lazy bum who sits at home and does nothing but eat. I will clean the house and work on projects.

8. I promise not to be gloomy. When I am gloomy, I will think of Jesus of Bethlehem and try to be happy.

Behavioral & Psychological Sciences: Their Strengths and Weaknesses How to Learn Self-Control

2008-12-04T16:07:00.000-06:00

Behavioral & Psychological Sciences: Their Strengths and Weaknesses
How to Learn Self-Control
Val J. Peter

Since World War II, our knowledge of human behavior has grown enormously, especially through the many, many contributions of psychology and other behavioral sciences. Their strengths can be found in principles of behavior, stages of development and many other areas.

But the influence of these sciences is not always positive. In fact, at times it is downright negative. The insistence, for example, of many behavioral psychologists that guilt, in any form, should be eliminated is downright harmful to the human condition. Denial of original sin by these folks makes their views seriously defective. Two things missing from their agenda: the idea of virtue and the understanding of self-restraint in sexual behavior are seriously lacking among many behavioral science practitioners. At times, they are outright ridiculed by them. This is a sorry state of affairs. Some behavioral psychologists are moral relativists who believe in a form of hedonism.

It is a common view in some therapeutic psychology that we should abandon the rules of Christian morality and that psychologically well adjusted people must do so right away. They believe that therapy is not directed to clients discovering some basic wisdom about objective truths of life and transcultural values, but is directed to removing the psychological impediments in a client’s life to emotional adaptation and a shifting moral landscape. In other words, some of them believe the human mind and heart cannot find the truth about life, but instead must learn to adapt to the environment because that’s all we have.

So there is much we Christians can learn from psychology and the behavioral sciences when we apply lots of these insights with great success in helping our boys and girls. However, too many psychological specialists have no interest or understanding of religious devotion, prayer, fasting, ascetical discipline or chastity. They do not understand the saying of the Lord: Take up thy cross and follow Me.

So while we can benefit so much from the behavioral sciences, at the same time, we have to take care less we gloss over things that are harmful to Christian faith and practice. Let us take a few examples.
 For a man or woman to be faithful to their spouse in marriage, it is necessary for them to practice sexual self-restraint and self-denial both on occasion and even over long periods of time. The same is true of anyone committed to following the Lord.
 A pagan therapeutic mentality would say this sexual self-denial is a symptom of deep seeded psychological maladjustment.
 Philip Rieff, in his famous 1966 book Triumph of the Therapeutic, said that this pagan therapeutic mentality was killing off the spiritual roots of western culture and that it was nothing more than preaching kindly pagan humanism with fundamental opposition to Christianity.
 We Christians say the truth of the matter is that some guilt and shame are very appropriate. If you shoplift, you should feel guilty. If you lie and cheat, you should feel guilty. If you abuse a child, you should feel shame. The pagans are wrong to reject the efficacy of these when they are appropriate. What is rejected by us Christians is false guilt and false shame. False guilt is feeling guilty when you really weren’t guilty or feeling shame when you have done nothing shameful.
 The truth of the matter is that we should be sorry for our sins, our lying, our cheating, our stealing because they hurt others and ourselves, too. The pagan mentality would be saying that only therapy rather than repentance is needed.
 The truth of the matter is that we should do penance for our sins and make up for them and that these are vehicles for important personal transformation.
 The truth of the matter is that spiritual integrity involves good habits, for example, of sexual self-restraint and a concern for modesty.

With nothing more at his disposal than his wits, his good habits and an understanding of natural law, Hippocrates (long centuries before Christianity came along) saw clearly the relationship between a person’s interior spiritual life and their ability to heal. The Hippocratic Oath used to be taken by all medical students and that made it clear that the pagan Hippocrates, even without the help of God’s Holy Scriptures, recognized the vital relationship between the practice of healing and sexual restraint. The Hippocratic Oath sworn before the gods says this:

“With purity and with holiness, I will pass my life and
practice my healing art…into whatever houses I enter,
I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will
abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and
corruption; and further, from the seduction of females
or males, of free men and slaves.”

In other words, the practice of self-restraint or impulse control refreshes us into fuller humanity.

Wisdom would indicate that our goal should be to integrate the true valid insights of traditional Christian spiritual growth and development. The spiritual masters had real wisdom through the centuries. They were on to something.

Not all psychological experts are opposed to self-restraint and self-control. Here are some interesting studies that favor the Christian emphasis on self-restraint and self-control.

First, let us look at Shoda, Y., Mischel, W. & Peake, P.K. (2006) in the article “Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification” in Development Psychology, 26(6) 978-986.
The question was: can 4-year olds be taught to develop self-control and how?

According to this interesting study, some 4-year-olds were able to postpone eating a marshmallow longer than their peers under certain conditions. This study has some interesting implications on how we should approach self-discipline and self-restraint. In this study of 4-year-olds, the children were placed in four groups:

 The first group was given specific instructions not to eat the marshmallow with no apparent reward for doing so.
 The second group was told if they waited until the researcher came back, they could have two marshmallows. But if they didn’t want to wait, they could ring the bell and still have one.
 The third group was told the same thing as the first group. Don’t eat the marshmallow with no reward for resisting. (Except they were given help by the researchers as how they might resist such as try and think of something else besides eating the marshmallow.)
 The fourth group was the same as the second group (2 marshmallows for resisting, one if not) except they were also given suggestions by the researchers as to how to resist eating the treat.
 The first two groups (who were given no suggestions on how to resist eating the marshmallow) differed dramatically in their ability to delay gratification.
a. The first group (delayed 590.4 seconds), who were given a clear expectation to resist the treat without knowing the reward of doing so, delayed gratification for nearly four minutes longer than the second group (delayed 365.2 second), who knew they would get at least one marshmallow and opted for a smaller reward much sooner, rather than delay gratification for the greater reward.
b. The second two groups who were given instructions on how to resist the treat were interesting. The group whose reward was not revealed again performed better, delaying gratification for more than a minute longer than the group who knew.
c. The factors that helped delay gratification the most were twofold: the presence of cognitive strategies, coupled with clear expectations from the researchers.

The lesson we can draw from this study is when given clear expectations for behavior kids usually perform better, especially those with inherent traits of self-control. However, even for kids who might not be blessed with those traits, behavioral strategies to help them increase their self-discipline, coupled with clear expectations from teachers and parents may help delay things.

A number of studies also highlight the role of self-control in academic success. In one such study, researchers surveyed 201 college students and found that self-control (second only to high school GPA) was a better predictor of academic achievement than a number of other variables, including scores on the SAT. (Wolfe, R.N. & Johnson, S.D. (1995) “Personality as a predictor of college Performance” in Educational and Psychological Measurement, 55(2), 177-185.)

Another longitudinal study following 140 eighth grade students over the course of a school year found that students with high levels of self-control outperformed their peers in report card grades, standardized achievement-test scores, admission to a competitive high school, and school attendance. The students with more self-control scored two percentage points higher in the final GPA when compared with those with a high IQ. (Duckworth, A.L., Seligman & Martin, E.P. (2004) Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944)

What about children who have a genetic pre-disposition for low self-control…are they doomed to be low achievers and high risk-takers? Perhaps not; research shows that for those who regulate their behavior, self-control has the ability to increase in capacity, improving gradually and strengthening over time.

In a longitudinal study of college students, improvement over a period of two weeks in the capacity to perform seemingly unrelated tasks led to an increase in self-discipline to the initial exercise. In short term, the exertion of self-control made the subjects tired and fatigued. However, in the long term, the series of exercise caused the individuals to be less vulnerable to fatigue and to improve their self-regulation. (Muraven, M., Baumeister, R.F. & Tice, D (1999) “Longitudinal improvement of self-regulation through practice: Building self-control strength through repeated exercise.” The Journal of Social Psychology, 139(4), 446-457)

Self-control can function like a muscle, increasing strength and improving gradually over time with regular exercise. (Mischel, W. (1996). “From good intentions to will power.” In P. Gollwitzer & J. Bargh (Eds), The psychology of action (pp 197-218). New York: Guilford

Hurray for self-control. Kids can best learn self-control and self-restraint by using two things: clear expectations (I won’t let my anger explore) and behavioral strategies (neat tricks such as redirected thinking and acting). This works.

TEACHING YOUTH THE NEED FOR SELF-DISCIPLINE & SELF-RESTRAINT

2008-11-24T08:44:00.000-06:00

Val J. Peter

Introduction:

If people are to succeed in life, they need self-discipline and self-restraint. These are absolutely essential, not only for this life but for entering eternal life. The Lord says: “Take up your cross and follow Me.” Wisdom of the east and the west repeatedly says the same thing, namely, we need to learn self-discipline and self-restraint if we are to achieve our goals. This is written for you young people to read as a way to encourage you to start on the path of disciplining yourself and learning to restrain yourself. So let’s start at the beginning.

1. Training in Discipline Must Begin Early

When you are born into the world, there is usually joy surrounding the little baby. The baby has needs for nurturing, nutrition, cleanliness, constant care and a lot of warmth which adults like moms and dads can bring. When you, as a child, begin to crawl and walk, you come into what are called “the terrible twos.” You, as a child, are now able to express yourself and every good mom knows this is the time you need to be trained in self-discipline and self-restraint. Think of the following examples:

 You can’t turn the light switch on and off 400 times. That’s a no no.
 You cannot beat your baby brother over the head with a bottle anytime you get a chance. That’s a no no.
 You have to start to say thank you and please. That’s a big yes.
 You have to learn that there are positive consequences for good behavior and negative consequences for bad behavior.
 Mom or grandma are usually the ones who have to help you learn these things. So does dad. Big brothers and big sisters also are there to help.

2. Now Comes Self-discipline

Even before you start kindergarten, your parents and others need to help you understand that you must begin to discipline yourself. You have to take an active part in developing what are called the “civilizing skills.” You have to learn not to play with fire…not to run across the street without looking…not to take the toys of someone else without asking and always give them back.

3. More Discipline

You also have to learn that there is a difference between telling the truth and lying. You have to learn that to tell the truth takes discipline. Lying is easy. You have to learn not to cheat, but to be honest. Cheating is the easy way out. Honesty is the best policy. You have to learn not to steal. You have to learn to give to people what is theirs and not take things secretly or by force from them. All of this is the your disciplining yourself so that you can achieve your goals. Without self-discipline, you will not achieve goals in life because anger or jealousy or selfishness will be in charge and you don’t want that to happen.

4. You Need Discipline to be a Happy Family

Some of the things you need to learn are necessary for your family to be a happy family. Hollering, screaming and yelling all the time are not going to make you into a happy family. Throwing food isn’t going to make you a happy family. There are lots of things like that. We call them politeness or common courtesy and they involve introducing yourselves, not demanding things, but asking for things and many others.

5. Your Active Role in Self-discipline

When you are still young, you need to begin your moral and religious training. You need to begin to realize where you came from and where you are going. Where did you come from? You came from the hand of God. God is the source of all goodness, all kindness, all holiness, the source of warmth and caring. All the great religions of the world describe the Higher Power in this way. You have come from the hand of the Creator who is good, loving, kind and compassionate.

Oftentimes, it is at this point that you begin to realize you are born into a broken world. You don’t have a perfect family and you aren’t perfect either. No family is perfect. And as you start growing, you realize you make mistakes and you have troubles. And sometimes the troubles are because people are mean to you, but other times, the troubles are of your own making because you lie, cheat or steal and those are all sins.

6. Temptation

So you are pulled in two directions…in the direction of good (that comes from the hand of God)…and you are pulled in the direction of bad (that does not come from the hand of God).

It’s almost like we have two earphones, one telling us to do good, to love, to be kind. That’s the voice of God. And in the other ear, telling us to be selfish, mean, lying, cheating, stealing and not caring about anybody else.

Inside ourselves we have great, great desire for the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness. God sent His Son into our world. Christ’s promises are that if we place our trust in Him and not rely on our own strength, but with the grace of God, you will find this happiness. This is called hope. You want to be a person of hope.

Now there are two kinds of hope, both of which are very important. The first kind is the kind that you learn from experience. You learn that if you study hard, then you can expect to pass an examination. That makes you hopeful that you will do well. Oh, sometimes you fail, but you know if you pick yourself up that you will succeed. So you are a hopeful person. This is the natural virtue of hope.

At the same time, if you have faith and trust in God, you know that God has made you loveable and you know that God will rescue you from your sins and troubles if you trust Him. That is hope, too. He can be relied on.

Amazing Grace how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
I once was blind, but now I see.

That’s a person with hope in God.

So life is a struggle, but if you have faith it is a struggle that you know that God will be with you to overcome your sins and problems if you trust Him and turn to Him in prayer and self-discipline.

7. Self-denial

What is self-discipline? Self-discipline is self-denial. When you want to steal, you have to deny yourself and say: no, I’m not going to. When you want to lie, you have to say: no, I’m not going to lie. Now when you have lied, you have to say: I’m very sorry for lying. Please forgive me. That’s self-denial. It is also known as impulse control.

Virtues are good habits. Vices are bad habits. Good habits are the Six Pillars of character with faith added to each of them. Vices are very bad habits such as lying, cheating, stealing, sexually ripping people off.

We also have to learn how to control our thoughts and emotions. If we are emotionally down and we keep thinking of bad things and say how bad life is going to get, we will get more down. If we are emotionally angry and want to lie, cheat, steal or sexually rip people off, it will happen. We have to learn to be in charge of ourselves. You do that through good habits. If we watch lots of pornography or think of ripping off girls all the time, we will act that out. But if we avoid pornography and think of boy/girl relationships in terms of friendship and not ripping each other off, friendship will develop.

Every successful person knows that every day you have to deny yourself when you are tempted to lie, cheat, steal, be lazy, hurt someone, be bad to others, neglect your duties. You have to deny yourself. That’s self-denial.

It’s what Jesus told us to do: “Take up your cross and follow Me.” It’s essential. Jesus also said: “If you do not take up your cross, you cannot be my follower.” Every boy and girl at Boys Town has to learn to take up their cross and follow Jesus. Do you want to be a person of hope? Do you want to develop self-discipline? Do you want to be a person of success? Then you have to develop religious devotion because you need the strength to practice self-denial. It is the grace that God give you when you pray to the Lord earnestly. He will give you the grace and strength you need.

8. We are Powerless by Ourselves and Become Powerful by…Turning to God

The first step in AA is to realize that we are powerless before the sins and troubles of our lives and the second step is when we realize we have to get in touch with the Higher Power.

Religious devotion is turning to the Lord with our everyday prayers. You should have four or five prayers that you say at least every day in good times and in bad. You will discover when you start saying your prayers every day your life is happier because you have God’s strength. You cannot be happy by lying, cheating and stealing. Life won’t go well for you.

The goal of life is not self-realization. The goal of life is to love God with our whole heart. So self-denial involves serious self-restraint.

9. Mental Health

Much research on mental health shows that our well being is connected with the practice of religion and that our mental health is much better when we follow the Ten Commandments. In other words, a firm commitment to a good sound moral life through prayer and self-discipline has a very, very positive impact on us. We become more hopeful and more successful.

10.Ask God’s Help

We know that hope, as well as optimism are key ingredients. An optimistic and a hopeful person both say that with significant effort on our part and good prayer life, we can expect good results. Religious hope contains an added element, namely, that the expectation of success for you is in part due to the help and generosity you know you will receive from God if you but ask Him.

In other words, hope always involves the expectation in the one who is hoping that the good Lord will come to your aid and help you succeed in very difficult tasks. Hope means God is more powerful than you. And when you get in touch with that power, good things happen. Hope also entails a big element of friendship with God.

11.Daily Devotion/Daily Prayer

Devotion or daily prayer means that you surrender yourself to the service of God. And meditation and thinking about God in prayer is a big cause of devotion. And one of the big effects of devotion is joy.

What about loneliness? When loneliness comes our way, most of us find two things are very, very helpful. The first is that we talk to someone who loves us and cares for us. Perhaps it’s a friend or a relative who we know loves us. But it also involves prayer to God because when we pray we know God loves us very much and is close to us and we are close to God and that takes away our loneliness. We are not alone. God is with us.

12.Conclusion

So boys and girls, let us commit ourselves to the following:

(1) Let us commit ourselves to daily devotions. If you don’t have daily devotions, let’s start some. Get a little prayer book. Use your Bible. Pray to God every day. That develops great friendship with God.
(2) Practice self-denial. When you are tempted to do bad things say: “God, please help me” and stop yourself. When you are tempted to cheat, say: “Lord, please help me” and then stop yourself.

Both bring you great happiness.

Virtue is not possible without friends. Why do you we have church? Why do you think we have good Christian friends? True friendship always involves some element of sacrifice between persons who are like-minded and striving for common noble good. A true friend always sees his or her good tied to the good of the other. Virtue is not possible without friendship with God. Friendship requires the courage to resist evil and not hurting a friend and speaking the truth when they need to know it and standing up for one’s friend. A coward has no friends. Neither does a two-faced person.

When you think of it, we all depend on the love and generosity of God and each other. Happiness means that I am willing to help put your happiness as a priority in my life. Sacrifice is standing up courageously to moral dangers. Friendship with Christ through prayer and self-discipline and care of one’s brothers or sisters is the very best of all. This is the teaching of the Bible and it is the teaching of Father Flanagan.