Dear Folks my Christmas message is loaded with political significance. So here goes. John G
CHRISTMAS 2013: THE CHILD AND A SACRED ECONOMICS
“In the beginning was the Gift…..”
“Sacred Economics” is the title of a recently published book. Though the name is new to me, its essence is as ancient as humankind and so is especially present in our Christmas story when the three kings and the shepherds arrive at the crib of Jesus. The kings bring rich gifts, the shepherds, humble ones. They in turn are gifted with the love of the holy family and of an awesome sense of mystery and joy. This Christmas event continually occurs in the visions, hopes and dreams that emerge from the needy hearts of all mankind. Inspired by the Bethlehem story, Christmas can be said to be an ultimate festival of mutual gifting and so the deepest expression of a Sacred Economics,
According to Charles Eisenstein, the author of Sacred Economics, such an economy as a mutual sharing was for centuries the daily way of life in all civilizations. Economics is inseparable from “ecology.” “Eco” means “home” and so our shared home in the universe. So our author writes, “In the beginning was the Gift,” that is, of existence itself and that of each living thing and finally we humans. Since it is all gift, then it follows that in our early societies “The most important mode of economic exchange was the gift,” beginning with our gratitude for the miracle of life. Such gifts are not always equal, so that the more rich gave to the poor and the poor provided services in return. When money became the basis of exchange, the sacred remained. Even in the Middle Ages, lenders could not charge interest for their services. And before Feudalism, the concentration of land in the few was considered perverse.
This sense of the sacred economy was given a cosmic meaning by Silvio Gesell in his l906 book The Natural Economic Order. Eisenstein gives us a remarkable passage from this book: ”The earth belongs to and is an organic part of man….The earth is just as much a part, an organ of man as his head….How then can we suffer individual men to confiscate for themselves parts of the earth as their exclusive property” and so to keep us away…from parts of ourselves, to tear, as it were, whole limbs from our bodies?” Modern experts who are concerned about inequalities point out that the government must intervene to meet the needs of others for a living wage and the right to organize. Our popes since l892 have demanded of the rich that they and governments must meet these two needs. Our present Pope Francis also argues that the idea that the rich will “trickle down” their largess to the poor goes against the facts. Rather, we need increased wages and every other help that better sustains life such as health care. As a result the many will spend more and so our economy grows from “the bottom up.” This outlook is the last vestige of a sacred economics.
A sacred economics means a sacred community, Such a community is seriously damaged when wealthy men like the Koch Brothers (each of whom are worth 30 billion) attack programs that help ordinary people.Now, given the meaning of a sacred economy, I understand why such men act as they do. When such people greedily accumulate wealth, two realities invariably occur: they become increasingly protective of their wealth and also are very lonely, because they have cut themselves off from both mankind and Nature. Finally, a most dire result, such as an international economic collapse of the magnitude of 2008, did occur because ignorance was combined with greed by money brokers and banks and government regulators failed to act:. The three wise men would have understood the depth of this tragedy, because they understood that sacred wisdom in each of us and in all of Nature is infinitely more important than cumulative wealth.
