“After Black Friday”

“After Black Friday”     Dec. 1, 2019      Dr. Roger Ray

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St. Augustine of Hippo “So give to the poor; I’m begging you, I’m warning you, I’m commanding you, I’m ordering you.”

During the years when I was working on my doctorate, I was a frequent retreatant at the Abby of Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery that was once home to Thomas Merton. I became a close friend to Brother Luke, who is now the choir director at Gethsemane, but in those days, he was the Guest Master. But in the late 80’s Luke was sent to direct music for a tiny Trappist Monastery outside of Charleston, SC. He was there for two years and when his “sentence” was up, he called and asked me if I could come and get him and bring him home.

I was glad to do it, though it was not a small ask. I drove the 10 hours from Louisville to Monk’s Corner, loaded Luke’s luggage from his 2-year stay, which amounted to a very small gym bag. And we took off on the return trip. By evening, I was exhausted. I had been driving for hours and hours and so I pulled into a Holiday Inn where we would have dinner and spend the night. There, in a restaurant in a Tennessee Holiday Inn, Luke and I had our first fight.

He said, with that rising intonation he uses when he is challenging your morals, “We’re not going to stay here are we?” And I said, “Yes we are. I’m going to eat a steak and a baked potato, then I’m going to take two Tylenol, and sit over there in that hot tub until my back stops hurting.”

Luke said, “You are going to put on swimming trunks and sit there in a public hot tub, with no shirt on, in front of all of these strangers . . . and their children?” And I said, “Yes, I am.”

Too which Luke replied, “Give me the keys, I’m going to sleep in the car.”  About an hour later we were checking into a $14 flop house in a neighborhood of Knoxville, TN, largely inhabited by rats and cockroaches. For a guy who had lived his entire life in the isolation of a monastery hidden deep in the woods of Kentucky, Luke slept soundly in spite of the sounds of police sirens, gun shots, and drunken fights in the parking lot. My back was killing me. Luke had taken a vow of poverty. I was surprised to learn that when on a road trip with him, I was included in that vow. 

Luke is a vegetarian, he has totally given up alcohol, and he pretty much wears the same thing every day. But, because he is very skinny and because the monastery notoriously doesn’t spend much on utilities, in the winter the temperature in the monastic house is usually in the 50’s. Luke was always cold. So, I used to give him a very thick pair of socks and gloves for Christmas every year. And you could see the wheels turning in his head when he opened the package. He would profusely thank me for the gift, but I knew that he was thinking about who might need socks and gloves more than he did. When questioned, he would say, “Well, I have three pairs of socks. Why would anyone need more than that?”

There are lots of kinds of addiction in the world. Luke had certainly struggled with alcoholism when I first knew him. But we all know many people who suffer with drug addiction, some people do have a porn or a sex addiction, but more than all of those things added together, are the people who have what we might call a “thing” addiction . . . and addiction to shopping, to having, acquiring, keeping, hoarding. 

Luke is an extreme example of living simply but I think that people like Luke can become a social mirror in which we can all examine our lives. Not many of us are cut from the kind of cloth that Luke is cut from, but Luke stands as an example of what can be done if you decide to do it.

I owned ten times as much as Luke does when I was a teenager living in a college dorm room but in the past 50 years, we have seen the closets in homes grow from a narrow space in which you might keep church shoes, work shoes, and a pair of tennis shoes, and just three or four changes of clothes, to walk-in closets that hold dozens of pairs of shoes and more clothes than we could wear in a life-time. And all around the city we see these storage unit places springing up for when people’s closets, attics, and garages are full, they can rent extra space to store more and more and more stuff. . . stuff they evidently don’t need or it wouldn’t be stored away from their own home.

All of this while Americans now have $800 billion in credit card debt, an amount that has nearly doubled in the past eight years. Ironically, the estimates of consumer spending just for Black Friday, two days ago, was about $800 billion. Obviously, it is not a one-to-one relationship, but I imagine that an awful lot of that buying on Friday was done on credit. 

Still, I am not saying these are bad people, I’m just suggesting that these are people who are probably being manipulated by marketing and I know that many of them are spending money they cannot afford to spend on things that they do not need. 

I’m not trying to be a Grinch or a Scrooge about all of this. You have heard me talking in years past about what a bunch of balloon juice our Thanksgiving myths of origins are but even though the polished-up versions of 17^th century encounters between Native Americans and Pilgrims is fake, what we actually do on Thanksgiving is fundamentally a good thing. What I like about Thanksgiving is the giving thanks part, the part about families and friends getting together and loving each other.

And I like Christmas, not the seriously insane narrative about incarnation, angels, mangers, and magi, but I like the generosity part. I’m not going to go “Church-Lady nuts” on you and compare how close the spelling of Santa is to Satan but there is something inherently evil about the credit card debt and competitive shopping hysteria associated with the holiday. I think that kids deserve to be given toys and clothes that are appropriate, recognizing that kids grow up fast and their sizes change as well as their entertainment needs. But I feel about Christmas gift giving about the same way that I feel about birthdays . . . spoil kids as much as you can but there comes a point when you need to stop expecting people to make a big fuss over your birthday . . . and that point is somewhere between 8 and 16. There is nothing more pathetic than someone over 25 who is all pouty and depressed because they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.

Again, I’m not trying to be a radical about this, but what if we just decide that we’re not going to be sucked into the capitalism of addictive shopping? Give love gifts to your friends if you want, I will do some of that, but just realize that almost everyone you have in your middle class circle of friends will buy the shirts, ties, and electronics that they want and that nothing you will wrap up and put under a tree will mean as much to them as an invitation to come to your home for dinner. Most of us already have too many things and none of us really have enough friends. What we really need can’t be stored in a closet and somehow, we have been tricked into believing that spending money equates to love . . . it doesn’t, check your own heart, you know that I am right.

But, again, the impulse towards generosity is something I want to applaud. And there are people all around us who do need warm socks and gloves this winter and I just think we should be generous in ways that reflect the reality of our broken economic system.

If you have never seen Ben Kingsley’s 1982 portrayal of Gandhi, I highly recommend the movie to you. There is a wonderful scene in it in which Gandhi is trying to fight the cast system in India by establishing an Ashram in which everyone was treated the same and everyone shared in every necessary job. But Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, who had been born into a higher cast, simply could not bring herself to clean the latrines and Gandhi was insisting that they were all the same.

Gandhi argued that he took his turn in cleaning the latrines and she had no choice in the matter . . . she had to clean the latrines like everyone else did. Kasturba memorably tells him, “But everyone doesn’t even want to be as good as you are.”

And that, I submit, is a fact. Most of us are sufficiently woke to not wear furs, for example . . . we would never have animals killed to make our coats, but all of us are wearing leather shoes and what, if I may ask, is the difference? It becomes a question of how good do you think you want to be?

I told you about my friend, Brother Luke, who has chosen to live in poverty as a discipline that is good not only for his own spiritual health but for the health of the planet. I have no desire to live in a small cell, to wear a habit every day, to eat only vegetables, and to refrain from owning a car, a TV, or even a wristwatch. But I know that Luke’s life is an example that we can all consider. I will acknowledge that his choices are much more in line with the reality of our planet than mine are.

I know that eating meat is bad for the environment and that chickens, pigs, cows, and fish that are raised to be eaten have unspeakably miserable lives. Still, I cannot get over the feeling that I did not bite and claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat only salads. I’m not ready to become a vegetarian but I know that I can eat a lot less meat and a lot more fresh vegetables and that will be good for me and for the earth. I know that I probably own enough clothes to get me to Memorial Gardens and anything further that I buy is pure vanity and I really should be very conservative about that and very generous about giving coats and scarves to people who don’t live and work in a warm place. 

Many years ago, I was sharing a private conversation with the director of charity that works with the poor. And he very sincerely asked me, “Roger, how do we justify our lifestyles? Our suburban homes, our cars, our standard of living?” And I said, “I think it is a mistake to try to justify it.” We are not owed the comfort we enjoy. We cannot say that it is right for us to be securely, if not rather comfortably, housed when so many people are in dire circumstances. But none of us are quite like Gandhi or like Brother Luke. Kasturba speaks our lines for us, most of us don’t even want to be that good. 

So many Americans get defensive and say that we worked for what we have, we earned it, it is ours, and we deserve it. But, realistically, if wealth were directly related to work then the richest people in the world would be sub-Saharan women who have to carry water and firewood on their heads every day of their lives to care for their families. I feel like I work hard and I cash my paychecks with my head held high, but, I am also aware that I heat my home by changing the thermostat’s setting and I get water from any one of the 8 faucets or spickets at my house and I don’t carry anything heavier on my head than my hat. 

So, yeah, I work a lot, and I have been lucky even more. 

So, how good do you want to be? Don’t just justify how we live today to yourself; you know that isn’t the whole story, we all have room for improvement. I’m not suggesting that any one of us here might become another Gandhi or even a Brother Luke, but what are you going to buy over the next few weeks? Could you be a little less capitalist and a little more compassionate, a little less of a “thing-addict” and choose a bit more simple life? Because, you know, what we really want for Christmas won’t go into a gift bag . . . unless you know how to wrap the end of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.