The Spiritual Economic Crisis

Rev. Amy Russell - 2009-09-06

Over the past year, our country has been experiencing an economic recession characterized as the worst since the Great Depression. We all know people who have lost jobs, who are fearful of losing their jobs, who have lost their houses, or who fear they just can’t make their bills this month and may lose their house or car. In these tough economic times, fear is often present in our conversations. We often hear fear and anxiety in people’s voices as they tell us what is hard in their lives.

For me the time in my life when I experienced a sense of great fear of the future was when my first husband died. I remember waking up the morning after his funeral and having the nature of my new reality begin to seep into my consciousness. In addition to the grief that confronted me every second, it began to come to me that I would be faced with the economic burden of paying the mortgage, the car payment, and sending my children to college all on a single person’s salary. I truly felt an overwhelming sense of fear. What if I couldn’t do this? What would I do if I couldn’t stay in the house where my children had grown up, where they felt safe? It felt important to me that I be able to continue to provide for them what they had grown used to since we were facing such a devastating emotional loss. The emotional crisis in my life was real, but so was the economic crisis.

Recently, I heard my favorite author, Rachel Naomi Remen, speak with an interviewer on PBS about how the current economic crisis raises questions for people such as “What can we trust in life?” and “What sustains us?” and “What do we truly need?”

These are the questions I grappled with as a new widow facing economic loss as well as dealing with creating a whole new life for myself. When we are faced with loss or fear of loss, such as losing a job, losing one’s house, or facing a whole new lifestyle, sometimes we are forced to grapple with these deeply spiritual questions about how one wants to live one’s life.

What can we trust? This question is truly a spiritual one because it touches the basis of one’s center. Our own unique experiences with life create in us a paradigm for how we view the universe. Were our parents trustworthy? Were our siblings trustworthy? Did we experience trauma in our early life? From the world view that we formed from our early life, we developed either an ability to trust or an inability to trust. During our lives, we continue to struggle with these questions and with the most basic spiritual question- do we have an underlying trust of ourselves? That is where we must start in facing a fearful, uncertain future.

What does trusting yourself mean? For me, trusting myself means loving myself. Seeing that I am loveable and that I am worthy. I think it is the single most important spiritual foundation where we all must begin. If I trust myself, I know that I will be able to deal with whatever comes to me. If I trust myself, I know that while I may not feel very strong, that I can muster the strength within me to move forward and not give up no matter what happens.

Theologically, I think some faiths provide a foundation for this trust. Love the Lord, your God, with all you heart, all your mind, and all your soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. This Judeo-Christian teaching assumes that we love ourselves.

However, some faiths teach that all people are born sinful and must do something in order to be loved, to be saved. That theological foundation sometimes translates for some people into fearing that they are not good enough to be loved by God.

Our Unitarian heritage rejected the idea of original sin and viewed all humankind as having the potential for good. And our Universalist foundation taught us that God loved every creature that God created and forgave each person their sins. Based on this strong foundation, our first principle of the inherent worth and dignity of each individual was born. We are steeped historically in a heritage that teaches us to love ourselves.

But it’s not always that simple. Some of us love ourselves, but are not sure of our inner strength or how loveable we are to others.

During my period of grief when I was initially lost in my fear, I did not know whether I had that inner strength. I did not know if I could get through that time, but gradually I learned that I did.
The first thing I found out was that I was not alone. The people who loved me were standing there ready to catch me if I fell. The people around me, including the people of this church, reached out in many ways, large and small, to make it clear to me that I could always ask for help. Knowing that somehow allowed me to breathe easier. And having that breathing room, gave me time to figure out whether I had that strength within me.

As a Buddhist, I had been taught that I had enlightenment within me. But what does that mean when you’re fearful and not sure of yourself and your future?
When I felt so unsure, I tried to assess what I knew about myself and my life that I could count on. I knew I could count on my friends and family. I knew that I was smart enough to figure out my economic future. I knew that I had so much love in me that I could hold my family together. I knew that I was a worthy person and maybe even a loveable person. All these things were maybe enough to get me through my difficult time. And then I had my meditative practice. And that’s what made the difference. I could sit down and use my practice when I felt there wasn’t anything else. That’s where the question, “What sustains us?” comes in. During these difficult times, we need to ground ourselves in what sustains us.

Norman Fischer, a Buddhist writer, talks about how a spiritual practice can ground us during these fearful times. He says that when we are faced with a negative situation, we need to understand that the situation is not us. “Confronting, accepting, being with negative thinking and feeling, knowing that they are not the whole of reality and are not you, is the most fruitful and beneficial of all spiritual practices.” Coming back to a spiritual practice during an anxious time will remind us that we are not the situation. (Ibid.)

When we meditate or pray, or walk in the woods, or listen to music, or practice whatever is a calming activity for us, we can remember to breathe. We can remember to feel our breath connecting us to the rest of the universe. Sometimes we can even feel a part of that universe, realizing that we are held by our breath to this life, this very incredible miracle of life, no matter how difficult it can be. So for many, a spiritual practice of some kind sustains them through these difficult times.

Over the years of my ministry, I have had many people come to me to talk about their jobs. They might be fearful of losing their job, they may be having difficulty finding a job, but often they are not happy in their jobs. Often they say to me that the work that they do doesn’t sustain them. And so I might ask, “What does sustain you?” And they will sometimes describe a hobby of their artwork, or raising children, or selling plants, or whatever they find soothes their soul and lets their creative parts come alive.

Once, a woman in her early forties came to talk with me about hating her job as a legal secretary. The money was good and she felt that her family needed her to keep her job because they needed the money. I asked her how her job affected her. She described coming home tired and frustrated from a job where she had no control. And when I asked what sustained her, she started to tell me about her pottery. She loved to throw pots and then to glaze them with wonderful earthy colors. And when she told me about this hobby, her face would light up and she would become a different person. And over the months as she continued to tell me about the fear she had of not having the income that her job provided, I saw her become more and more depressed as she ignored the part of her life that sustained her in favor of the money. One day she saw me at church and her face was excited. She told me joyfully that she had been fired. I’ve never seen someone more excited about being fired. And in the weeks that followed as she put together plans for a pottery workshop to teach others about pottery, her face became more and more animated and lit from within with this light from her own soul.

She had found what sustained her. She found that by working at a part-time job and gradually building up her pottery studio, she could have enough income to get by. Her family began to learn to live without a few things in order to have her be truly happy at what she did every day.

Then of course, there are people who lose their jobs and don’t have this experience. They don’t have a burning desire to create their own business and they truly need the income. So, I would ask these people the final question that Rachel Naomi Remen asked, “What do you truly need in your life?”

The reading we heard today was from The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. Randy was in his forties when he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and told that he had 3-6 months to live. As a professor at Carnegie Mellon, he decided to give a “last lecture” to his students about what he had learned from life. In the reading today, we heard about how he had learned that his cars were not status symbols, just necessary for transportation. But during his illness, he learned what was really necessary for him. Being with his family and friends and having fun.

When Randy and his wife were going into the office to receive the results of his latest scan, to receive the news that he would have only a few months to live, this is what he said to his wife, “I just want you to know that it feels great to be alive, and to be here today, alive with you. Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I’m enjoying it,” Randy enjoyed every day one day at a time until he died last August. Randy was also a Unitarian Universalist.

I think this question about what do I truly need is what I asked myself when I became a widow and was fearful of how I would live. I knew that I wanted to live in the same house and have the same kind of life for my kids that we had had. But I knew deep down that that was a pipe dream. Our lives were truly never going to be the same again. Life does not ever stay the same. We can’t ever count on that. Life is always change.

As Michael Shillingford said, “The nature of our world is transitory- always has been, always will be. Change occurs every second. … But despite the interconnectedness of everything, we still have a say on how we handle the weave of the fabric. We can let the status quo confine us to a narrow thread, or we can cut through that fabric to see its true nature. Our lessons cannot be learned if the sun is shining every day.” (Ibid, p. 43)

So when I ask myself what I truly need in my life, I can only answer that I need air to breathe, water to drink, food to nourish me, a roof over my head, and something to love. But to try to keep control over all those factors to keep them the same, that is not possible.

So, when I wake in the morning and do my morning practice of meditation, I try to remember true gratitude for all those things that I need including those I love and who love me. For these things, I am truly grateful. The stock market, we cannot control. We have very little control over our employment. We have little control over others and how they love us. But we can control who we love and how we love.

So, during this economic downturn when things in our lives seem unstable and scary, I hope we will remember to ask ourselves these questions, What do we trust? What sustains us? And what do we truly need? The answers to these questions should give us hope.
I know this rose will open.
I know my fear will burn away.
I know my soul will unfurl its wings.
I know this rose will open.