A Conscious Endeavor

A Judeo-Christian Reflection on the Distribution of Wealth

Terence Wenzl

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781610973663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877231
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A Conscious Endeavor is a synopsis of the social teachings and the concept of justice in the Old and New Testament. It looks through the lens of the Old Testament books of Torah law and the New Testament teachings of Jesus, applying them to contemporary situations and raising questions regarding housing costs and other basic costs of living. Ultimately, this book invokes the personal conversion of inner change so that readers can apply what they learn to their own work situations and their payment of a just wage.

1

Right Relationships

When I was twenty-four years old, I worked in the South as a Vista Volunteer for a year and a half. While in the South I decided to go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. At the time I had long hair and a beard. The year was 1968. I had stopped in a small Southern town to get some gas for my old Volkswagen. While I was filling my gas tank, I was accosted by a man of the Baptist persuasion who had been recently redeemed. He literally backed me into a corner and asked, “Have y’all been saved?” I said, “What do you mean, ‘Have I been saved?’” He replied, “Have y’all been saved? Y’all had a day and an hour and a minute when you was saved? If you cain’t tell me the day, the hour, and the minute when you was saved, then y’all ain’t been saved.”

I think he figured there would be very few times in his life when he would have the chance to “save” a hippy. I thought about what he said and responded, “Look, Mister, I don’t remember much about being born, but I sure was born. I don’t think memory has much to do with whether or not a person is saved.”

Later on, when I studied theology in the Catholic Church I wondered why people used the term “saved” as if it were something that could happen in a moment. It seemed to me a term that had lost its meaning.

One day I was reading an author whose name I cannot now remember. He explained how the word “salvation” came from Roman medical terminology, derived from the Latin word salvus. When a person gets cut, for example, the skin is separated. As part of curing the wound, one might apply what we call a “salve,” and the skin broken and torn apart would be brought back together. It becomes salvus, that is, healed.

The author explained how early Christians took this medical term and applied it to relationships. He then began to explain how in Christian belief there is a rift in the relationship between God and humans, something that requires “healing” of the relationship. What Jesus shows people is a way to become salvus, or healed, in our relationships to God, ourselves, others, and nature.

If we read the New Testament carefully, we would say that Jesus was completely focused on reconciliation, forgiveness, and healing. He wanted people to take stock of and come to terms with their relationship to God and others.

Emerson in his “Essay on Nature” says, “We are as much strangers in nature as we are aliens from God.”4 The Transcendentalists believed God revealed the divine presence in nature. For them, to the extent that we alienate ourselves from nature, we alienate ourselves from God. There is a sense of alienation and separateness we all experience deep within ourselves. This feeling is like a deep ache, which often indicates how out of touch we are with our own soul, let alone from others. For example, many who live in large cities feel no sense of community. Many in this environment feel cut off from most of their fellow human beings. One can look at New York City or Los Angeles and see more a large group of individuals than a vibrant human community.

Some religions call this sense of separation and aloneness “original sin”; some “fate”; some “caste.” There is something at the heart of our relationships to ourselves and others that is often out of whack.

Emerson also suggests there are experiences we have with nature that make us feel deeply at peace and closer to God. In the movie Jeremiah Johnson, an otherwise rather disreputable character named Dale Q at one point exclaims as he rides off into the mountains, “There are no finer church spires than these here Rocky Mountains, and no better place created by the Almighty.”

Our life’s task is to bring ourselves from fractured and broken relationships back into Right Relationships. The process by which we do this is what I will call inner change or conversion. Conversion does not happen all at once, like the gentleman in the gas station believed. For some people, being set on the road to conversion might be initiated by a dramatic event, but that is just the beginning. Inner change takes a long, long time. It takes a lifetime. Your inner changes might be initiated by profound experiences in nature, or in human relationships. Your discovery of the value of life, for instance, might be initiated by the birth of your own son or daughter. Your realization of the value of human relationships might be initiated by the death of someone for whom you cared deeply. Your inner change might be brought about in struggles for social justice and experiences of solidarity with those who are disenfranchised. Experiences that lead to the awakening in our souls of the call to inner change are not necessarily peaceful or positive. The experience that awakens us to who we are and why we are here might be very painful and negative in our initial understanding.

For my oldest brother, Don, it was such. If there was ever a person who reminded me of Job, it was he. Don was struck with polio at age nineteen, and would live out the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He became the first paraplegic to graduate from the University of Oregon. This was before the time of such things as curb cuts, wheelchair ramps, and disabled parking spaces. Later in life he became blind. While blind he earned a doctoral degree in educational counseling.

While Job had his worldly suffering end and his wealth returned, my brother did not. Still, he did not give up on life. One time he said to me, “Terry, everyone has handicaps. I am lucky to know what many of mine are.” He also related to me that although there were numerous times he had contemplated suicide, he never would take his own life. And to watch his joyful demeanor, you would never think suicide could have crossed his mind.

Living in a wheelchair and being blind slowed Don down. He became a great listener and effective counselor. He had time to listen. He was not in a hurry to be about some other business. I was repeatedly amazed at how many lives he touched. People would tell me things like, “When I was going through a tough time in my life, he really helped me out,” or, “He always had time to listen to my problems,” or, “He never complained about his burdens, and this seemed to make it easier for me to carry mine.”

Don would never tell you what a great thing it was for him to have his ability to walk taken away. Nor would he tell you what a wonderful thing it was to be blind. What Don would tell you is that you have to identify your limitations, accept them, and move on.

Don’s situation and the concept of conversion remind me of an idea put forward by the composer Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky reflected that if you offered him a piano with an infinite number of keys, he would compose nothing. But if you limited him to eighty-eight notes, then he could create wonderful musical compositions. Stravinsky concluded that in order to be creative one has to work through very clear limitations. Each of us must learn and accept our limits. In Don’s case, he had to accept and work through his inability to walk and see physically to discover his creative genius as a counselor in seeing deeply into the lives of others and helping them to move or walk forward in their own lives. Often times knowing what our limitations are is relatively easy. Accepting and working through them is far and away where our difficulties lie. It is one thing to have my ability to walk or see taken away from me and to know in my mind those abilities are not coming back. It is quite another to accept in my heart and soul this totally absurd situation without bitterness, and to continue my life in a positive and loving manner, eventually creating genius and redemption where others might have seen only suffering and loss. Yet this is the miracle we accomplish in our life of conversion. Just as Don had to deal with some very difficult limitations, each of us has difficult situations that can lead to conversion, positive inner change, and growth if we rise to the challenge.

Conversion, as I said, does not always come from a positive experience. But conversion will shape what we do with present experiences and how we let it mold our future. This is the qualitative difference I am trying to describe.

Many times it is only in retrospect we can look at a certain experience or number of experiences and understand that they were moments of conversion. These may become events we will recall as experiences of the Divine, or times of intense insight, or inner peace, which brought about in us changes that led to positive growth and deepening.

In Rio Grande, Texas, there is a group of Mexican-American citizens who for five generations has followed the crop harvest from Texas up through New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Oregon. They end up in Yakima Valley, Washington, harvesting apples. They are paid less than an appropriate wage. However, they live simply and send their money home to their American families in Rio Grande.

One day my friend Ed Dunne was talking with one of these men. “Jose,” Ed said to him, “every year you work your way from Texas to the Yakima Valley. You live in housing that’s quite a few notches below substandard. You are paid meager wages. You’re in dangerous working conditions. You’re afforded no medical services. You work fourteen-hour days. You know it’ll always be the same. Why do you do it?” Jose looked at Ed and responded, “Ed, if we do not harvest the crops, the people will have nothing to eat.”

Here was a man who understood the dignity of work and its importance even though the people who paid him to harvest their crops did not. Listening to this young Mexican-American husband, father, and field worker reflect on the importance of what he does hit Ed right between the eyes. It was a powerful moment, a moment of conversion. Ed explained to me how moments such as these continually keep him dedicated to working toward a world in which there are more just human relationships. We all have such experiences that offer us conversion.

In California, at the height of the Grape Strike led by the United Farm Workers Union, I had the occasion to have dinner with some friends who were quite well off financially. It was a Sunday dinner. The mother happened to be a supporter of the union strike. Her son-in-law was on the other side of the issue. At one point in the discussion he asked almost cynically, “Do you actually think your not eating table grapes is going to change the situation for farm workers?”

She thought a moment, and said, “I really cannot say for certain if my not eating table grapes is going to change the situation for farm workers. But I’ll tell you this, not eating table grapes and the reasons why I don’t has changed me.”

Whether this process of conversion, of inner change, begins dramatically or not, for most of us it is a quiet change that takes a very long time, a little bit at a time. A young Buddhist monk was being taught meditation by his teacher. When the teacher thought he was finished teaching a certain method of meditation, he said to his student, “Do this every day for one hour, and in twenty years you might begin to notice a difference.”5 The change in ourselves is like this.

Conversion is not the privilege of only those who claim to be men and women of faith, who believe in God, who belong to an organized religion. It may happen there, and maybe one has the right to expect it to happen there more often. But all of us are offered many opportunities and experiences that can lead to inner change. It is this inner change, conversion, that will bring us back into Right Relationships with ourselves, with others, nature, and with God.

After many years of reading the Old Testament and New Testament I have become convinced that their central theme is Right Relationships. Forming Right Relationships is the result of inner conversion and an examined life. For only through changing ourselves can we make things right. As the years have passed I’ve realized the most substantial change that we can effect is the change within ourselves.

In our own time, those who offer themselves as representing the essence of mainstream religion seem to be lost in the gas station...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Right Relationships
• Chapter 2: What Is Conversion?
• Chapter 3: How Conversion Happens
• Chapter 4: Reflections on Organized Religion and Biblical Inspiration
• Chapter 5: Old Testament Teaching Regarding Justice and Distribution
• Chapter 6: New Testament Teachings Regarding Justice and Distribution
• Chapter 7: Defining the Task
• Chapter 8: Property Rights
• Chapter 9: Distribution of Wealth and Just Wages
• Chapter 10: Environmentalism
• Chapter 11: Classical Economic Theory
• Chapter 12: Life with Corporations
• Chapter 13: The National Interest
• Chapter 14: Profits
• Chapter 15: Community
• Conclusion
• Bibliography