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December 2008

Hanging Up the Green

BY PAUL BEEDLE, MINISTER, THOREAU UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CONGREGATION, STAFFORD, TEXAS

If you happen to come to my town you’ll see an interesting Christmas lawn decoration: it depicts Santa Claus bowing to the Christ Child.

I drive by it every day. I think I know what it’s about. I grew up hearing annual pleas to remember “the true meaning of Christmas” amid the hustle and bustle of the holiday season—that at least in our own homes, we all need to save Christmas from commercialism. Santa must bow to the Christ Child. No doubt those pleas continue in Christian churches all around us. It’s a kind of holiday tradition. Along with rituals of decorating and shopping and lighting the Advent wreath, there’s a ritual of worry.

It begins officially on the day after Thanksgiving—what the news media call “Black Friday” because that’s when retailers hope to pull their operating balance out of the red and into the black. Others call it “Buy Nothing Day”—a day to take a stand against the intrusion of commercial interests on our lives. Of course, many who go shopping on that day are hoping to take some pressure off of the frantic month to come, and many more know the sales and markdowns on that day provide the only possible way they can afford to purchase all of the gifts they need to satisfy the minimum daily requirement of gifts they have to give.

In any case, as December unfolds—as the malls resound with Christmas carols, and direct marketing to children intensifies, the struggle against commercialism becomes a daily meditation. The function of the candlelight Christmas Eve service, in this context, is to sanctify that struggle. We gather that night to remember the true meaning of Christmas, to make Santa bow for a night to the Christ Child, before we enjoy the hard-won fruits of our shopping on Christmas morning. Like the king’s jester mocking the arriving stranger, Christmas Eve makes the commerce-laden Christmas morning safe for the family.

Some people enjoy that sort of thing: the battle for Christmas. There are always folks who like to worry: “Big bad Santa, insidiously bringing joy to children all over the world while striking terror—or despair—into the hearts of their parents. We’ve got to do something about him!”

I was raised in the “remember the true meaning of Christmas” version of this ritual of worry, and indeed, the ritual of worry can help one to cope with holiday pressures. It seems to work for lots of folks. But I’m having second thoughts. Using worry to cope with the holidays is too much like using caffeine to cope with drowsiness. Sometimes you need to do it, but it’s not good to depend on it and too much of it just makes you crazy. I’m looking for another way.

At the root of all this worry about commercialism at Christmastime is a basic problem of stewardship. Why are retailers running their businesses in ways that depend on Christmas sales to break even for the year? There was a story on the radio the other day about noisy toys: in order to get your attention in the store, the toy is designed to make a lot of noise—it’s not actually designed with homes or children or families in mind. Why do they do that?

Why are retail businesses putting so much pressure on consumers in the first place? We don’t get very far with that conversation in the public square, because all the mainstream views of our economic life assume a mystical attitude toward free markets. We believe that businesspeople should be free to run their companies in ways they deem appropriate. We sometimes put limits on that freedom through government or voluntary regulation. But we leave everyone free to make their own plans, believing that by some mystical process the uncoordinated activity of a great many diverse economic agents will meet our economic needs.

Now I want to be clear about something: I’m a mystic. That’s the center of my theological outlook. I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with a mystical attitude per se. I’m saying there’s something wrong with having a mystical attitude toward the mechanisms of a market economy. It’s appropriate to have a mystical attitude toward life’s great mysteries. But there’s a difference between a mystery and just a very complicated problem. It’s a very complicated problem to sort out how a market economy meets our economic needs. But it’s not a mystery. People communicate, and somehow buyers find sellers. A mystical attitude toward this very prosaic human activity only gets in the way of our economic relationships with one another, and therefore it gets in the way of coordinating and improving how we meet our economic needs.

While we all communicate about specific transactions in the market, and groups of businesses communicate about how to maintain and direct specific industries, and groups of consumers communicate about specific consumer concerns, and charitable organizations communicate about specific charitable causes, very little communication happens between these interest groups. We don’t set goals for the economy as a whole, or have any meaningful conversation about values and good social stewardship. Instead we talk about statistics: business profits and household income and imports-and-exports and other such measures of financial wealth. We treat financial wealth as a proxy for well being.

It won’t do. Wealth is a measure not of well being, but of power. Wealth is a means, not an end. Toward what quality of civic life shall we use it? What shared values shall we express with it? How shall we be good stewards of both wealth as a means and of our values and environment and quality of life and the kind of people we want to become as ends?

Our civic leaders—in politics, religion, business, academia, and elsewhere—ought to help us find more civic-minded ways to operate businesses and employ people that consider all our economic needs and our shared values and environment and quality of life and what kind of people we want to become. To put it bluntly, the apparently widespread inability to run a business profitably without putting the squeeze on consumers at the end of the year does not constitute a civic duty to consume. Nor does it make sense to put the squeeze on workers throughout the year. It’s not about tax rates or government programs; it’s about right relationship and good process and civic responsibility.

That’s one more reason to take stewardship seriously as a spiritual value. It’s not just about how we use our resources of time, talent and treasure. It’s about how we use ourselves. My colleague John Buehrens likes to say: “Leadership is having something left over, after taking care of yourself, in order to pay attention to someone else.” Maybe it’s fair to say that stewardship is having something left over, after meeting our basic needs, in order to pay attention to our values and how we live them.

The financial counselor George Kinder talks about this in terms of maturity. He relates what he calls “money maturity” to progress in meeting higher-level needs in our financial life. He thinks our lifelong process of maturing has seven stages, or building blocks, starting in childhood with our early lessons in survival (that’s one) and in how to manage conflict and our feelings about it (that’s two). In adulthood are three more stages: developing our skills for reflection, understanding, and forming a sense of purpose in our own lives. The last two stages are developing an openness and focus on a vision beyond us, and a generous and compassionate and wise personal presence in the world.

What Kinder is getting at is the question of vocation. Frederick Buechner has written that “vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” In the context of stewardship in church life, we often talk about vocation in terms of finding your ministry within the congregation. But as Buechner suggests, it goes deeper than that. It goes to the question of meaning and purpose in your life: to what are you called? Or as Mary Oliver famously asked, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

To reflect on stewardship as a spiritual value, some questions to ask ourselves are: What do we value? What power do we have to live our values? How do we spend ourselves? How, and in what, do we invest ourselves? To what ends? How do we replenish ourselves?

Financial life can be a fruitful field for exploring stewardship of ourselves because it’s the metaphor these questions come from. Also, since it’s a part of life we can’t avoid, it’s a good place to develop spiritual practices—there’s some hope that we’ll keep practicing.

Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman wrote:

There are two kinds of life, with all gradations between the extremes. One is the brush-pile life; the other the big-tree life. One is a pile of twigs and branches; the other is an organic system. In the first the several parts do not vitally sustain one another. In the second every little detail, every leaf and twig, has some important and vital part to play, and is precious because it carries in itself the value of the whole which it represents and to which it organically belongs. Of course no life is merely a heap of disconnected parts; and no life is completely organic. But roughly speaking all lives may be divided into two kinds as they are symbolized by the brush pile or the growing tree.

And so I come back to the frenzy of the holiday season: are the holidays an ornament on the “big tree” of your life, or does your life annually turn into a Christmas tree ornament? How do you spend yourself differently during the holidays? Invest yourself? Replenish yourself?

As you go about hanging up the green this season, I invite you to reflect on how you trim both trees: the Christmas tree and the “big tree” of your life. And in this holiday season may you find love and peace and all that replenishes you.

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Last updated January 12, 2009