BY VANESSA RUSH SOUTHERN, MINISTER, THE UNITARIAN CHURCH IN SUMMIT, NEW JERSEY
To me, the metaphor that keeps surfacing about the debilitated financial state of the world is that of an earthquake. It feels to me like we have all been through an earthquake. The tectonic plates on which we used to stand secure have moved beneath our feet and shaken the foundations of much of what we had come to take for granted.
I remember being in California on my college campus in 1990 when such an earthquake shook our world. It was a 7.0 on the Richter scale, so no small event. We all walked around in a daze afterwards, in disbelief. People returned home to find out their dorms had been condemned, or closed down until they could be inspected by engineers. Our trailer was one of the safer places to be. Its aluminum sides, after all, shook, but didn’t break or crack, and so our floor was soon covered with friends and their belongings in one big post-disaster sleepover that lasted for over a week, until people could return to their rooms.
For a while, after the quake, there was nothing to do but wait and see how things settled. We had to wait to hear what the experts ruled about what had been ruined, what needed repair but would survive, and what miraculously remained unscathed. And in the midst of this waiting there were an unsettling number of aftershocks that continued for days; mild, unpredictable bouts of shaking that would send us running to the doorways to stand until the shaking stopped. It is hard to live life amidst all of that—ready to dash to safety, living and sleeping even on your toes, and harder still when there is no clear place to run where you know you’ll be safe. It’s such a great metaphor, really, that the safest place is perched for a while in the doorways. That was always the best place to wait out the ride—at least that’s what we were told at the time.
I have felt of late that we stand in this same kind of place, in the aftermath of an earthquake. Everyone is agreed that the shaking hasn’t quite ended yet. We aren’t sure what will be condemned, what resurrected, what stands sure and strong despite the upheaval. And there are aftershocks that keep us nervously on our toes. Moreover, we are living in that hard place too, standing in the doorways, uncertain, waiting, hoping, and afraid, too.
I know I’m not the only one feeling uneasy with the uncertainty. I meet a strong, older woman, a scientist with a razor-sharp mind, prudent and wise who has endured incredible professional barriers to make her mark in the world. She is a sound financial planner, I am sure, and generous and deeply reasoned in her choices. She wonders out loud if she will be able to afford her medicines when all this is over. I meet a man who works for one of the banks that was not overly invested in sub-prime loans. In that firm he has recently been promoted with nothing but strong reviews, but when his normally polite boss sends a brusque message summoning the man to his office, the man realizes that his first thought is whether he’ll be carrying his belongings out the door in an hour. After that he notices at the main door every morning as employees swipe their ID cards how gallows humor prevails. If for a moment the card doesn’t read or register someone as familiar, everyone laughs that perhaps he or she has been let go.
As the financial crisis goes from weeks to months to years, it is hard to tell which anxieties, which fears, are real and which illusory. As Martin Luther King, Jr. very rightly pointed out in his sermon on fear, fear and uncertainty are not innately dangerous or destructive. He writes:
Fear…is a powerfully creative force. Every great invention and intellectual advance represents a desire to escape from some dreaded circumstance or condition. The fear of darkness led to the discovery of the secret of electricity. The fear of pain led to the marvelous advances of medicinal science…. The fear of war was one of the forces behind the birth of the United Nations.
The thing that is important about fear, then, is knowing when to be afraid and how. What is important is not simply surrendering to fear when it comes knocking.
So, I have been thinking a little about the when and how of fear. As for the how part of the challenge, I like Emerson’s reminder that life, a life that is lived boldly and with passionate commitment, is about daily surmounting some fear. You might say that for some of us these days are a boot camp training for that kind of Emersonian life. We are being called to reconsider our way of life. I expect all of us will slim down a little in the months to come, and not just our budgets. Some spiritual flab should come falling away too. And I expect we’ll be stronger for spirited living in the end.
Even my dentist this week, a man with a sleek office and a family of four kids to support in this part of the country that is both expensive and competitive said, “Well, this just gets us back to what’s really important.” For a moment I wondered if maybe he said this to please me. I was, after all, a minister standing in his office. Except that there was such a deep sense of relief in his voice. It made me think that for him, and people like him in our communities, keeping up with the Joneses may be hard, unpleasant and unwelcome work. It might be nice to have an excuse not to compete, or for the bar to come down all around.
So, perhaps we befriend fear. We can respond not by closing down, but by opening up. None of us would dream up this hardship, but maybe we look for and find the opportunities in it.
And it might just be that the “how” for how we deal with this fear and uncertainty is also channeling it into a bit of righteous anger. The Bible was big on righteous anger! We can get mad about privatized gains and socialized losses, but we don’t have to let it end there. Maybe we refuse to ever again feel guilty about advocating for a regulated mixed economy. Maybe this reminds us of the need for a social net, for there is nothing like the possible need to be buoyed up by a net to make you hope it is there, and strong to boot. Maybe we channel this experience of fear into nurturing a generation of prophets (not “profits”) for a greater, more broadly shared economic and social health to be built from the wreckage.
Finally, we might befriend fear by drawing closer to each other, as people have always done in such times. The older members of my congregation I’ve talked to lately have gone back naturally and immediately to stories of the Depression. Part of the stories they tell is about how tough things were. They tell of the shanty towns in the marshes on the way to New York and how people would come to the door asking for a cup of coffee or food to get them through the day. Others of their stories, however, are about how people would take evicted friends and neighbors into their own homes and how you shared what you had, whatever you had.
We don’t have to get through it alone.
Many of us have lost a lot in the last months—savings, retirement, some of us have lost homes or jobs, all of us have lost some of our sense of security. But what have we really lost?
Amidst all the uncertainty, certain certainties remain. Our portfolios of love and friendship need not have taken a hit. The privilege of breathing the morning’s first whispered beauty didn’t drop in value with the DOW or become less available in the marketplace of life. A healthy body or a quiet hour —none of this has been taken from us in the market devaluations. Much of what is most important is certain and remains.
When the earthquake in California hit that spring, I was in the gym, where I practiced as part of the fencing team for my college. I was in a bout, in full fencing gear: the metal-weave vest, the headgear with its strong mesh of wire. I didn’t know what had happened when the quake struck. I thought I’d slipped on sweat or water on the floor. All I knew was I lost my balance, and then when I looked up I saw my teammates rushing to the doors, pulling the equipment we were tied to behind us, foils and epees cast to the floor. As I ran I could see through my mask that white stuff was falling from the ceiling. Everywhere it was coming down. I tried to dodge it, fearing I’d be knocked out and buried underneath what must surely be pieces of the ceiling breaking off all around me.
Once at the door I tore off my mask, and then almost immediately the world stopped shaking. At that moment, without the mask or the shaking of the world, I could see clearly for the first time since the quake began. I could see that I was safe. I could see that my teammates were safe. I could see to the courtyard outside the gym doors and that the sun was still shining and the clear blue sky dotted with white clouds was as gorgeous and blue as ever. Everything I loved was still intact. Even the gym seemed whole.
However, there on the floor of the gym, scattered everywhere by the hundreds and perhaps thousands, were what I had seen through my mask. Not pieces of the sky falling, Chicken Little, but basket loads of white badminton birdies from decades of classes and countless generations of wild shots that lodged them in the gym’s high beams! I had to laugh.
What I had feared in the midst of that earthquake, all of it, had been for naught. Sure, I would return home to a trailer that was shaken, with some broken glass to sweep up. Yes, I would cook that night for ten displaced friends and step over them on my way to class each morning for weeks to come, but life, in all the important ways I had known it, would go on despite all the dramatic rumblings.
So allow me to give the following ministerial investment advice. Divest from fear’s most destructive derivatives. Hold tight to what shares of a fundamental faith in life you already own. My advice, like Warren Buffet’s, is that in these days we double down. But in my case I’d say, double down on what is precious in your life and write off the rest, and absolutely, absolutely keep the faith.
