Becoming Poor

The last week has been wild for everyone with even the smallest interest in the economy. Because of my various responsibilities over the years, I have acquired the habit of watching the markets and putting my finger in the air to see what the breeze is doing. I don't have to tell you that it is scary.

The last time something like this happened to me was in my first parish. The parish had a little money socked away, largely from the sale, ill-advised in my opinion, of the rectory years before I got there. It was invested in so-called junk bonds, which actually produced pretty high returns quarter after quarter, remarkably stable over most of the time I was rector. During the autumn of 1999 most of the Vestry decided that it was time to increase our returns by increasing the value of the capital. Stories of churches that had seen fabulous returns were told. And so, despite my urgings, it was decided to get into a risky but potentially high-growth technology mutual fund at Merrill Lynch. Well, you can guess the rest. March, 2000 and it tanked. We went from a more or less guaranteed $17,000 a year to zilch, overnight. People who were happy to proclaim their expertise got very quiet, and the rest had no stomach to talk about it. It became The Thing That Didn't Happen. And the parish had a lot less money.

I would like to say that this made everyone wiser. It didn't. It did not increase the capacity for making do with less. It did not increase selflessness. It did increase anxiety and all that can flow from that. I am afraid of the same thing happening again.

Monks believe in poverty. We may not practice it very well. In fact, we may be as bourgeois, even as haut bourgeois, as any around us. But at least we proclaim poverty as a virtue. And in doing so, more than once I have heard my profession described as crazy.

At its best I think monasticism is the practice of working together in an organized discipline of simplicity for the Gospel. This takes a number of characteristic forms, usually expressed in the vows. For Benedictines the vows are Obedience, Stability and Conversion of Life. The first two are pretty straightforward. The third is a complex matter. Conversatio morum is the Latin in Benedict. Literally it means something like "completely turning your habits around". Included in this are chastity and poverty, but also a whole raft of other things, like how you use your time, how you relate to other people, where you find your values, how you choose to think and speak, and on and on. Poverty is just one of these many values system changes.

But it is an important one. Benedict knew, and all "successful" monks know too, that a person's value is not, is never, determined by what he or she has. In direct opposition to "the world" on this score, the monastic movement makes a virtue of exactly the opposite: How little can you get along with? How much of what you have can you share or give away? How little is the big question, not How much.

If you have read this blog for a while, you must know what a challenge this is to me. There is an art to monastic living. And part of the art is knowing how and when to give what one has to others. Anthony of Egypt began his monastic career hearing the Gospel injunction to the rich young man: "Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and come, follow me". He did. He sold his property and then made careful provision with it for his sister, for the people of his extended family, for the community of workers who surrounded his parents' farm and made its life possible. He didn't just strew it about indiscriminately but used it wisely for the future. In doing so he seems to have created a mutually supportive community, because all through his career as a hermit, people helped him as he helped them, with food and other things he genuinely needed.

When a community of monks work together and share and are content with little, even with less, then economic disaster has another valence. It is not the end of things. It is a storm to be weathered, a lean time, to be faced calmly, intelligently and in confidence that what is truly needful will be given by the Lord. If it keeps on and gets worse, we won't hide our heads in the sand and pretend it didn't happen. We'll just get thinner and work harder and be more creative and have more opportunities to pray and serve each other. An economic storm is a time to look to our communities and strengthen them with what we each have, and to take care of each other.

Holy Cross went through some really tough economic times, beginning in the early 1980s. The signs were there to see some years earlier, but it was a dramatic loss in investment values that galvanized us. We had to change. We had to organize ourselves to make a living, and bit by bit we did. It wasn't easy, and not everyone stayed on board as we turned the ship around. But in the end working together produced more than a modest renewed prosperity. It produced habits of work and accountability and realism and loving, honest mutuality that have remained with us. It's not news that most people want to hear, but poverty can be good for people. You learn who you really are, what you really can do, and how to trust each other.

I would like to think that how a monastic community reacts to real poverty has something of value to offer to others. I think in Holy Cross we'll have some opportunities to turn our customary habits around in the face of the loss which is almost certainly on the way. I pray that if this present crisis endures and deepens, we will meet it with increased courage and confidence born from the authentic springs of our tradition. I pray that as we struggle with our real difficulties in faith and mutual love, we may be able to find in our poverty gifts to share with others whose economic lives are shrinking as well.