A Crisis of Prosperity: Could Small Again Be Beautiful? by Father Richard Rohr   

Things that were luxuries for even kings and queens throughout most of history have become commonplace for most of us in developed countries. Easy availability soon became expectation, then eventually habituation, and finally entitlement. Wasn't life always this way? we came to imagine. Isn't this the way it is supposed to be? we assumed. It is surely hard to go backward once you have taken something for granted and it has become the norm.

Most humans since the beginnings of humanity have lived with a clear sense of limits. Scarcity has been part of the deal. Somehow there was wisdom and enforced maturity by living inside of boundaries. Small was the norm. It also made many people security-obsessed and driven toward violence and control, with no time left for art, literature, leisure ("the basis of culture"), higher education, or even the daily skills of communication and relationship. It kept many in history from the fullness of their own humanity, less capable of love and union with others, with themselves, with creation, and with God. I think we can say that God's plan was surely not penury, nor were human lives supposed to be "nasty, brutish, and short" as Thomas Hobbes complained. Yet many lives have been exactly that.      

We swung to the other extreme and created a prosperity gospel, a religion of "Cadillac faith," and limousine liberals (and conservatives!) who saw no conflict between the Gospel and amassing huge personal fortunes for their private lifestyles, despite the rather clear warnings of Jesus and the prophets against precisely that. I could gather extensive quotations, but I realize we have compartmentalized and denied these clear teachings for so many centuries that our resistance and denial is strongly in place. We just cannot hear what we cannot hear. Our ears are stopped and dulled, as Isaiah predicted (6:10).

In the last forty years, it became possible to be easily "rich," and so it soon felt ethical to be rich, even in the presence of so much poverty, oppression, and even desperation on this earth. Again, the rich man is ignoring Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), as if Christians had never read the story.

Most of human history connected money with actual work, effort, and sacrifice. For the first time in human history, on a very broad scale, money and success became associated with money and success themselves. Financial incest spread, but this incest was unrecognized as abuse. Where were the watchmen that Ezekiel said were necessary and obligated? (33:6)-the making of money was itself the work and even the most admired and envied work by many! Let's be honest, on some level many, if not most, of us believe that "greed is good." In our form, it is called capitalism.

Yet I would say that our real failure is not so much greed (although it is that, too) as self sufficiency, arrogance, and superficiality. Inner depth, compassion, and community died in many of us. We might call the thing that died a capacity for simple presence-presence to ourselves, to others, to the moment, and to inherent joy. That is the death of the soul for sure, and eventually of society.

Surely this is a moment of invitation, for a very new framing, for utterly new possibilities. Only a small number will probably do this, but that is all that is needed. We need to imagine our world, our economies, and our lifestyles in whole new ways. How can we get back to the way it was in recent years? is the question many commentators are asking, or worse, How can we restore the wealthy, the banks, and the corporations, so their largesse can again trickle down to us? These questions show the spiritless and sad way in which we have not-imagined a better world.

We surely cannot imagine Moses, the prophets, or Jesus thinking in such a way. They moved toward the crowds, the common good, not the protection of elites. Now, by some strange legerdemain, we dismiss this program as "socialism," with believers themselves some of the major dismissers. It is so ironic that we must protect the bonus contracts of executives as "legally binding," and yet the contracts of the ordinary worker can be easily dropped for the "survival" of the corporation. We are back into the divine rights of kings, and dare to call it democracy or free market, or even capitalism. It is "big government" protecting big government.

One wonders and hopes if this crisis of prosperity cannot return us to a re-admiration of smallness? Is it possible that we could join E.F. Schumacher's shout and plea that "small is beautiful"?

I trust, I believe, I hope, and I even know that the New Imaginers are out there! This crisis of prosperity is an opportunity to again love the small, the local, the human scale, the human over the corporate, the soulful over the successful, and the common good over private advantage. This alone will offer us a future worthy of spiritual and wise human beings.

 Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. For more information please visit www.cacradicalgrace.org.