Wednesday, November 4, 2009

SpiritMatters Monthly November 2009


Poussez


The Montreal subway system came up with a clever solution for getting passengers in and out of their METRO stations in an efficient manner: rather than have the standard double doors in which people coming and going fend for themselves in opening their own doors, they created a very simple single door that pivots in the middle. If you push on the door to exit the station, you open the door for those entering. If you push on the door to enter the station, you also open the door for those exiting. I doubt that the designers of the METRO stations were trying to make a social statement, but they made one nonetheless: life doesn’t have to be about competition all the time. It is possible to get where you need to go without standing in the way of others.
Most of us were taught in school the principle of scarcity. What scarcity basically says is that we have unlimited needs and wants, but limited resources. In other words, we are taught that there is not enough to go around and therefore we must compete with each other just to get what we need. Much of human history seems to be about one group competing with another just to stay alive. There have been some moments of grace though when we have realized that life may not always have to be a case of “me or you.”

One of the great “American Stories” that I was taught growing up was that of how the Pilgrims left the religious persecution of the Old World and came to America to create a different type of society. One of the great pinnacle moments of that story is when the Pilgrims celebrated a great “Thanks-giving” feast after their Native American friends had helped them find and grow the food they needed to stay alive in this new land. The feast that the Pilgrims had with the Native Americans might have been seen as a hopeful sign that future relations between these two races would be characterized by charity and cooperation, but alas we know that was not the case. The old idea of scarcity crept back in and the Pilgrims soon found themselves competing with the Native Americans for the land, food, and resources that the abundant New World had to offer. Pretty soon the New World began to look just as bloody as the Old World. What happened? We turned survival from being about cooperation into being about competition.

The feast of Thanksgiving was a celebration of God’s abundance. When we realize that we have enough we have less inclination to take from others. Thanksgiving is a wonderful American tradition of taking a moment to remember how much we have, and how important that it is to share what we have with others. We are in danger of losing Thanksgiving though. Retailers have been in fierce competition with one another to see who can get the earliest jump on the holiday season. This year Christmas (or the retail version of it) invaded mid-October, perhaps September will be next. Retailers see Thanksgiving as a day to rest and energize for the shopping to follow the next day, not a day to recognize that we already have all we need.

I thank God for those moments of grace like that first Thanksgiving, when we realize that if we share what we have with those around us that we will get so much more in return than we would if we just tried to take what we want. Maybe we have enough. Maybe things are not as scarce as we are sometimes led to believe. Maybe life would be better if (like on the Montreal METRO) we worked together to push the doors out of the way, and not each other.