Famine to Feast

Let me define what I mean by famine. Famine is the reigning myth. It is king and queen, emperor and president. As the kids would say, “It rules.” Myth one is that there is not enough. You will barely get through an hour anywhere in the first-world without the subtext of “there is not enough” coming up. “I would love to come but I am so busy.”

Myth two is that more is better. “When I get the promotion or the gig or the partner, then I will have the more I need to be better.”

Myth three is that there is nothing you can do about it. “I won’t get the promotion or the gig or the partner, and if I do it won’t work out, so there is really nothing to do but stay here and whine about it along with the rest of the culture.”

Myth four—and this is really a new one, straight from the Republicans—is that you are personally responsible. No pension? You must have invested your 401K wrong. No health insurance? You probably didn’t take good care of your health. No freedom from work? You probably went to the wrong graduate school.

These four myths are relatives. They all belong to the same family. They dine very well together every night. There is not enough. More is better. There is nothing you can do about it. You are personally responsible.

The story of the wedding at Cana is a striking alternative to the king, queen, prince, and princess myths. It says just the opposite: there is plenty, we have enough, there are lots of things you can do to change things, and we are positively personally responsible. There is not blame here—as in who ordered the wrong amount of wine—but there is hope. As they will say at the World Social Forum, over and over again, another world is possible.

I am a recovering famine freak. I am training myself to be a feast freak. I choose small strategic gifts. I choose a feast mentality (even though there are plenty of days of desperation and despair still left). I also choose a steady principled pace that has plenty of time for setbacks—as well as plenty of time built into it for my money to create lasting change. The better wine is coming. That is the first and central point of view I have on money. From there the rest is simpler.

From Living Well While Doing Good by Donna Schaper. A Seabury Book, an imprint of Church Publishing. Copyright © 2007. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org

[Courtesy of Vicki K Black]

Things are still slightly different here in the UK; but there are plenty, in and out of Government, who feel that the answer to the funding crisis in the National Health Service is private health insurance, and that the answer to the increasing cost of pensions as people on average live longer is to insist on privately-funded or employer-driven pension schemes. The culture of blame is spreading so widely that schools dare not organise school outings for fear of being blamed if something goes wrong, and hospitals dare not allow flowers to brighten the lives of patients for fear of being blamed for the spread of infection.

As Christians we may feel that there is little we can do to help a situation like this: that between the Press and the Government, the famine mentality is here to stay. Yet we can each live the feast. St Francis used to encourage his Brothers to preach the Gospel, and only to use words if necessary. Who knows what might not be achieved if we were to live, and to pray, the Gospel life in the midst of the culture of appetite?