Pastoral on the Economy 2
I’m just back from the Spring meeting of the House of Bishops, held at the Kanuga Camp and Conference Center, near Asheville, North Carolina. I was part of the writing team that produced the bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy, which I commend to you.
The process of putting a pastoral letter together to represent 100+ bishops, and the diversity of the writing team itself was a fun challenge. It meant, of course, that some things each of us wrote couldn’t be in the final draft. What follows is an edited version of something I wrote, which I felt was quite important, and that responded to the request of one bishop who said, “We must let people know that our response to the economic crisis cannot be an attempt to get back to where we used to be - that is futile and counter-productive - but must be reaching a new level of being and doing.” I agree.
A central theme of Lent is repentance. The commonest way to view repentance is to talk about reflection, rethinking, finding a new understanding of the past. But equally powerful, and sometimes a missing yet life-giving perspective, is to see repentance as seeking the mind we need beyond the mind we have now. You might say it is the Mind of Christ, who waits for us in the future.
Understanding repentance as seeking the mind we need for the future is helpful as we not only see the mistakes we have made in the past, relating to the economy, but as we seek the future mind we need for health and wholeness in the present and in the world to come.
In one instance, our old mind has been self-interested, not only at the level of the individual, but with respect to our culture as opposed to the larger world, with its ocean of suffering. We have had a narrow focus, and failed to speak a compelling word of commitment and economic justice as a whole culture.
The new mind we seek is pointed to in our historic commitment to the relief of global suffering, through meeting core human survival needs. We have done this by committing to eight interconnected goals that address the deepest human needs, called in total the Millennium Development Goals. There is a great trajectory in our commitment to the Millennium Development Goals that leads us towards the Mind of Christ, the compassionate one who is our Goal.
We seek a new mind that knows that while there are some of us for whom this crisis is a way of being invited into more simplicityfor the most vulnerable this “downturn” represents an emergency. As Christ looked on the hungry people gathered to hear him teach, and had compassion on them because “they were like sheep without a shepherd,” we must bear in our renewed minds not only our own privations, but the great danger into which this crisis puts the nearly three billion people on the earth who live on less than $2 a day.
Be assured that while we have a roll in striving towards this new mind, it is the grace of God in Jesus Christ that is drawing all creation to Christ. Our theology envisions a moment of completeness, of fulfillment, with Christ as both the center and the encompassing presence in this longed-for future. At the deepest level, our “work” is to be open to this grace that moves us to the Mind of Christ.
