The observations of a St. Benedictine monk from the 8th century are still useful. “We have a false view of the world presented by greed, that possessing and appearing to be wealthy are the highest values of existence.”
By Allan Hartley
Editor
Getting through the recession intact is like an individual going through a personal crisis and calling themselves a survivor. Some people are proud of themselves for being a survivor which means they remained the same person. What is more important is not to survive but to lose the person who went into the crisis. Use the crisis to change, to transform into a different person. And that is what I meant in the previous issue when I asked if the national economic crisis is deep enough to make a big difference.
Some say that we are already starting to come out of the recession. But, we see businesses closing, and people losing their jobs. Homes are still being foreclosed on. Some are doing well while others are suffering. Those that have not been affected by this financial crisis can help those who have been hurt by it. Will that happen? I am sure, to some degree, it will take place. But there are already others who are taking advantage of others now instead of helping. The same banks who have been given billions by the government are increasing the charges to use their credit cards. We see prices going up. Those that have and are in business should be generous now and even decrease their prices to make it easier on others.
It amazes us, but probably shouldn’t, that the source of our country’s financial crisis comes not from a system or economic philosophy, but pervasive greed and corruption. This starts at the individual level and permeates to the whole environment — if one can get away with it then why not the rest? We all know that the people who run the banking system, the automotive industry, and the people who should be overseeing it all, congress, are guilty of this behavior.
It is all to obvious all around us, this greed and corruption, that one wonders why we don’t live differently — as individuals — because it is individuals who make up the banking industry, Wall Street, the automotive industry, and Congress. It took one person, Madoff, to do so much damage in dollars and human lives.
Let’s start with the individual. We are told there is an epidemic of obesity and some are asking is this a sign of collective greed. Reverend Heng Sure, director of the Berkely Buddhist Monastery says: “Greed unchecked expands. At a certain point we are going to meet the limits to that. We won’t be able to just eat and eat. I would say the quick answer is to wake up. As Americans it is very easy to get into this dream of there is plenty and it’s peaceful and there are no consequences. Television teaches us there are no consequences. The body falls and then you go to a commercial break. There never is any blood. There is just this sense of ongoing fantasy. There is always more. When you come to the limits as India has done you wake or perish. There is no guarantee that we will wake up — and just keep this super addict’s dream of superabundance.”
In the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, April 25 the writer, Louis Sahagun, reported “Dalai Lama sees good in financial crisis.” He said, “The Dalai Lama, in a ringing denunciation, declared Friday that the ailing global economy is the result of too much greed, and lies and hypocrisy.”
“These are some of the factors behind the global crisis,” the Dalai Lama said at a news conference at UC Santa Barbara. “Those people who feel that money is the most important thing in life, when economic crisis hits, learn that it is only one way to be happy. There is also family, friends, and peace of mind.”
Pope Benedict XVI, in his weekly address on April 22nd, “pointed to a ‘vice’ of the human heart as the profound cause of the economic situation. The Pope also spoke recently in Luanda during his trip to Africa as “the greed that corrupts the heart of man,” and in the beginning of April in a message addressed to the “G20 summit he wrote that the origin of the crisis is also a “failure of correct ethical behavior.”
In the same weekly address Pope Benedict refers to Autpertus, an 8th century abbot of a Benedictine monastery. Autpertus told his monks that “the disdain of the world becomes important in their spirituality, a disdain not for the beauty of creation, but for the false view of the world presented to us by greed, which insinuates that possessing and appearing to be wealthy are the highest values of existence.” He added, “There is a widespread false concept of freedom,” understood as “having everything in one’s disposal.”
It is obvious that there is a moral and ethical crisis in the world. We all know right from wrong and we have been told by religions how to live for thousands of years and yet we don’t get it, that if we don’t live within certain limitations we perish. I am questioning whether human nature is rejecting the religious because there is some other way to live. The way we are living and have lived from the beginning of religions has not worked — although what comes from the Dala Lama, Heng Sure, and Pope Benedict is logical and inspirational. Look around at obesity and drug problems, environmental changes, the financial distress, political corruption, the wars, and civil strife.
Let’s stay open to learn from this crisis. Can we learn something new, not merely repeat the same feel good solutions. |
