Photo by Joanna Stołowicz on Unsplash
In late October, a good many years ago, my wife and I drove to Maine for a weeklong vacation. We went to see the fall foliage and to relax and retreat from the demands of everyday life. As we drove across the border, we were greeted by a sign that read: “Maine: The Way Life Should Be.” I’m not sure how true this sounds to anyone who lives and works in Maine year-round, but for us weary travelers, it was music to our ears.
As we drove through the park, stopping periodically to get out of our car, we spotted the rich cranberry colors of blueberry plants long after they have surrendered their large juicy berries. We also admired the lichen in every shade of green, gray, and orange that grew on the mountain rocks. On every side, we were surrounded by the abundance and bounty of nature.
We spent a few days of our vacation in a small cabin on Mt. Desert Island, five minutes from the entrance to Acadia National Park. The drive through the park and to the summit of Cadillac Mountain is always splendid. On a clear day, one can see mountain lakes, small islands in the Atlantic Ocean, and foliage in every shade of red, orange, yellow, and green.
Where nature is full of bounty, the world that we humans have constructed, and in which we now live, is ordered by economies of production and consumption in which scarcity is a defining principle. The price of an object, as we well know, is based in part on the degree of its availability. The more rare or scarce an object is, and the more others desire it, the more it will cost. Shaped by these economic forces from the moment we become aware of the world around us, it is easy to see how our attitude towards our money and possessions is shaped by an attitude that sees the world in terms of the scarcity of things. This attitude is what philosophers call a “pre-understanding, that is, an attitude or worldview that precedes everything we encounter. It is just “the way that it is” for us. In human societies, however, it is important to remember that things do not always have to be the way that they are; they could be otherwise.
The stories of the Bible, written long ago, offer us a glimpse of a world very different from our own. In the Old Testament, the prophets see it as their duty to remind the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, both ruled by monarchies, that life could be different—that under God’s rule or reign the world could be ordered differently from the way human rulers order the world. If we read the Bible carefully, we may find that our attitudes to the world in which we now live may not be as fixed as we might at first have thought.
In the midst of a severe drought, the prophet Elijah visited a poor widow who lived with her only son in Zarephath. He asked her for water and a morsel of bread. She replied: “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die” [I Kings 17: 12]. Elijah told her not to be afraid. He directed her to make a small little cake for him and for her and her son and promised the woman if she did so, her jar of meal and jug of oil would not fail until the drought had ended.
Elijah, Walter Brueggmann observes, “enacts a world of guaranteed abundance for the widow, in defiance of more conventional arrangements of scarcity.” This encounter “is not a ‘do-good’ act of charity, “ but rather “a revolutionary act that rejects the myth of scarcity fostered by the privileged, a myth accepted by the widow who has no available alternative. The prophet is able to enact this ‘wonder’ of meal and oil,” because “in God’s creation “there is more than enough. This story, then, affirms the “generosity of the creator who has given enough gifts for all” while at the same time criticizing the monarchical government and economy under which the poor woman lives, which has organized the “abundance of creation” by means of a “practice of scarcity.” [Walter Brueggemann, 1 & 2 Kings (Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing), 216.]
Our contemporary world, like that of the ancient royal world of Elijah’s day, Brueggemann concludes, subscribes to a myth of scarcity.” This scarcity, however, is not the way it has to be; it is an imposed power arrangement whereby some have too much so that, consequently, some have too little.
Most of us are far richer than we ever imagine because scarcity thinking shapes our perspective on life. In the stewardship of our own resources, including our treasures, time, and talents to God, we more often live according to a “pre-understanding” of scarcity than we do to a celebration of the overwhelming abundance of God’s creation. The Bible continually reminds us that God’s world is not governed by scarcity but by overwhelming abundance. Jesus promises us that he has come that we “may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).
Signs of “the way life should be”—or could be — surround us all the time, but you may not see them if you look at the world around you solely in terms of scarcity. Would life be different for you if you began to think in terms of abundance?
In These Times 