by Dennis Green
In a materialistic society such as ours, the common assumption underlying all our other values is the notion that the more affluent you are, the happier you will be. All the other debates — about Wall Street bonuses, foreclosures, health care reform, deficit spending, and unemployment — rest on this one central, unavoidable supposition.
No one even questions it. And along with that assumption comes many about “poverty.” That ignorance, and a lack of education, is an inevitable side effect of poverty, for example. But as a sawmill kid, a child of the working class, I can tell you that if you have a thirst for knowledge, you will find a way.
I did that, earning my own degrees and even teaching at UC Santa Barbara, Westmont College, Hayward State and UC Berkeley Extension — but more importantly, I saw my own father, who was pulled out of school at the end of the 8th grade to work in his father’s sawmill, become a self-educated and very articulate man, serving as president of the board of directors of the Eureka Chapter of the AARP.
And as a classroom teacher, I saw it all the time, kids from broken homes, impoverished backgrounds, ghetto neighborhoods, and even lives of crime and drugs — determined to become knowledgeable and educated and capable of realizing their dreams. But even education doesn’t guarantee a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction.
The Greeks believed that such a state of spiritual buoyancy comes from being in tune with Nature, and the natural order of things, living a just life in accordance with the laws of nature. “Nemesis,” for example, is the Goddess of Retribution, of the sorrow and unhappiness, the personal undoing that results from transgressing on these laws. Justice was as important to the Greeks as it is in the religion of Islam.
Many spiritual prophets have warned against the dangers of materialism, including Jesus’ famous dictum that it is more difficult for a rich man to get into a heavenly state than for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Excess baggage? And will that be one hump or two?
Yet the hallways of the Vatican are filled with display cases packed with gold plundered from Pagan empires all across the world. And most American televangelists preach that wealth and prosperity are a sign of God’s blessing, not a curse at all. Some blame this twist in Right Wing Religion on Industrial Protestantism, even Calvinism, but those are not the tenets of God’s grace at all. It is gratuitous, a gift, unbidden and unearned.
Blessed are the poor, and in Buddhism and many other traditions, a life bereft of the trappings of affluence is something to be sought indeed. As the poet Gary Snyder tells us, “All I need is enough ground beneath me to sit in meditation.” Amen to that.
In my own experience, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I’ve been blessed by satisfactions wide and deep that have nothing to do with things. And some of the richest people I’ve known have also been among the least happy or fulfilled. The blessing quotients don’t always compute along with the balance sheet. The life of the spirit, like the life of the imagination, is not for sale. Not even on that credit card you just maxed-out.
©2009 Dennis Green
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