DENIM SPIRIT: An economy based on abundance – Finger Lakes Times

Looking out on Seneca Lake, when the sky is cloudless sapphire blue, the sun shining brilliantly from its distant perch, it seems as if the star at the center of our solar system gets caught in the fire of shimmering diamonds atop small waves.

I am talking about those white crystals gleaming by the thousands off the lake, so bright that naked eyes are forced to squint. Looking at those white blossoms of light shining off the waves, I imagine they are waiting to be picked like so much cotton in a field of blue.

There are real jewels of light in the field of dreams inside the human heart and mind. It is not even my imagination; they are real. If harnessed, these bits and pieces of light within the crowded cosmos inside us would utterly transform life as we live it.

Love, for example, is one such element. Think about the nature of it. Love creates love, whether the romantic, familial, or friendship kind. There is no scarcity in love, only abundance. There is an edgier, subversive element to love as well. The willful choice to love someone someone we could more easily hate than love actually heals our woundedness over time. Now think about love in economic terms.

Abundance is intrinsic in love.

Love generates a greater capacity to love, and the more we do it, the more we have of it. It is enough to make a capitalist miserable. If it were a commodity of trade, love as a self-generating resource, with an ever-increasing capacity for production, would be dangerously subversive to any economy based upon scarcity and self-interest as our economy is. In

bottom-line, quantitative economics, love is astonishing and subversive.

Forgiveness is another small shimmering diamond found within the deep space of the human heart and mind.

Forgiveness is like a cell attracting other cells in the process of forming new life. Forgiving someone actually generates within us an even greater capacity to forgive ourselves deepening our capacity to accept who we are, just as we are, even without further improvement.

Forgiveness is synergistic like that: The willful choice, for example, to forgive someone we could more easily resent, conditions and builds emotional and spiritual muscle that we also need in order to more deeply accept ourselves. So, like love, the nature of forgiveness is abundance rather than scarcity.

But in our economy, the consumeristic one, the presence of forgiveness would sound a death-knell to whole industries. The consumerism upon which our economy is built, depends upon and trades in the power of diminishment and injury, raising self-doubt and self-hatred so that consumers buy more of what promises to make them beautiful or acceptable. Forgiveness would corrode those efforts from the inside out.

Consider another gem, one almost never heard spoken these days: mercy. Mercy spawns mercy.

Even though rarely mentioned in polite society any more, mercy is a crucial element of any universe we would ever want to live in. What mercy does is melt away our drive to be right, and to win at all costs, and to demand punishment and retribution. Mercy bears the sweet, nearly indescribably fruit we call kindness.

Imagine a social order that valued mercy even more than justice? If we were thinking about our own self-interest, isnt that the kind of society we would want if we found ourselves on the margin?

So, whereas our economy creates and trades in currencies based on scarcity, the elements of our better natures are self-generating and therefore exhaustively abundant. Love, forgiveness, and mercy just to name three reproduce exponentially when exposed to fresh air and are allowed to circulate and be nurtured.

So often we credit competitiveness and dog-eat-dog fierceness with being elements upon which a better economy is built. We even imagine those are the driving forces that have promoted us as winners on the evolutionary scale. But I wonder, as I think about these sparkling beauties in the field of human qualities, if our assumption is indeed true.

Cameron Miller is the author of the spiritual fiction The Steam Room Diaries and numerous published poems, and is publisher of http://www.subversivepreacher.org. He lives and writes in Geneva and serves as the priest of Trinity Episcopal Church. He can be reached at dspiritflt@ gmail.com.

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DENIM SPIRIT: An economy based on abundance - Finger Lakes Times