Finding Abundance
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The earth is our horn of plenty. She sends forth all manner of delicious food. She flowers and sends forth fruits and vegetables. She dances wheat into the wind, sprouts and bathes rice, and draws corn toward the sky. Season to season the earth provides.
From ancient time human beings have held harvest celebrations to show appreciation for the abundance of the earth.Sometimes our celebrations have been more propitiatory in character—trying to placate the gods so they would continue to provide. Long ago, sacrifices were made to appease the gods so life would return to the soil and abundance be restored.
I expect we want to think of ourselves as having moved far beyond such primitive ideas of appeasement and sacrifice. But I’m not so sure. For millennia abundance, or the lack of it, was simply taken for granted. It was the mark of a relatively solid and unchangeable social station or caste— perhaps preordained in an earlier life, certainly inherited from one’s parents, given to the first born male, and possibly assigned by the gods or by God.
This idea has evolved over time, particularly as the system of inherited class began to break down a few centuries ago. As that happened, the idea of abundance changed—but ever so slightly—to mean that if you had wealth, enough to eat, a good place to live, etc., it meant that somehow you deserved it, you were entitled to it. You’d found favor in the eyes of God. And those who did not have abundance— well, they had just not found, earned, nor deserved that favor.
The nineteenth century saw a new form of the idea of deserving favor—or entitlement. It was most clearly articulated by churchman and lecturer Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple University. Although he began as a Baptist preacher, he developed a theology of wealth and preached it around the country. Conwell is best known for his “Acres of Diamonds” speech, which he gave repeatedly. I will quote from it here because I found it so clarifying:
I say that you ought to get rich,
and it is our duty to get rich…. The
men who get rich may be the most
honest men you find in the community….
98 out of 100 of the rich
men of America are honest. That is
why they are rich. That is why they
carry on great enterprises and find
plenty of people to work with them….
Money is power, and you ought to
be reasonably ambitious to have it.
You ought because you can do
more good with it than you could
without it…. If you can honestly
attain unto riches…it is our Christian
and godly duty to do so….
While we should sympathize with
God’s poor—that is, those who
cannot help themselves—let us
remember that there is not a poor
person in the United States who
was not made poor by his own
shortcomings…. It is all wrong to
be poor, anyhow.
Conwell believed that abundance was a sign of virtue, and he has been followed by new generations of similar preachers, touting varieties of the same teaching—that faith brings abundance and poverty is a sign of failure.
It’s the power of positive thinking on steroids. On the Reverend Creflo Dollar’s website it says: “We are firm believers that the precise understanding of God’s Word is the gateway to change in people’s lives. From finances to walking in divine health; Creflo Dollar Ministries is committed to equipping people all over the world with the knowledge and wisdom needed to make decisions that will positively impact their futures.”
Paul Yonggi Cho, minister of the world’s largest church in South Korea, has what he calls the “Law of Incubation.” He says, “First make a clear-cut goal, then draw a mental picture to visualize success. Then incubate it into reality, and finally speak it into existence through the creative power of the spoken word.”
Joel Osteen, pastor of the 16,000-seat Lakewood Church in Houston preaches: “God wants you to live an overcoming life of victory. He doesn’t want you to barely get by. He’s called El Shaddai, “the God of more than enough.”
Now, I know that El Shaddai actually means Lord Almighty—as in overcoming or victory. If you accept what Joel Osteen is saying it’s unsettling, because the overcoming is a military victory— a battle in which one’s foes are utterly destroyed. And I have to say that while there are many kinds of God in which I cannot believe, that one’s at the top of my list—the powerful destroyer who uses infinite might to crush adversaries into dust.
And what does that mean when it comes to the receiving of abundance? Does it mean we only have enough when everyone around us has been ground to dust?
All these abundance or prosperity preachers teach that money is not the important thing, though. The important thing is faith, and if you don’t have faith, you can’t have the abundance. If you don’t have the abundance, you just didn’t have the faith. Simple as that. So the wealthiest one percent must be the most faithful, the ones God has chosen for God’s greatest blessings. And those who starve, those who are hungry on city streets or in Sudan, they are just the less faithful.
I believe that there is great abundance on this earth. I believe that there is plenty to go around, and no one needs tostarve. But I’m also sure there is no mathematics that will allow such plenty to flow if the bulk of the world’s abundance is held and controlled by a few people.
It’s both bad math and bad faith. And I notice that society around us is suffering from this poor equation. There have been times when people have overcome the prejudice of this figuring—times when poverty or scarcity has not been seen as an immutable fact, a personal failure, or as an obstacle to be overcome by individual grit and determination.
We’ve enjoyed those times of relative generosity and compassion because of the rise of a powerful and dangerous idea. It is a political idea, but it arose from a deeply known and held religious value: that each person is created in the image of the divine and not, therefore, born in sin and evil, but rather equally endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That idea caught fire —birthed a nation— and has been in struggle with the preachers of individual abundance ever since. This belief created a very new view of the world: that every person is entitled to basic thriving because there is, in fact, enough to go around if only we live in a social contract that can ensure cooperation over control and generosity over greed.
Where does greed come from? It is not born in evil, but rather in want and fear, in haunting insecurity. It’s born in hunger and spiritual famine, because we are trained, taught, primed to internalize that equation of “good equals wealth” from the time we are small. After all, Santa has a list and he’s checking it twice and you are only going to get stuff if you were nice. So, if you don’t get lots of stuff, well, it’s pretty clear you aren’t nice.
There was a movie in 2009 called The Box, with a haunting premise. A box appears on the doorstep of a couple who learn that if they open it they will be given a million dollars, but someone, somewhere, will die.
Now, most of us have problems that could be well solved by a million dollars. It was a test of greed—a test in just the way that greed happens. Not because someone is cackling at someone else’s bad fortune, but rather because they are certain that the bad fortune will be far away from them. They might feel bad, but not so bad that they’ll keep the lid on the box.
Famine is created by our fears and hungers. It’s created because someone dams a river, closes a border, starts a war, prices a medication sky high, prevents a crop from being grown or sold. It happens because two nations can’t share the same land or water rights. Famine is created because in one place people have a bottomless hunger and to feed it, they are willing to let others suffer or die. Perhaps it’s easier to live with that cost because somewhere, not too long ago, our ancestors were making living sacrifices on the altars of gods they hoped to buy favor with.
But the earth is our horn of plenty, and our real abundance—abundance which allows the plenty to flow, which allows us each to feel safe in our homes, which creates good neighbors, whether next door or around the world—that abundance will only come when we recognize the long-lost child, the orphaned brother or sister who is every person. That abundance will only come when the emptiness inside is filled by the knowledge that we are enough, that each one of us is precious and worthy
and deserving and connected.
That abundance will only find us when we understand that none of us is fully nourished until all of us are nourished. And then none shall know famine and all shall be full—in body, in heart, in mind and in spirit.
- Finding Abundance - October 1, 2015
