2017.12.3 The Gift Economy

2017.12.3        “The Gift Economy”   Rev. Laura Bogle

Time for All Ages Sophia’s Guest by Becky Brooks

Reading          by Alison Luterman

Consider the Generosity of the One-Year-Old

who has no words to exchange with you yet,

and instead offers up her favorite drooled-on blanket,

her green rhinoceros as big as she is,

her cloth doll with the long blonde pigtails,

her battered cardboard books, swung open on their soggy pages,

her limitless heart.

If you were outdoors she would hand you a dead beetle,

a fistful of grass, a pebble,

by way of introduction or just because.

And if, a moment later, she wants it back,

it would be for the joy of passing

these simple symbols back and forth,

freely offered, freely relinquished,

This is me.  Here is who I am.  Oh.

In the same way, sun

drapes a buttered scarf across your face,

rose opens herself to your glance,

and rain shares its divine melancholy.

The whole world keeps whispering or shouting to you,

nibbling your ear like a neglected lover,

while you worry over matters of finance,

of "relationship,"

important issues related to getting and spending,

having and hoarding,

though you were once that baby,

though you are still that world.  

                    

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Robin Wall Kimmerer is a scientist, a professor of botany and ecology, and a person of Native American Heritage.  In her recent book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she tells of how the early summers of her childhood she would spend hours out picking wild strawberries.

“I’d lie on my stomach in my favorite patches, watching the berries grow sweeter and bigger under the leaves. …

Even now, after more than fifty Strawberry Moons, finding a patch of wild strawberries still touches me with a sensation of surprise, a feeling of unworthiness and gratitude for the generosity and kindness that comes with an unexpected gift all wrapped in red and green.  ‘Really? For me? Oh you shouldn’t have.’ After fifty years they still raise the question of how to respond to their generosity.”

One way, she says, to respond to generosity is to pass on the gift.  She and her siblings would always pick enough berries for their Father’s special shortcake on father’s day.  His favorite.  “it was a gift that could never be bought.”

She remembers an early lesson in economics when one summer she was hired to pick cultivated strawberries on a neighboring farm.  Earning a dime for every quart.  And the owner of the farm saying to her, “These berries belong to me, not to you.  I don’t want to see you eating my berries.” The cultivated berries had become an owned commodity, and if Robin wanted to bring any home, she had to spend most of what she had earned picking the berries, to buy the berries, which sold at 60 cents a quart. 

In contrast, the wild berries were there as a gift—they belonged to themselves, not to anyone else or to the marketplace.

She writes, “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.  The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries.” (25)

You could say Robin’s whole book is a meditation on the moral disconnection that happens in the great so-called Free Marketplace, where we are removed from the relationships and reciprocity that occurs when we look on the world and each other as gift.

Think about a time you received a gift – what was your response?  One of gratitude?  Did it make you want to give something back in return?  How did it make you feel? 

Now think about the last time you bought something – put gas in your car, went to the grocery store, went to the department store, exchanged money or more likely, you didn’t even exchange money with a person, you simply put a card in a slot and mysteriously paid.  What were you thinking?  What was your response?  Very often, for me, anyway, it’s simply completing a task. There’s not a feeling of connection.  There’s an emptiness in the transaction.  Or perhaps a sense of despair--  Maybe we think… wow I just spent the equivalent of hours of labor to put gas in my car just so I can work more.  Or maybe… I have no idea where any of this food was grown or who grew it.  Or maybe… I wish I could buy that sweater I saw, that would just complete my life, but it’s too expensive.  Or maybe I buy it anyway and just put it on the credit card, only to find out that another sweater produced in Honduras, or wherever, does not in fact make my life better.

That feeling of emptiness and disconnection might be why, according to a Harvard study released last year, just over half of millennials aged 18-29 say they don’t support capitalism. They aren’t sure about what the alternative is, but they realize the current state of affairs isn’t serving them, or their future and the future of our planet.

As Martin Kirk and Jason Hickel write in a recent article for FastCompany, entitled, Are You Ready to Consider that Capitalism is the Real Problem?, “It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on. …

As Robert Kennedy famously said, Gross Domestic Product “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.””

One of our neighbors is kind of a crotchety old guy.  In a neighborhood that is gentrifying he holds out in his house, living on a very limited income, partly surviving on food pantries and scavenged items.  And yet, he occasionally will bring us things – most recently it was a bouquet of flowers he got at a local ministry, clearly donated by Trader Joe’s because they were a bit droopy and on the verge of their demise, and no longer could be sold.  “For the girls” he said, “make sure you let them put it in a vase!”  And so we did.  And they loved it, of course.

Now, I would never think to write a thank you note to Trader Joe’s after I spent money buying a bouquet of flowers there, but I feel gratitude to my neighbor, and I even feel some gratitude to Trader Joe’s for giving away some flowers.  Our neighbor received a gift and passed it on, and it made me more mindful—what gifts do I receive to pass on to him?

Charles Eisenstein writes in his article, “To Build Community, An Economy of Gifts,” :

“Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."” 

There are increasingly all kinds of organized and informal ways people are trying to resist the commodification and upwards concentration of wealth in the marketplace and turn towards alternative gift economies, circles of the gift, structures that help meet people’s needs and build community at the same time.  “Think mutual aid, community organizing, self-help, and cooperatives of all kinds.”  http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/solidarity/capitalism-is-not-the-only-choice-20171114

In one model a small group of people meets on a regular basis, they each share one thing they need – say, help building a fence-- and they each share one thing they have to give—say, extra produce from the garden—and they figure out how to share and meet each other’s needs without buying anything or exchanging money.

There are lots of other examples too, including large cooperative, worker-owned businesses whose mission is not to make the most money but to meet a community need and sustain family-friendly, family-supporting jobs in the process.

These are not new and innovative ideas—in some ways it is simply returning to and expanding a well-known way of life. 

We ourselves as a congregation are our own gift economy.  We pool our resources—money, talents, food, care—we share them with each other and with those outside our walls with no expectation of equal exchange or “profit”.  When you give to this congregation, it is not a market transaction, but a gift of trust in community and reciprocity.  When you allow yourself to receive gifts through this congregation the circle is completed. 

Giving and receiving is both a reflection of the relationship that already exists, and a way to deepen that relationship. 

In the same way, when I give out of our Ministers Discretionary Fund, it is not a gift with strings attached, I do not ask for a detailed accounting of how the gift was used, nor a particular return on investment.  It is simply moving what has already been given as a gift along again, circulating the wealth towards the greatest need.

It is hard spiritual practice to be like the generous one-year-old in the poem that Autumn read—simply experiencing the joy of passing gifts back and forth, freely offered, freely relinquished, without grasping for self or security, without feeling owed to or in debt.

If only I could be so generous in my heart. 

If only we could be so generous in our nation.

We often hear talk about our country as a Christian nation, but we have long since replaced the God of Abraham with the God of the Marketplace. 

One only need to look at the last month in Congress to understand that.

The tax reform bills passed by the Senate this week and in the House previously do not follow Jesus’ admonition to “Love thy Neighbor as thyself” or any of the other hundreds of places in scripture that instructs believers to care for the vulnerable and poor.  Instead, they cater to the wealthy, Wall Street and large corporations, leaving the rest of us to carry the debt and figure out our own survival.

And here’s another thing that happened this week, getting less attention --  legislation was introduced in the House this week to repeal some of the already pretty weak consumer protections around a practice known as pay-day lending. Imagine: you have a job but not enough to have much of a buffer in your bank account.  You have an unexpected expense – a car repair, for instance, and you need that car to get to your job, to keep your job.  So, what do you do?  Often the only line of credit available to you, especially if you aren’t from a family with resources, which is so often the case for low wage workers, is to go down to the pay day lender.  To get a loan against your future paycheck.  And then to find yourself, when all is said and done, paying upwards of 300% interest on that loan, for years.

The regulations that this legislation want to roll back simply say, you can’t do this too often with the same person.  There’s not a cap on interest.

The reason I’m raising this today is because there’s a group right here, through the Blount County Ecumenical Action Council, that is considering what alternatives we might set up.  How might we create a pool of money that could be loaned at very low or no interest to people who need it?  What if instead of going down to the pay day lender, people had an option to talk with a person in their community whose highest regard was for their health and dignity and not the bottom line of shareholders or banking regulations?  What if we based a system on trust and reciprocity and compassion instead?  What if instead of telling ourselves a story of scarcity and competition, we told ourselves a story of abundant gifts, that we already have what we need to meet every need, if we would share?  What if?

Robin Wall Kammerer writes,

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep.  Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath.  Our work and our joy is to pass along the gift and trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.” (p.104)

We need each other, and in the years ahead that may become more and more clear to more and more of us as social safety nets get sacrificed.

May we, even in these days when we might despair that the decisions people are making in Washington are all too big and too mean for us to do anything about – may we remember that we still yet have the ability to ask “What if?” What if we just did it differently?

In this season of gift-giving and gift-receiving, may we be mindful of the gifts of earth and each other which we already have received.  May we look for ways in the coming year to more often share and pass those gifts along, so that we might all live more abundantly and free.

Amen.