We treat the economy as if it were God.  We try to appease it, worry that it will smite us, and don’t really understand it.  We’ve built our ethical systems around it.  This became abundantly clear to Methodist Theological School of Ohio professor Yvonne Zimmerman when she was studying the movement to end human trafficking.  She noticed that many of the advocacy organizations and nonprofits that comprise this movement use an economic argument to oppose contemporary slavery.  People who don’t receive an income can’t be consumers, the rhetoric goes, and this is bad for all of us, since being a consumer helps the economy.  But she began to notice that the rhetoric sometimes goes even further, and equates consumerism with freedom.  And she began to notice other voices in American culture equating consumerism with the freedom to live a full and meaningful life.

If consumerism becomes a human ideal, then we learn to judge our ethical choices in terms of that ideal.  We know we are acting rightly when we act as good consumers, and we expect these actions to make us happier and make the world better.  For religious people this presents an obvious problem.  To deify the market is to turn it into an idol, and to align all of our behaviors so that they serve the market is to worship that idol and blindly act according to its will.    Yvonne wasn’t making an argument against capitalism, or saying that the economy is unimportant.  But she was inviting us to step back from it, to critique the market and its call to consumerism, and to understand that the economy, while neutral in itself, is often used to dominate and oppress people.

Since we live in a country that is often dominated by economic concerns, it sometimes becomes hard for us to use any language but that of the market.  Hence the reliance on consumerist rhetoric by anti-human trafficking groups.  Where, Yvonne wondered, could we find a different language for talking about the purpose of human life, and a different set of ethical standards for understanding whether that purpose is good.  She suggested three voices we might want to pay attention to.  The first voice is Tex Sample, Professor Emeritus at St. Paul School of Theology, who critiques power, self-interest, and the notion of self in our society.  The second voice is Katie Cannon, who discusses in her book Black Womanist Ethics how the goal of slaves and African-Americans living in the Jim Crow south was often survival, rather than success, and how that changed their view of what constitutes an ethical life.  The third voice belongs to David Hilfiker, who lays out a Biblical conception of the value of work.

We were meeting at the Wexner Student Center, the home of OSU Hillel.  When Yvonne asked for our help in critiquing the market and articulating ethical practices that could reorientate us away from the economy and towards God, our host, Rabbi Feivel Strauss, spoke very eloquently about the Sabbath as a time set aside from consumerism, when one neither sells nor buys, neither works nor relies on the work of others.  We were all challenged by Katie Cannon’s work, since she suggests that the centers of power are not the source for moral alternatives, and true moral alternatives often look so alternative that we might not even recognize them as being moral.  We talked about the idea that quiet grace or invisible dignity could be moral precepts that one might live one’s life by, and the difficulties that idealistic, passionate people who want to change society have in accepting these seemingly passive ethics.  We also talked about the value of work, and whether it’s possible to think of that value in non-economic terms.  We didn’t come close to answering the question of how we can live in ways that aren’t arranged around the economy.  It’s too big a question for a single luncheon.  But by beginning the discussion, we began the search for answers, knowing that those answers can’t be arrived at through discussion, but by the ways in which we choose to live our lives.

Trespass is a very old idea, and although it’s often seen negatively it can lead to beauty and revolutions in understanding. Sometimes we need other people to trespass into our private preserves of thought and belief, and into our carefully curated ways of doing things. In October of 2014, artists and writers came together in the EASE Gallery to share and talk about their work over dinner. Having met each other, they formed partnerships with each other and set about creating works that address the theme of trespass.

You can view those works by downloading this .pdf file, or you can order a print copy of the book on demand by following this link.  Ordering a print copy will provide a small financial benefit to the EASE Gallery.

“Im not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live.”  Brad Modlin was reading from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book about the color blue.  The Ministerium of Ideas was meeting to examine the question of how we can cultivate a culture of reverence, and Brad was sharing an omnium-gatherum of readings that he’s collected during his studies as a poet and a teacher of literature.  He divided these readings into five sections, and talked to us about Reverence through Rituals, the Reverence of Dropping Silent, Reverence as/by Staring, Reverence as Pause, and Reverence as Real Presence.  Most of the readings were drawn from contemporary poetry, and for many of us this was part of the excitement – to discover the gathered wisdom of a world of artists who are living now and experiencing the same fractured world that we experience.

To talk about ritual, Brad read Marie Howe’s poem, “What the Living Do.”  She wrote it for her dead brother, and Brad’s point was that the reverence of ritual shows up in everyday life, in the wonder at just being alive, even when grocery store bags break and the sink gets clogged up.  The poem conveys the idea that cultivating reverence is not about looking for exceptional moments, but discovering the beauty of the ordinary.

And that beauty can be wonderfully discovered when we fall silent.  Brad showed us a video of Neil Hilborn performing his spoken word piece, “OCD.”  Hilborn suffers from the eponymous condition, and the piece is a spillage of words, starting at a heightened level of intensity and becoming more intense.  But it’s true power comes at the end, when Hilborn falls silent.  All the clutter and confusion of his mind and words is allowed, for a moment, to lapse into quiet, and I couldn’t help thinking of the clutter and confusion of my own life, and those moments of allowed silence that create a sense of reverence.

Brad showed us a video of Marina Abramovic’s amazing performance art piece, “The Artist is Present.”  Abramovic performed the piece at MOMA, and it consisted of nothing more than her sitting, in a red dress, at a table.  When audience members sat down opposite her, she made eye contact with them for as long as they wanted.  Some people would sit for only a few seconds.  Others for long periods of time.  Some would weep.  The piece emphasized the power of the human gaze, but also the paucity of looking in our lives.  And this was Brad’s point, that reverence can be cultivated simply by gifting each other, and the world around us, with our attention.

So what stops us?  Perhaps its the fact that we fall too easily under the sway of what Brad called kronos, an understanding of time as sequential and demanding.  Kronos is the root of the word “chronology,” and holds within it the idea that time is fleeting, and that we must use it to accomplish all that we can before we die.  Brad contrasted this to kairos, which he described as God’s time, time that is eternal and secure, and that we don’t need to feel anxious about.  To engage in the rituals of ordinary life, to fall silent, to look and truly see, we need to let go of chronic anxiety and cultivate kairos.

And we need to understand that the world is full of what Brad (and countless Catholic theologians) called “real presence.”  To illustrate this, he showed us Michael Craig-Martin’s piece, “An Oak Tree.”  The piece consisted of nothing more than a water glass on a shelf, and a dialog between Craig-Martin and an unknown interlocutor, in which Craig-Martin makes the case for the water being an oak tree, in the same way that bread is seen to be the real presence within the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.  “An Oak Tree” is an examination of belief.  We need this belief to give meaning to the mechanics of ritual, but, Craig-Martin asserts, it is also only through belief that we can give meaning to art, and life.  Experiencing reverence in the ordinary, in ordinary silences and ordinary seeing, seems to require the mediation of belief.  We believe that we will see something that contains more meaning than the ordinary should allow.

Which brings us back to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and her assertion that all the things we long for are already present here, if we could simply look and see them.  They’re present within the color blue, which is Nelson’s great obsession.  They’re also present within moments of realized justice, and in classes that we take about Ohio trees, and when we sit beside people who are dying, and when we witness the power of a sunset.  There is a great and constant transubstantiation going on, brought about by our silences, our looking, and our reverence.

“If the goal of medicine is to prevent death, then the entire enterprise is a complete and utter failure.”  Dr. Robert Taylor of the Ohio State Medical Center was speaking to us at the Newman Center on a Thursday in early December.  We had gathered to examine the question of why it’s so hard to help people die in America.  Dr. Taylor has spent his career examining the ethics and spirituality of palliative care, and has concluded that the goal of medicine isn’t to prevent death, but to relieve suffering.  He and his colleagues are re-thinking the ethical paradigm for providing medical care to the elderly in an aging world, and he graciously shared their discoveries with us.

People who are seeking a good death help their families prepare for their absence.  One of the frequent questions that patients ask Dr. Taylor is, “how much time do I have?”  In some cases, they are really asking him to try to extend their time on earth.  But in most cases they’re thinking through all of the things they’ll need to do to arrive at a good death.  One of the most important aspects of a good death is called “completion.”  It means a chance to thank those who have been important in our lives, to forgive those who have hurt us, to express love, and to ask for absolution.  People who are seeking a complete end to their lives are willing, in general, to cede medical decisions to their loved ones, because they care more about their loved ones’ well-being than their own autonomy.  Seeking completion is a way of helping those loved ones prepare for the dying person’s absence.

Ceding one’s autonomy can be very counter-cultural, especially among white middle-class people.  Dr. Taylor pointed out that being dependent on others is often the worst thing that white middle-class people can imagine.  Which made me realize that even a healthy person in mid-life, such as myself, can begin preparing for a good death by surrendering my self-reliance daily.  As I listened to Dr. Taylor, and thought about my own eventual death, I realized that I want it to be fearless.  I don’t want to cling to life because I think that I can somehow control it.  I also don’t want to fear death because of a sense that too many things have been left undone.  A good death, it seems to me, is a reflection of a good life.

Hospice is a unique cultural institution, one of the only American institutions that explicitly bless death in a culture that is youth-obsessed and death adverse.  Our faith-communities can sometimes do this, but with less consistency and intentionality.  What if we were to adopt the questions of hospice and ask them of our members?  Dr. Taylor gave us four questions to ask.  What is most important to you?  What gives your life meaning?  What is your greatest fear?  What is your greatest support?  These questions can be asked of anyone, at any time.  They are questions that help us understand our lives as we live them.  And because of that, they are questions that can help us understand, and accept, our deaths.