“What can be trusted? What will sustain me?” These two seminal questions were posed by Rachel Naomi Remen on the NPR program “Speaking of Faith” on which she was one of several featured thinkers reflecting on the spiritual dimensions of the current economic crisis.
I was so moved by her, and others’, comments that it caused me to stop and reflect on these issues, and other related concerns.
In this tenuous economic climate, indeed what CAN be trusted? A constant refrain among those who seemingly know is that real estate is such a stable investment because it has historically always gone up. In 2006, I bought a condo in Boston as an investment, believing in that premise. Surprise!!! The problem with real estate is that people have been treating it like any other investment, and like any other investment, it can go up and down when the circumstances surrounding it that gave it stability in the first place are altered (i.e., when mortgages are handed out like free gifts at a Tupperware party, or bundled and sold like any other investment to speculators who have no intrinsic interest in what stands behind their purchase). We have been on such a roll over the past 30+ years, with real estate constantly appreciating in value, that we have become impervious to the possibility of its potential for fluctuation, and hence even more panicked when it acts or reacts to market forces like any common stock.
The larger question, however, is the stability of the neighborhoods, towns, cities and regions that have been adversely affected by this one particular meltdown. When foreclosures start to pop up with the regularity of dandelions, the fabric of a community is dealt a hard blow. Even against the backdrop of a mobile society, where we take impermanence for granted, this particular type of instability has had the devastating effect of calling into question what is permanent, or more specifically what needs to at least have the semblance of permanence. We need, as human beings, to know that we can count on the continuing presence of family, or friends, or neighbors. To see that a neighborhood can dissolve right before our eyes, where people just turn the keys over to the bank because they can’t pay the mortgage any longer and walk away, is unsettling. A question that must arise for people affected by this, both those who lose their houses and the neighbors who are left with empty neighborhoods and the empty skeletons of discontinued lives is “why should I invest myself in the next people to move in next door or down the street if they might also move away or be forced to leave?”
There is actually a somewhat perverse positive in this set of circumstances. If we can’t necessarily trust the continuity of neighborhood like we once could, doesn’t it make sense that something would need to arise to take its place? I would suggest that other institutions, like the church or the school, might serve as a surrogate to the stability of neighborhood. Similarly, an inward turning, a greater reliance on ones’ self and a seeking of fulfillment from a spiritual bank based on altered external realities may actually result from this crisis. If indeed the economic woes we are suffering are pointing a finger at a basic spiritual emptiness within our consumer-driven society, where we no longer can afford the seeming “necessities” of before, then what we are left with is a need to seek our fulfillment in those areas that are free to us, where we re-discover the simple pleasures of friends and family, of picnics in the park, or a daily walk with friends, or a free public lecture, or game night with family or friends. These kinds of activities represent the bonds that we have allowed to be slowly eaten away as we have allowed a consumer mentality, a quick return need to dominate our economic and personal realities.
So, this is the silver lining I see in all of this madness. As the story of comfort, as Rachel Remen calls it, slowly unravels even further, I believe that we will not allow it to simply reinsert itself into our lives; rather, I feel that we as a society will call into question our assumptions and our stories and re-assert the primacy of the links to friends and family and neighbors that have so sustained us over the centuries. This is a golden opportunity to shift the axis
