From The Pulpit

I am ready to give some quaint advice to the parishioners: (I was meditating on this picture above and admired the irony of juxtaposing the store named "Foodland" and its empty parking lot of crumbling asphalt. When you get past its tawdry commonplace nature, its takes on a tragic note of a once great civilization brought low to dusky death.) Everything - every propensity, every action, every type of behavior - which has led us to the present state of affairs must be abandoned.

We cannot have an Earth that sustains life, if the living beings choose not to sustain Earth. Simply put in terms of the Consumerism Paradigm of our lives, the Wal-Mart system wherein goods of poor quality are produced in sweatshops to sell in the USA in order to undercut the inflationary pressures of a profligate way of life must be abandoned, now!
Every step of the way must be moral: from the extraction of resources to the manufacture to the shipment of goods to the point of sale and to the end use of goods, everything must follow a morality wherein all beings are not merely logical variables within an economic theory. The individual consumer must be an individual conscious and moral being and they must be distinct enough that they are themselves responsible morally for what they do. Thus, they must be aware of the moral dimensions which exist in the economy: the destruction of our jobs, the sweatshops abroad, the tainted goods... Everything.

This is not a ridiculous notion. People are vastly informed about things, some of little value, some of great value. The thing we should never forget is the present War: all the intelligence was there.......IF we had but chosen to spend 1/2 hour per day reading real news from real news sources and from impartial sources, we would not have allowed this atrocity. Those who deem themselves our masters do not wish us to pay attention to what they do, therefore they say that we should not bother because all the intelligence was wrong, anyway. They say we should look the other way and go shopping at the mall. Moral things are difficult and pipe dreams and impractical schemes only to those who love their immorality. This is the Economics of fully developed Individuals.

When moral individuals are in the market, the market cannot be explained solely in terms of market dynamics; there is an extra dimension which defies analysis. The so-called Individuals of classical economic thought are rather similar to George W. Bush. Here is a man who has the most prestigious and powerful job on Earth. Many of his fellow countrymen are in great economic stress. They are beset every day with bad news and rising prices. They don't really know what to expect.
What sign of sympathy comes from the President? None. He talks about matters that interest himself and I suppose some group of Republicans somewhere, but when he speaks, he evinces no interest in our well being, merely a desire to justify himself. He shows no deep desire that we thrive, just a desire that he may escape from office before the house of cards falls down. He is a perfect example of a thwarted human being, scarce half made up. Economic man of classical economic theory is scarcely one-quarter made up.

The men and women of the future - if there is to be a future- must retrieve the other half of the lives of conscious beings made in the image of God: the moral dimension. Which Morality, you ask? There are so many. Which is the one which is right? God made conscious beings in His image. Therefore, the Morality which is God's is that which liberates mankind...for God is free and He is not constrained.

The Morality of God is not a well-manicured lawn with strictly regulated gardens of flowers; it is a glorious carpet of millions of different prairie flowers growing from horizon to horizon, as far as the eye can see, each with perfect freedom within its neighborhood, each growing unfettered yet according to the laws of emergent growing things ...... and where the cramped eye of classical economy and the pinched view of the rigidly doctrinal see chaos, I see the strength of diversity.

The Diverse Universe grows in perfect freedom, perfectly observing the laws and customs of its time and place and nature. It is not a false freedom, as is that proclaimed by master to slave, or by autocrat to serf, but a perfect liberation which is intuited within all our quiet meditations.

Freedom proclaimed by words and pictures is only a shadow of freedom. It is a crude attempt to portray the unportrayable.

Freedom can only be lived.

The Morality of which I speak is just the next step of mankind, the one which we have resisted so far, the one proclaimed by all the great religions and to which we have turned a blind eye. It is nothing new.

Only our liberating obedience will be new.