Thanks to Justamere Tree Farm Blog for this picture

We live in a culture that values being tough and scorns those who are seen as naïve. But it is not naïve to look for the best in people. It really works, often better than defensive battling. One example comes from Yale University during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War. In May 1970, the Black Panther Party called for a large march in New Haven, home of Yale, while provocative leaders like Abbie Hoffman vowed to burn Yale down. The threat didn't seem idle. A month earlier there had been a march at Harvard that went bad when marchers found the Harvard gates locked, resulting in 214 hospitalizations and $100,000 worth of property damage. Yale President Kingman Brewster decided not to repeat Harvard's mistake. When the protesters came, he declared, Yale would not only keep its gates open; the university would coordinate their sleeping arrangements and serve them granola. Moreover, Brewster met ahead of time with student leaders to ensure a peaceful protest. The strategy worked. Although state troopers and Marines had been brought in by the state to quell the anticipated violence, the protests went relatively smoothly with the only vandalism caused by a fringe group of out-of-town provocateurs whom Brewster suspected of being "dirty tricks" operatives of the Nixon administration.

What strikes me about this story is the wisdom of keeping the Yale gates open and welcoming the protesters. We live in a culture that assumes grenades are stronger than granola, however, and Kingman Brewster was harshly criticized for these actions, accused of giving in to radicalism, even though his strategy for keeping the peace worked better than Harvard's. Even thirty-six years later, an article about this incident in the Yale alumni magazine provoked a diatribe against Brewster being soft on the radicals.

Kingman Brewster was a white man in control of a rich and powerful institution. His decision to yield came from a position of power. But what about when we don't have much power to begin with? Although we still have to accept our limited control, we may face a different challenge: the need to make sure we are not giving up too much. Indeed in promoting the spirituality of acceptance, I must quickly add that this real spiritual truth has sometimes been misused to keep people more passive than they need to be. In some ways, it is simple for a rich white man like Kingman Brewster to yield. The process is more fraught when someone like him is the one telling someone less powerful to yield.

"Aren't their poor people who live near here?" she asked. Well, yes, I responded, there were.

"So why don't we bring them our rice and beans?" she persisted. I had to explain that, while there are many poor people in Philadelphia, we don't actually know anyone who would appreciate us showing up with our unwanted rice and beans.

While I was still trying to explain this awkward fact, my daughter pointed to the Catholic Relief Services rice bowl and asked one more question: "Why do all the people on the box have brown skin?"

I tried to explain the history of colonialism to a five-year-old, but I'm not sure she got it, just as many middle class Americans don't understand that the African, Asian and Latin American faces on the brochures of relief organizations reflect a colonial legacy that made the West rich. We tend to assume that people are poor because of their own laziness or stupidity. Even the idea of learned helplessness can be used to blame the poor for their condition. That old Calvinist idea that the poor must somehow deserve their fate is more comforting than all those Biblical injunctions to care for those in need. When the people are far away, psychologically if not literally, and especially if they look different from us, it's easy to image that we are not connected to them.

This became clear to me when I returned from my two and a half years in Botswana. Friends and family often asked, "Were you alone in your village?" When I answered, "No, there were ten thousand people in my village," there was usually an awkward moment as the implication of my answer sunk in. Of course what they were really asking was, "Were you the only white person?" Or perhaps, "Were you the only American?" Their question reflected an unconscious assumption that those people were somehow too different from me to count. Such prejudice is one common barrier to compassion. I can't help thinking that if the 20,000 people who were dying of poverty each day were white, we would be paying more attention.

Sometimes the things that need to be changed don’t affect us directly, making us unlikely to do anything about them unless we feel connected to those who do need help. Evangelical minister Jim Wallis makes this point, talking about Christians in the United States who do not live with people who are poor. Author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn?t Get it, Wallis explains:

Some people try to argue that when Jesus said, "The poor you will have always with you" (Matthew 26:11), it somehow provided justification for doing little or nothing about poverty, as if Jesus had said there would always be poor people among us, so why do anything about it? However, this misreads both the immediate and the broader contexts of his words.

Wallis argues that there are thousands of Bible verses that compel us to care for the poor, and Jesus' comment reveals his assumption that his followers would always be close to the poor, something Wallis points out is no longer true of many middle-class and wealthy Christians.

      In Jesus' time, ending poverty was a dream, something only God could achieve. In the twenty-first century, however, human beings could actually do it. All the experts say so. Yet the New York Times reports that more than 20,000 people perish every day from extreme poverty. Every day. (Some aid organizations say the number is higher.) What's lacking is not the ability to end or reduce crushing poverty. What's missing is the political will. Although the New York Times argues that global poverty poses a national security threat to the United States, solving poverty is not a priority for the US government, or for the US electorate, for that matter.

I recall another story Sophie told me once before she was ill. One night she was walking to her car on a dark city path in a neighborhood with a high crime rate. Sophie, who was in her sixties at the time, grew nervous when she heard footsteps. Then she heard a voice inside her say, "Turn around and go talk to the person behind you." Sophie turned and walked back toward a tall, young black man. As soon as she spoke to him, the fear left her. "Excuse me," Sophie said in her high, soft voice. "I'm walking alone to my car, and I would feel so much safer if you would escort me." Surprised, the young man agreed, and they chatted to the parking lot. As Sophie climbed into her car, she thanked the young man, who shook his head and said, "Lady, I was planning to mug you, but you were so nice to me, I couldn't do it." She thanked him again and said goodnight.

I love this story because it shows the difference between real wisdom and conventional wisdom. Because most white women are taught to fear black men (either by their mothers or by the stereotype-filled culture), approaching a tall black man on a dark city path is not what most sixty-year-old white women would do. But obeying the voice turned out to be much wiser than running would have been. Not only did it keep Sophie safe, it also may have helped the young man. Maybe it kept him out of jail. Maybe it prompted him to change his life. We don't know. All we know for sure is that the young man was moved enough to admit to Sophie his original intentions. We also know that she didn't hurt him, as people sometimes do when they are afraid. If she had heard a voice telling her to turn around and shoot the person behind her, that would have been a sign it was not God talking, since that would have contradicted several of the fruits of the Spirit.

Although this story was originally in the chapter about listening to your inner voice, it also makes me think about how our expectations of people–for good or for bad–affect them. 

Near the end of our interview, Sophie told me with some urgency that there was one more story she had to share. She had been visiting her grandchildren when her two youngest granddaughters, ages five and six, pulled her aside in secret. The six-year-old sat her down and said, "We know that you're going to die soon, Grammy."

"You do?" Sophie asked, astonished because the girls had not been told about her cancer.

"We do," said the little girl. "And Grammy, it's OK. It's really OK because you're going to be an angel. It's going to be lonely, Grammy, but you will be there for us." Then the girls said, "The sad thing is, our mothers are not ready to hear this, so please don't tell them." Sophie said she wouldn't and asked the girls what they would do. "Don?t worry," they said, "When you die, we will take care of our mothers."

Although many people would have found such a conversation with their grandchildren painful or awkward, Sophie was deeply moved and joyful. She concluded our interview saying, "I've been given so much. See, I could have gone home and died the next week. I thought, "That's all I need. They have given me permission to die. What more could you want?"

How often do we underestimate our children's wisdom or their ability to see us more clearly than we see ourselves?

Our culture discourages us from the practices that help us to connect to our inner guidance. The gym music blares, the doctor’s office television is always on, our senses are constantly being stimulated. Our schedules are full of soccer games and PTA meetings, not to mention commuting to work that is often unsatisfactory. We come home and try to tune out the stress by watching “reality” shows about people with worse problems than our own. This, needless to say, does not lead to serenity or courage. All this contributes to a common sense of alienation, made worse by the fact that we tend to live further removed from nature than previous generations in communities where no one walks or even knows their neighbors. We live in a culture that anesthetizes us from our feelings, and if we’re not in touch with what makes us unhappy, we’re unlikely to do anything to change it. Erich Fromm made this point over fifty years ago in The Sane Society. Imagining the most efficient form of dictatorship, Fromm said it would be a system where people were too distracted to realize they were unhappy.

Another part of alienation is being overwhelmed and not knowing what to do. Even if we believe we should change our lives and others’ lives for the better, even if we haven’t been too beaten down by life to believe we can make a difference, even if we are not in denial that there are problems that need to be solved, and have not lost our compassion, we may feel uncertain what to do. This is the challenge I most often face. Some people call it compassion fatigue. We can’t respond to every plea for help, so we either stop responding altogether, or give $20 to every organization that asks and end up feeling that we haven’t done anything significant for anyone.

Obviously no one of us can take on all the things that should be changed in the world. I can’t even keep up with all the e-mails asking me to fax my representatives about global warming, mercury in our water, and Darfur. Add to this the fact that we receive so many other messages in our culture about things we should be doing: we should control the mold in our houses, our children’s Internet use, our weight, our credit card debt. Advertisers bombard us with images of perfection, achievable if only we buy their products. Even if we don’t buy into the images, they affect us, adding to that stressed out feeling so common today. Some say part of our alienation comes from living in the nuclear age, during the first era when humanity has the technical ability to blow ourselves to smithereens. My eleven-year-old daughter believes that global warming is going to kill all of us in fifty years. Although I assure her that is an exaggeration, her concerns are not unfounded. Still, her brother needs help with his book report, and that need seems more pressing at the moment.

I thought about taking a vacation from the blog (now over five years old), but my friend Lori Tharps gave me what seems like a fun alternative. She pointed out how people love to watch the deleted scenes after they’ve seen a movie and mentioned a writer who posted the deleted parts of her book on her blog. I have literally hundreds of pages that were cut out of various drafts of the book, and at least a few of them are pretty interesting; they just didn’t fit the flow or the page limit. So this summer I’m going to scan through those pages and offer little stories or quotes that didn’t make it into the final book, but which should be interesting anyway, whether you've read the whole book, or not. Some will be longer stories from the interviews, and some will be short bits of my own writing. If you’re not already subscribed to my RSS feed, please do so now. These outtakes will probably be shorter but more frequent than my usual posts.

Today I’m going to start with a few lines that were cut from the Introduction:

Writing over two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Cicero identified Six Mistakes of Man. Two of them were “The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected” and “Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.” The other four all boil down to not knowing the difference between what we should and shouldn’t change. 

This shows pretty clearly that seeking the wisdom to know the difference is nothing new.

But lately I’ve been learning a different set of lessons and trying to integrate them into my worldview. I am coming to appreciate the idea of valuing one’s self and one’s work by expecting to be paid fairly for it. Over the years, I’ve been part of certain circles where being paid poorly is almost a badge of honor, where it is assumed that a teacher must be morally superior to a CEO, where exploiting people is alright, as long as it's for a cause. I’m coming to realize that this approach isn’t right either.

Partly I may be reacting to the activist martyrdom complex Michael Learner described in Surplus Powerlessness (an interesting book about why certain people feel more powerless than they really are). For women, it may have to do with internalized sexism. In February I attended a workshop on pay negotiation during a conference for women at Duke. It was striking how many accomplished women had trouble asking for money for themselves, though one noted that she could negotiate a million dollar deal for a client, no problem. As I negotiate pay for speaking engagements, I’m facing this hurdle in myself, compounded with the Quaker assumption that if you are following a leading, you don’t need to be paid—though a person following a leading still presumably needs to pay bills, for which money comes in quite handy.

My writer friends struggle with this issue a lot. Many of them have made the unconventional choices, followed their callings, yet still struggle to make their callings sustainable. They know that money isn’t everything, and that money isn’t irrelevant either. A few have figured it out, finding ways to do meaningful work for compensation that shows a value for their work and allows them to keep doing it. One of them recently shared her story with a group of other writers, and it seemed really helpful—inspiring, even.

I have the sense that there is a balanced approach to this that I am still trying to figure out. There is a way to value our selves and trust God’s abundance without promoting materialism. There are ways to earn money that don’t exploit others or require being exploited, and there are ways of spending money that support things like sustainable agriculture, rather than unsustainable consumption. I think part of the difficulty in finding the balance comes from the fact that people are embarrassed to talk about money openly. It seems that hearing each others struggles with these issues might be helpful.

I finally decided to get the iPhone when Mac announced a new generation of even more clever phones, which means that all the old ones are now on sale. Better yet, I discovered, they are selling refurbished models of old iPhones, so you can get a phone that could replace at least ten other gadgets for as low as $40 at Best Buy (not including service, of course). The fact that it’s refurbished lessens my guilt about buying another electronic device, along with the conviction that this is going to help make my work more efficient. In addition to the fact that I can videotape my talks and post them to the Internet, my phone can also invite people to those talks and give me directions to them. There is also a free application that turns voice into text, something that would have saved me literally hundreds of hours had I had it while doing interviews for my first two books.

One of my iPhone obsessed friends swears that it saves her time and money. I’m thinking I might never again buy a watch, calculator or musical listening devise for the gym, so this fancy phone is feeling very “simple,” in a 21^st century kind of way. The fact that my phone is refurbished reminds me of the 18^th or 19^th century (?) Quaker rule that women could wear fashionable clothing only after it was no longer in fashion. It also raises the question of what exactly we mean when Quakers talk about simplicity. Frugality? Rejection of popular fashion? Environmental stewardship? Or anything that helps make more space in our lives for God? (If George Fox were alive today, I suspect he’d have a weekly podcast.). My husband and I once had an argument about whether it was simpler to paint the living room ourselves (with two kids and a dog helping) or to pay someone to do it. There are legitimate arguments on both sides, depending on how you define simplicity.

Of course, I’m sobered by the fact that Mac’s continuing innovation is motivated by the desire to sell more people more stuff, even when that means they will discard the old gadgets that were groundbreaking three weeks ago. I’ve yet to see an environmental analysis of ebooks, but I’m curious whether the paper and shipping saved will outweigh the effects of all the Kindles that will end up in the landfill once everyone switches to the iPad. I don’t think there is an obvious Quaker answer here. I suspect that most of us will flounder around in the wide middle ground that lies between rejecting all new technology and showing off the latest device. I also wonder how poor people will be affected by the growing technology gap between rich and poor. There already seems to be an assumption that everyone has a computer and a cell phone, even in circles where that is not always true.

Although I grew up in a frugal working class family that never had a VCR or an answering machine, I am now privileged enough to drive a Prius, my first new car ever, which is better for the earth than a Hummer, though admittedly not as good as the bus, which we tried for six weeks and decided that it did not make our lives more simple (Just getting to my son’s piano lesson, which took ten minutes by car involved two buses, an average of 45 minutes, and bus fare for three, since my daughter usually came, too.).

I was totally enamored with the Prius until this week when I stuck a portable GPS on the monitor and scrambled all the circuits. In short, we were too frugal to buy the Prius with the GPS installed, but I later decided that a GPS would be handy after getting lost at night on the way to a book group in rural New Jersey, so I bought a cheap one at Staples. In trying to mount one electronic device on top of another, I slightly dented the $7,400 screen that controls temperature and audio on the car, so that the car fan is now permanently set at high, and you can only get WXPN if you manually search for the station. As the guy at the Mac store commented when I told him the story, you could buy a few old used cars for $7,400—or 14 iPads. Or as some members of my meeting would point out, you could feed several thousand children or give them antibiotics.  Rest assured, we will deal with keeping the fan on high and find better things to do with our money.

Despite the ultimately high cost of my Staples GPS, it was good to have this past weekend when my in-laws were visiting from Wisconsin. The device enabled them to borrow our car and navigate the city with less anxiety than they would have felt if they were trying to read directions while driving. That may be one way to judge all this technology in the end—does it increase or decrease human anxiety? I’m not sure the jury’s in yet, but when it is, I’ll be able to read the verdict on my iPhone.

In some ways, Osteen’s core message is not that different than mine: God is good, and life goes better when we trust that. Many of his stories of faith are inspiring examples of what Quakers call “way opening,” moments when we get aligned with our purpose, and God opens doors for us. Osteen encourages gratitude, trust, and optimism and says that holding onto resentment and fear can block blessings in our lives. On a very basic level, I agree with him.

My disagreement starts with his understanding of how blessings work. He uses the word “favor” a lot, arguing that God will give us “an edge,” presumably because God likes us (Osteen’s readers?) better than all the other people “He” created. Obviously there is a particularly narrow version of Christianity at work here, even though it is never articulated. It reminds me of Peterson Toscano’s recent Facebook wall post: “Jesus Loves You! But he seems to love you more if you are healthy, white, male, American or European, middle/upper class, in a monogamous heterosexual marriage and able to reproduce.”

The assumption that material prosperity is a sign of God’s favor is the second problem that I have with Osteen’s approach. Although he acknowledges that blessings can come in many forms, so many of his stories involve people getting rich that I started to wonder if he reads the same Gospel I do. While I don’t believe that money itself is evil (as some Quakers seem to), Osteen makes buying a mansion sound like a spiritual practice. I’m sure this is part of what is so appealing about his message, as well as books like The Secret, which says a lot of the same things without the Christian veneer.

My third objection is that the first two approaches can lead to a total lack of compassion for people who are poor or suffering. Taken to its logical conclusion, his philosophy seems to imply that if you are sick it’s because you didn’t have the faith to be healed; if you are poor, it’s because you were blocking God’s blessings or didn’t have God’s favor. I think of the many people who have been starving and dying of poverty related diseases in Zimbabwe, and I wonder if their problem is a lack of faith or a history of colonialism followed by dictatorship. Somehow I think Jesus would judge the people who got rich exploiting Zimbabwe’s wealth, not the people who are suffering because of it.

Despite my discomfort with so much of Osteen’s philosophy, I find myself wanting to finish the book. I feel like I am still recovering from the opposite religious message, that God wants us to suffer all the time, which can be equally harmful. There is something in Osteen’s message of hope that speaks to me, even though I have to constantly edit and translate it into my own spiritual language. In the end, I wonder if this book is spiritual junk food, something people crave, even though it is really bad for them, or if it’s more like fruit, sweet and good for us, but needing to be eaten in balance with other types of food. Either way, many people are clearly hungry for it.