ABUNDANCE

Benedictine Brother David Steindel-Rast, who has studied both Oriental and Western spirituality (in Values and Visions, Vol. 25, No. 2) says this about abundance. "[It]is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over. The smaller we make the vessel of our need...the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight."

One of the unspoken reasons, I believe, why so many are so opposed to allowing Hispanics and other poor immigrants into our country is not that we will have to care for them out of our tax dollars -- an honest reason at best, a very selfish reason at worst -- but that, in many ways, they are a visible reminder of something that we have lost and that gets lost whenever the subject of immigration is brought up. That something is our growing inability to enjoy life in all its simplicity -- and abundance.

We have become a society where the simple life is ridiculed, even if secretly envied. We live in a country where a car, no, two cars; cable on multiple television sets, the latest appliances, a computer and smart phone for everyone in the home are believed to be rights. It would be unthinkable not to have such items in our homes. Yet most of the world thinks every one of these to be luxuries. The only necessities are food and water and some kind of roof -- straw, paper, burlap or tin -- over one's head.

We can't relate and thus we cannot understand. We cannot understand because we don't know when our cup is full and when it runneth over. And as Brother David notes, it is only when our cup runneth over that we find delight. Most of us do not think our cup is full let alone runneth over.

Thus, it becomes difficult for us to enjoy God's good gifts (which is redundant: all God's gifts are good). It does us no good to wish for the simpler life, to wish that we did not seem to need such a large cup to satisfy ourselves. Wishing and hoping don't get very far. They remain, and always will, in the realm of unreality.

What is real is actually using a smaller cup, which means actually being satisfied with less. Perhaps that is what Jesus was alluding to when he lamented on how difficult it is for rich people to enter into the Kingdom -- which means, find happiness, happiness now as well as happiness later. When we never have enough, we are never satisfied and we are never happy.

We may object that it is easy for Brother David to make his observation because he already lives that simple but abundant life. Well, is that not the whole point? We will not know unless we try. That is not to say that we should all run off and join a monastery or convent, although spending a week at one might not be such a bad idea.      

What it is to say is that amid all our riches -- and you and I are very, very rich compared to the rest of the world -- we seem to find great difficulty in finding real pleasure. There seems to be something missing. What is missing is the realization that we already have more than we will ever need. Our cup is already abundant, running over.