Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, February 17, 2002
I will admit that at first blush it seems a little overblown to claim, as Professor David Loy does, that market capitalism is 'the most successful religion of all time'. One could spend a lot of time arguing the pros and cons of that claim, struggling with the definition of 'religion' to see whether an economic system like capitalism could be made to fit. Seminary students might be hotly locked in debate on the issue at this very moment. I hope you will feel relieved rather than disappointed at the news that I'm not planning to go there this morning! I'm not sure that it really matters whether or not we agree that market capitalism has become a world-class religion.
What I do think is important to consider are the influences that shape our lives. I do think we owe it to ourselves and each other to be keenly aware of the forces that teach us our values and therefore shape our choices as we move through our lives. And I think it is especially important that when we view our world through the lens of our religion, we notice the ways in which even our chosen religious lens is colored by the world in which we live. And that world is, of course, permeated with the power, the values, the language, the images, the desires, the pace and the products of consumer capitalism. It may or may not qualify as a religion, but it is undeniably the ocean in which we are all swimming these days.
There are lots and lots of ramifications to that fact, and it would take lots and lots of sermons to consider all of them. The question I am most interested in thinking about today, however, is this: How does the consumer society affect the way in which we view spirituality and religion? There are at least two possible answers to that question that might immediately spring to mind for most of us. The first answer is that the consumer society seduces us away from spirituality and religion. It does this most obviously by its tendency to stoke the flames of desire, and then focus our desires on things that require money.
We are bombarded with the messages that urge us toward cars and jewelry, newer and bigger houses, cruises and idyllic vacation packages, clothing and furs, perfumes and high tech toys. There is always something more to want, always something more to envy and covet. Who has room for God in that mix, or for holiness by any name at all? Surely consumer capitalism is the antithesis of religion, and surely it therefore affects the religious quest most obviously by truncating it or derailing it altogether.
But there is another answer to the question of how consumerism affects spirituality which is nearly the opposite one. The consumer life does have its limits, after all. And it's possible to view those limits as a gift that can push us toward a more spiritual perspective. Every thinking person has to recognize at some point the futility of the drive to have and grasp and accumulate. At the very least, we know perfectly well that we can't take it with us when we die. And most of us recognize sometime in our early adult years that no matter how rich and materially laden we become, we can remain miserably unhappy.
The hollowness of the consumer lifestyle isn't all that hard to discern. Many religious people testify that it was when they found themselves rattling around in that hollowness that they finally turned toward a true spirituality. David Patt writes in his essay, "There is no more fundamental question, addressed consciously and unconsciously by every being every minute of every day, than 'how do I find happiness?'" It can be argued that after years or decades of getting and spending, most of us will realize that happiness doesn't lie there. We will flee from the distractions and desires of the culture, and thereby be led or driven to seek out a more spiritual life.
So it may be that our consumer society distracts us from the spiritual life. It may be that at least in the long run it will drive us toward the spiritual life. But what about the ways in which our consumer society co-opts the spiritual life? What if we are so irrevocably shaped by this grasping culture of ours that we can't even see the ways in which we make religion into just one more commodity, one more thing to be consumed?
If you read any magazines at all, you have seen the ads. They've been showing up for years now, subtly and often blatantly using the language and images of the spirit to sell us more stuff. There is an ad for Hanes underwear that shows a young woman in her bra and briefs, sitting in the lotus position and obviously deep in meditation. The headline blazed across her says, 'Be seamless. Be you.'
There is an ad that shows a woman in a half dozen different yoga positions over the headline, 'Suggested daily routine for achieving inner peace'. The final position is made to look as though it fits in the yoga regimen. It shows the woman posed in thin air in the position she'd assume in driving a car, and beneath her is a picture of the car being advertised. Deep down inside, the car is apparently our vehicle for achieving inner peace.
There is the ad that shows a business executive sitting in meditation pose, hovering above his immaculate desk while incense burns before him and the caption reads, 'Finding a moment to find himself'. It's a Saks Fifth Avenue ad for the elegant suit he's wearing. And my personal favorite is an ad for a Ford Ranger that shows a young man meditating amid a mountain of consumer goods and informing us, "To be one with everything, you've gotta have one of everything."
The ads are so blatant that they invite us to dismiss their choice of language and image as good clean fun, just making a little joke while the car or the suit or the underwear are promoted. But there's a not-so-funny message inevitably attached. The message is that religion and faith and the spiritual quest are on a par with all of these things: on the same shelf where we might reach for that underwear or car, that perfume or that new suit. It's all the same game: go out and choose the one you want.
This mentality was cleverly spoofed in an e-mail a colleague sent on to me, fashioned after the promotions we get in the mail that are disguised as surveys. This one is titled, "Post Deity Purchase Survey", and begins, "God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage. In order to better serve your needs, [God] asks that you take a few moments to answer the following questions".
The questions that follow include, 'How did you find out about your deity?' (with options like 'parental indoctrination, newspaper, bible, television, divine inspiration, burning shrubbery, tabloid'); 'which model deity did you acquire?' (with options like 'Jesus, Yahweh, Jehovah, Krishna, and Trinity Pak'); and, 'did your God come to you undamaged, with all parts in good working order and with no obvious breakage or missing attributes?' Toward the end, in good marketing fashion, this spoof says, "From time to time God…makes available the names and addresses of Her/His followers … to selected reputedly divine personages who provide quality services and perform intercessions in [God's] behalf. Are you interested in [these] offerings?"
It's almost pathetically easy to spoof, particularly because the realm we would have to call 'spiritual marketing' really does exist. In the Buddhist magazine called Tricycle, to which I subscribe, there are just as many ads as there would be in any New Yorker issue, and they are crafted just as elegantly. But these ads sell the accoutrements of the spiritual life: meditation cushions and statues of the Buddha, books and seminars and retreat centers.
We know that the clever marketing firms out there have developed profiles for all of us, to capture our patterns of spending with ever greater subtlety so they can convince us to keep on spending. And there must be a profile that they call 'liberal spiritual seeker' or 'new age consumer', or maybe they even call it 'Unitarian Universalist type', although I doubt it. I know that profile has to be somewhere in their lists because somehow or other they decided that I fit it. So I get inundated with catalogues and magazine promotions and sales pitches for seminars, books, tapes and even clothing that have something to do with spirituality.
Now, as a more or less rational human being, I know that this isn't an entirely bad thing. Some of these seminars and retreat centers and books and so on actually turn out to be of interest to me, and I wouldn't have found out about them unless the famous 'invisible hand' of capitalism sent them my way. And while I view the other 95% of my particular inundation as junk mail, it really isn't this marketing strategy that has my interest. It is the way in which the marketing mentality shapes and influences my spiritual life, and the spiritual lives of us all. I believe it shapes and influences us by teaching us that our religions and our spiritual paths are, like everything else, objects of consumption, designed to satisfy our desires.
Well, what's wrong with that, if the desire is a positive one? What's wrong with turning to religion to gain a more satisfying life for ourselves? If our desire is for a deeper sense of meaning, or for inner peace and tranquility or for bliss and enlightenment -- what's wrong with satisfying those desires with religion? Isn't that what religion is for, after all?
And that question leads us to the heart of the matter: what is religion for? Until the advent of the consumer mentality, there is no faith tradition I know of that would have answered the question by saying, 'The purpose of this religion is to satisfy your desires.'
At the heart of both Judaism and Islam is the notion of obedience to God's law. At the heart of Christianity is the mandate to love God and love our fellow human beings. At the heart of Buddhism is the cultivation of compassion through the willingness to see deeply into the suffering and illusion of our world. In none of the world's religions is the mandate, 'Do this and it will make you feel good'. The ideas of sacrifice and relinquishment are far more central than promises of personal fulfillment.
In today's world we find such best sellers as 'Chicken Soup for the Soul', and between its covers there is very little that speaks of sacrifice or relinquishment. In most of what is now available as religion in its popularized form on the bookshelves, there is little that speaks of the demands of the spiritual path. It's a lot easier to find books that look like one version or another of 'religion lite': all of the goodies and none of the demands.
There is nothing that might echo the ferociousness of an Indian mystic when he wrote, "Go ahead, light your candles and burn your incense and ring your bells and call out to God, but watch out, because God will come and He will put you on His anvil and fire up his forge and beat you and beat you until He turns brass into pure gold." [Sant Keshavadas] The great mystics and writers of all the world's religions would nod their heads in understanding and agreement with that vision.
I don't mean to slant things here back toward the donning of sackcloth and ashes, and I don't really think there's anything very wrong with a hunger for inner peace. But I do think it's crucial for us to notice what motivates us in our spiritual questing. If our primary motive is personal fulfillment, I think that in the end we are doomed to disappointment. Personal fulfillment might very well be a consequence of leading the spiritual life. But if it is our prime motivator we will stumble on the path, because our eyes will simply be too much on the self: my happiness, my enlightenment, my wisdom or inner peace.
About a year ago I had a small revelation that arose from my own meditation practice. I had been sitting meditation very regularly for over two years by then and had made it a very integral part of my life. And then I hit a rough patch in my life and found myself in a conflicted situation I couldn't resolve. So, good meditator that I had become, I brought that struggle to my meditation with me, sure that by holding it in my attention, by quietly sitting with my dilemma and watching my breath, some measure of peace would begin to come back into my heart, and some sort of wisdom would break through my confusion and show me the way forward.
Instead, I found that I went to my cushion with the knots of tension in my stomach; sat with those knots of tension and dutifully breathed into them; and twenty or thirty minutes later got back up from my cushion with the same damn knots of tension tied just as tightly as when I first sat down. This went on for maybe a week or so and then, in a pure childish fit of pique, I quit meditating. It wasn't a conscious decision, but somewhere in the shadowed corners of my mind the sulking child sucked her thumb and whined, 'It isn't working!'
Lucky for me, I had already been scheduled to go on a weekend retreat during that period of time, and after sitting for a while in my churlish frame of mind I spoke with one of the meditation teachers about my disappointment. She is a woman in her eighties with a face I find beautiful, deeply crisscrossed with lines born mostly from where laughter has creased her skin. She listened as I told her my story and then nodded and smiled beatifically and said, "Ah, so you sat down with expectations!" And I found myself ruefully laughing as well, able to see the silliness of coming to my spiritual practice as though I were coming to a wizard who, with a flash of lightning from his wizard's staff, would banish my problems and 'fix' whatever it was.
This is not what the spiritual life is for. Its purpose is far larger than that, much less self-focused than that. Depending on our theology, what the spiritual life is for is to teach us how to align ourselves with God's purpose. It is to help us learn to love one another. It is to awaken us to the suffering of the world and show us the ways of living that might lessen that suffering. It is to aid us in awakening. It is not there to satisfy our desires, but to shift us, lift us out of our desires and into a place where we see a far wider horizon around us.
The spiritual life is one that is shaped not by our griping insistence that it give us something, but by the ways in which it teaches us to give forth, to give out, to give back. It is the opposite of the consumer mentality.
In her book, Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris reflects on the purposes of the religious life. She says, "If one engages in a discipline…strictly for oneself, for the purposes of self-improvement, then that is all it is. It may even disconnect us from others, taking up so much time and energy as to weaken our commitments to family and friends. [Truly religious practice], however, is always for others. That is all it can be…"
And her Christian understanding is echoed by Jack Kornfield, speaking from the Buddhist tradition: "The lesson of spiritual practice is not about gaining knowledge, but about how we love. Are we able to love what is given to us, to love in the midst of all things, to love ourselves and others? Are we able to see the illumination offered by the sun every morning?…The gate is open; what we seek is just in front of us." AMEN.