"...Can't Buy Me Love"

Several years ago I was part of a church mission group that traveled to a tiny Nicaraguan village that was completely "off the grid."  A single hand-pumped water well in the center of the community was the only water available; there was no electricity -- in fact, there was precious little of anything except for a church, the several crude houses, and a tiny medical clinic that was the focus of our group's efforts for the week; those structures, plus the people who occupied and animated them with their living.  There were no jobs, no "industry," and virtually no possessions beyond the few changes of clothing and the rudiments of necessity for cooking and repairing and gardening.

But -- and here is the mystery of it -- they were happy:  happy within themselves, and happy together with each other.  Even as I write those words I hear them to be inadequate.  These were not happy people; they were people of joy.  Suffice it to say that we fell in love with these people -- and were slightly in awe of them and their spirit.  By Wednesday night of that week, after the work of the day was finished, after the evening meal shared and put away, we were sitting together as a group in the deep darkness pierced only by the stars above us reflecting together on our experiences thus far.  What had we seen?  What had we noticed?  What had we learned?  What had we felt?  We talked about -- what else? -- the people, and we talked about their joy.  Summing up our affection and also our compassion for them, one of us verbalized what many of us were thinking:  "I just wish we could help these people."  And then, after several moments of contemplative silence, another of us confessed, "I'm not sure that they are the ones that need the help.  They are happy."

Somehow, we had discerned, in their emptiness they were full to running over.

I thought of that experience again while completing Ben Hewitt's engaging book, The Town That Food Saved:  How One Community found Vitality in Local Food about the small Vermont town of Hardwick that, in the midst of all the usual problems faced by rural communities haunted by a once-vibrant past and few present opportunities, is finding some fresh glimmers of vitality.  In his final chapter Hewitt writes:

"I believe that Hardwick is succeeding not in spite of its relative impoverishment, but because of it.  What is happening in Hardwick does not happen in the absence of trust and collaboration, it does not happen without a shared sense of destiny.  Call it vision, if you want...  And I believe that this trust and collaboration are in no small ways social and cultural responses to economic hardship.  Money does many things very well, and one of those things is to insulate us from each other.  It becomes a safety net, and when we carry a s safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to  slip through our fingers.  By and large, the people of Hardwick have not had this luxury" (p. 219).

Money...successfully insulating us from each other.  If our mutual indifference to and estrangement from each other as a culture and as a world is the mortal sin and grief I belief God sees it to be, then Hewitt's insight might turn out to be the core of what the Apostle Paul meant in his observation to Timothy that "the love of money is the root of all evil" (1 Timothy 6:10).

I hardly know what to do with this wisdom -- I, who likes my toys, my creature comforts, as much as the next guy.  And I don't mean this to glamorize or romanticize poverty.  It all leads me to surmise, however, that a culture now almost totally and absolutely focused on the economy and accumulation of wealth -- when every vote that is cast and every policy decision made are predicated on a kind of slavery to the bottom line -- has gotten seriously and almost certainly mortally off track.  We have bitten a very different apple, but the results, I suspect, will be the same.

The Beatles had it right all along -- for the whole of us:  "I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love."