I’ve spent a whole career making measurements. That’s what scientists do. And in a general sense, all people spend a lifetime taking the measure of things, particularly in this country. As a small girl, I remember feeling positively wealthy when I had saved up thirty-five cents. My mother took me to Bruce Variety, the local variety store (we didn’t have places like Target and Wal-Mart in the Bronze Age), and I went on a spending spree. I could by a balsa wood glider for 10 cents and a compass for another ten cents. I was about five years old, so could not do higher math, but I was very interested to know mow many cents I would have left over so that we could go somewhere else after my first ever buying binge, and still be able to buy candy. I felt powerful because I knew that those little round pieces of metal gave me the power to go home with treasure. And I guess we are exposed so young to the concept of wanting stuff in our culture that the longing for it begins really early. And it continues throughout our lives in a number of ways because we live in a capitalist economy. My parents had enough money to provide balanced nutrition for me and for my sisters, but not endless quantities. We never had dessert, and on an occasion where we were able to have soft drinks, the precious elixir of coca cola was carefully rationed into a juice-sized glass. But it wasn’t until a good ten years later that I really understood that we were wealthy by any measure—we were a family of five and we were all eating three meals a day.
In June of 1968, I had just finished my sophomore year of high school. I was fifteen years old and had acquired a boyfriend for the first time, having met a couple of months earlier. At the science fair. Having successfully navigated our first date in which his mother drove us to see a new movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we were emboldened to try a second date. This time we would be on our own, safely at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The boy’s dad would take us there and then deliver me safely home, which was half true, and it’s what I told my mom. Actually he drove us to the bus station, and we headed downtown to the national mall, a place that my parents did not want me to be that month. A lot of terrible things happened in 1968, including the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., resulting in widespread rioting in the cities, including Washington, D.C. Lots of the city had burned down in April following the assassination, and though the national mall itself was not one of those areas, Dr. King’s successor as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, successfully obtained a permit to create an encampment on the Mall that came to be known as Resurrection City, followed by a Poor People’s March to the Capitol to demand legislation to address poverty and racial inequality. It had been in the works before Dr. King was murdered, and his successor, Ralph Abernathy, was determined to see it through.
Some people portrayed Resurrection City as a violence-ridden and scary shanty-town, but when the funeral train carrying the body of Robert Kennedy, himself the victim of an assassination, passed by Resurrection City, the protestors stood amongst the gathered mourners at the Lincoln Memorial, singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic together. What I saw on TV was a huge crowd of people, joined together in grief and respect: poor and wealthy, black and white. I also saw the film images of the sodden tents, and all of the mud that had resulted from day after day of heavy rains that turned Resurrection City into a literal swamp. Something about the images of the unity in grief and the divisiveness of poverty drew me, and I knew I had to sneak down there and learn more.
Fresh from my experience seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had the image of the scene in the movie where the apes figure out how to use a bone as a tool—an image that sticks with me to this day, and realized when I got to Resurrection City, that I had experienced my epiphany like the first tool-using ape. I was wealthy, living a life of privilege, while there was a multitude of people living in the same country with me, who lived a completely different reality in crushing poverty—people who were hungry, and desperate to get help from their neighbors and maybe their government.
The movie, which remains a classic examination of both past and future milestones in human evolution, prompted my recognition that I had experienced an evolutionary milestone by realizing that I possessed far more than merely enough to survive, and that I have neighbors in this country who don’t have enough because others of us are holding on to abundance without recognizing that the act of consuming more than what is enough, can prevent someone else from actually having enough.
In the tradition of the prophet Elisha, Jesus knew that God’s abundance is enough for humankind. As a species we have enough. As a church, we have enough. And as a country, we have enough. Why don’t we share more of it?
When we start to think of ourselves only as individuals who must hoard resources “in case we need them later,” we hold on to things we probably WON’T need, and instead of focusing on the need of the community, we focus on the management and multiplication of personally held resources. That behavior affects our ability to share them, and some people end up with vastly more than other people. Of course we should be rewarded when we work hard and when we are compassionate with others, but not so much that we get in the way of someone else’s need.
The story of Jesus and the disciples and the feeding of the 5000 is an important one because John reminds us that God has made enough of every cosmic speck and grain. There is enough food, enough water and for goodness sake—enough money. There is enough love and enough respect for everyone to have some. It’s when we hold on to it that we create inequality. Jesus and the disciples were tired and hungry. But John tells us Jesus had compassion for the crowd. And the boy with the five barley loaves and the two fish had generosity and trust in Jesus, both of which added incalculable value to the loaves and fishes.
We can choose to be that boy. We have enough. If we will just trust that and act on it, we can change the world.