I recently saw a promo piece on The History Channel for their show “Cities of the Underworld.” At first one sees an overview of a busy commercial street teeming with professionals and consumers. The captioning states – “A pagan ritual is taking place on these streets. Can’t see it? Look deeper.” The premise is that some secret society once met in the abandoned tunnels below the city that you can hear all about on the show, but the irony of the commercial struck me.
Of course there is a pagan ritual taking place – the daily oblation of ourselves to the idols of money and stuff. Now I know there is nothing necessarily pagan or evil with buying, selling, and trading, but the obsessive way we commit our lives to the pursuit of such things reveals a devotion akin to worship. We acquire stuff and build our wealth often without thought to our religious beliefs and guidelines. Instead of caring for the least of these among us, we look out for number one. Instead of loving our neighbor we love our possessions – often at the expense of our very neighbors. This religion of consumerism isn’t hidden underground; its rituals take place in broad daylight.
The problem is that with the economic crisis the intensity of these rituals doesn’t diminish, in fact they simply becomes more sinister. People are not giving up on the desire to have more stuff. They just want to find the stuff more cheaply. So instead of rethinking our addiction to consumerism and the global impact of our shopping habits, we become more focused on finding the things we want at a lower price (apparently Wal-mart is doing quite well these days). Chanting our mantras of “it’s all about me,” we face the economic crisis with a determination to live just as well as we always have.
This is truly a worship that glorifies the self. Feelings of financial strain generally do not have the effect of pushing us towards compassion for those hurting more than we do. We cut back on our giving and increase our propensity for supporting systems that oppress others for our own personal sake. We want a cheaper product, which pushes the stores to find cheaper suppliers, who then must find cheaper labor. And these laborers are the ones who worked to the bone in sweatshops or kept as slaves (the cheapest labor possible) pay the real price. The strain of the financial crisis trickles down to choke those at the very bottom.
Even amidst the pressures of the economic crisis we need to remember that true worship doesn’t involve rituals of self-seeking consumption that exploits or ignores those around us. Instead as we are told in Isaiah that the faithful are implored to “spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed.” So instead of using troubling financial times as an excuse to turn inwards perhaps it could motivate us to lend a caring hand to others who are hurting. Abandoning our self-centered pagan rituals in favor of loving our neighbor might perhaps be the best response we can give to a hurting world in crisis mode.