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Embarrassed by Riches
September 22, 2002
"If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."Just in case you still had any romantic notions about Jesus of Nazareth, the quotation on your orders of service should serve as a wake-up call. People love to love Jesus, and many claim to be followers, but few take the vow of extreme poverty which Jesus demands in this difficult passage. Did he really mean it?--Matthew 19: 21
Evidence points to the possibility that Jesus may have been influenced by the ancient philosophical sect known as Cynics, who abjured possessions and traveled about the countryside barefoot carrying nothing but a small knapsack, begging for their keep.
No one ever said that Jesus' teachings were easy to follow! But his teachings around wealth and poverty are especially challenging. He also said that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven. . . .
I like this Jesus even though I have no inclination to follow him. I think that most of us would find him to be a pretty tough--even rigid and inflexible--taskmaster. But though we might not be willing to go all the way with him, so to speak, his words challenge us to consider our condition with respect to "things." Perhaps there are more important riches in this world than the material ones.
One of the uncomfortable lessons from my month-long sabbatical stay in Romania is how much we have in comparison to most people in the world. Our partner church minister Zsolt Jakab and his wife Borika are, by our standards, extremely poor. They get by on the equivalent of $60.00 US dollars a month, plus the small amount that Zsolt makes from his little farming operation. The church owns their house and land. They own a car--a used Dacia, Romania's ubiquitous automobile--which they purchased for around $1200.00, but they are limited by high fuel prices in how far they can drive it. Dacias are famously durable and easy to maintain, so all but the most extreme repairs are done by the owner.
At the time I visited, Zsolt owned five cows: three full grown milk cows and two calves, a male and a female. This is considered to be a large family farming operation. He is especially proud of his Holstein cow; purchased at a bargain price of around $800.00; it gives about twice as much milk per day as his Romanian cows. His log barn, built probably some time in the 19th century, is primitive, dark, and dirty. There are, for example, no stanchions to keep the cows in place during milking, which is done by hand,--in the case of the Holstein, three times a day, seven days a week. All of the manure from cows and pigs is removed by hand, one shovel-full at a time.
With the exception of a walk-behind, cutter-bar mower--purchased used, of course, and literally held together by baling wire--Zsolt owns no power tools except the ones Max Russell may have given him during his visit this summer. All of his hand tools--an ancient shovel, a pitchfork, a scythe, a hammer, an ax--have hand-made wooden handles. Almost all of the labor in Transylvania, with the exception of some field work completed with a rented communal tractor, is done manually or with horses. They make it look easy, but I can tell you from first-hand experience it is not. It is not unusual to see a lone gypsy--man or woman--hand-mowing an entire five acre field alone--making, I might add, absolutely perfect windrows with a primitive scythe. Haybalers are unknown, so wonderful round piles are built to dry the hay. Later, these very large piles are lifted on two stout poles and carried into the barn. They are not light.
Zsolt and Borika have running water--sort of. All of the water for the farm animals--cows, pigs, rabbits, chickens, and in the winter sheep--is drawn at the well and carried to the barn. The house has running cold water. A few times a week, the corncob-fired hot water heater is started up and there is hot water for a quick bath and for Borika's tiny washing machine. Hot water for dishes is heated on the stove, of which there are two: an old fashioned gas-fired tile stove typical of Eastern Europe and Russia, and an apartment-sized gas range.
In the winter, only the bedroom and the kitchen are typically heated. There are two unheated rooms to traverse between them, and if there is no fire in the hot water heater, the bathroom is also cold. The houses are all made of masonry and are very damp. Transylvania's winters, by the way, are not unlike our own.
There is an indoor toilet, but the family mostly uses the outhouse behind the kitchen. The concrete tank for sewage routinely overflows where it is buried outside the back door, every time Borika does her laundry, in fact, so one quickly learns that it is more sanitary to use the outhouse.
Kitchen utensils are minimal. Need to open a bottle of beer (as we did, often)? The back edge of the large kitchen knife will do for a bottle opener--Zsolt makes it look easy. There are two small refrigerators, one for every day and the other for large cuts of meat and the like. There is also a cold cellar under the kitchen, where all the vegetables and fruits and palinka--the homemade plum brandy which is the alcoholic drink of choice--are stored. Though more processed food is available in Romania all the time, most food is raised and put up by the family. Zsolt and Borika never eat out, even if there were a restaurant handy, which there isn't.
Zsolt's office is usually unheated in the winter. So if he wants to read his e-mail, which he can afford to do only after 10:00 at night when it is free, he must bundle up and sit freezing as he waits for the incredibly slow service to connect, if it connects.
There is a small box of inexpensive toys in the living room, but the most popular pastime for Zsolt and Borika's children, Bence and Abel, is the swing which Zsolt built for them in the plum tree outside the kitchen door. Soccer is popular in Transylvania, but there are hardly any fields, and no organized athletics. There is a small TV in the bedroom. I didn't watch it while I was there, but bizarrely I could have watched CNN in English if I had wanted to. Talk about culture shock.
Short trips in the car are not uncommon, but longer trips that we all take for granted are rare. Borika only gets to see her family, about a hundred miles away near the city of Kolosvar/Cluj, a few times a year. It is difficult for Zsolt to find reliable help to take care of his animals, and, besides, he has no money to pay his helpers. Much of the Romanian economy is a barter economy, based on the exchange of goods and favors. Palinka is one of the staples of this economy. Unfortunately, a drunken helper is no helper at all.
I have to admit I returned to the United States completely embarrassed by the amount of stuff I own. I looked at the tools in my basement--most of which I have no use for anymore--and wished that there was some reliable way to send them to Romania, which there isn't, short of carrying them there myself, and I don't think the airlines would look too kindly on some of them these days. Including the kids' stuff, we own three TVs and four stereos (no one I met even owns a stereo). We have four guitars between us. In Transylvania, I wanted to play the guitar for my friends, who love music, but we couldn't find a single one in the village.
I looked at our furniture, the pictures on our walls, the kitchen appliances and utensils, the clothes! Thanks in part to the fact that my dad and I wore the same size shoes, I currently own 12 pairs of boots and shoes. Zsolt has one worn pair of shoes--the same ones he bought before he came here in 1999--and his work boots. I own four suits, Zsolt has one. I own ten or fifteen dress shirts, he has one.
Books, CDs, dishes, odds and ends, over the counter drugs such as aspirin, you name it. We have so much, and they have so little. Of course, they would like to have what we have, but I know that it is not the panacea it appears to be. Possessions do not equal happiness. In fact, I came back from Romania feeling that I should really simplify my life. I'm still working on it. Call it my personal vow of poverty. Not selling all I have, perhaps, but cutting back. Getting off the consumer treadmill as much as I can. Reassessing my life in light of what I have learned. Getting rid of the non-essential so that I can better focus on the essential.
I have learned that I am rich beyond the wildest dreams of most of my Transylvanian friends. But I also learned that in the things that really count, they are at least as wealthy as I am. If generosity can be counted as a valuable possession, most Transylvanians are richer than we are. They know how to celebrate with little or nothing. The school children I met there were sweet and loving, and despite their poverty seemed happier and more carefree than most children over here, and certainly better behaved. I was welcomed into all their lives and treated kindly wherever I went. What they have, they are more than happy to give away.
If this was all I discovered during my stay in Transylvania, it would have been enough. To be made aware of our riches--both the material and the spiritual--what an important education is there!
Today is my 51st birthday, and I have every reason in the world to count my blessings. Not only because of my standard of living here in the United States, which is the envy of the world, for better or worse. (In a recent e-mail, my friend Denes Jakab, Zsolt's brother, referred to our country in his uncertain English as "perfect," which as we know it hardly is, but as he struggles to come up with the $300.00 to stay in school another year, it certainly must appear so to him.) But I am grateful for those blessings of family and friends and health and freedom of choice that it is so easy to take for granted. I am grateful to live in a country where, so far at least, I can choose to worship in my own way.
I am more aware than ever how vulnerable our freedoms are--and not just from outside threats, either. I cannot tell you how happy I was to set foot back, first in England, then in the United States, after nearly a month in Eastern Europe. But I also came back with an awareness of how easily those freedoms could be eroded away and taken from us. Fear and freedom are not good bedfellows, and if we find ourselves giving up our freedoms out of fear, we could be in for a terrible surprise someday soon.
Today I just want to be grateful, as Thoreau once said, "for what I am and have." I realize now more than ever how much I have to give away: time, talent, and treasure. One of the things Sabrina and I have talked about doing within the next few years is hosting a young person from Transylvania for a year of school here in the United States, because English speaking skills are a huge advantage in Romania. Regardless of what it might cost for us to bring someone here and keep her or him for a year, we know that we would stand to gain the most in the things that really count.
When people ask what is the most important thing about our partner church program, I say "relationships." Of course, whatever material and monetary assistance we can give is desperately appreciated. But it is the relationships we establish that are most important, and most profound. And in reality, I think we have much more to learn from our Transylvanian friends than we have to teach them. For they can show us how to get our priorities straight, to count our blessings for the life we are privileged to share here in the United States.
And most important, to show us that our most important possessions are not the ones with which we fill our houses to overflowing, but the ones that we carry with us in our hearts. The loved ones who care for us even when we don't deserve it, the friends who stand by us in good times and bad, the freedom we have here and the reminder that we need to use it wisely and generously to help those less fortunate than we are.
I came home from Romania not only aware that I had an embarrassment of riches, but also aware that I was thorougly embarrassed by them. In the coming months I hope to take this embarrassment seriously as I try to simplify my life and lighten my load. Starting today, as good a day as any, I want to be thankful for all my blessings and grateful for all those intangible riches "that eyes see not, nor hands can touch." It is good to be alive on this day, and to know that I am wealthy in the things that really count, and to know that I can use my material wealth in some modest way to help others who may not be as fortunate as I am.
I may not be ready to follow Jesus yet, but I think he was on to something, something which the saints of every religious tradition have known: our true wealth is to be measured not by what we own, but by what we are; by what we carry inside ourselves and what we are able do for others. I urge us all to consider this, to think well upon it, and to go forth today with a grateful heart for everything that is ours on this once only day of our lives. Amen.
The Rev. Harold E. Babcock
