Category Archives: Economic inequality

Crossing the Great Divide: A Homily on Dives and Lazarus

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Skylight (1732) for the high altar of the cathedral in Toledo, Spain .

Only a tramp was Lazarus’ sad fate
He who lay down by the rich man’s gate
To beg for some crumbs from the rich man to eat
But he left him to die like a tramp on the street

— Grady and Hazel Cole, 1939

Jesus was a great storyteller. He knew how to use a good story not just to make a point, but to change lives. But today’s story isn’t quite like any other parable. It’s the only one where a character is given a name. The poor man is called Lazarus, a variant of Eleazar, which means “God helps.” The rich man is unidentified in Scripture, but tradition has given him the name Dives. That’s Latin for “rich guy,” so readers of the Latin Bible began to treat it as his proper name.

This is also the only gospel parable about the afterlife.[i] Most scholars suspect it to be a version of a popular Egyptian folk tale widely told the in the first century. The fact that it makes it into Luke’s gospel suggests that Jesus liked the story well enough to use it in his own preaching.

It’s easy to see why people loved the story in a time when economic inequality was as appalling as it is in America today, where the 3 richest billionaires have more money between them than the bottom 50%. In first-century Palestine, the rich had scooped up most of the land and money, leaving tenant farmers with pretty much nothing of their own, while those who hired out as laborers got only starvation wages. So the idea of a great reversal of fortune was an appealing and consoling image. 

The reversal theme certainly resonated with St. Luke, whose gospel, more than any other, expresses a “preferential option for the poor.” [ii]  We hear this in Mary’s Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” And we hear it in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

A twelfth-century Italian bishop, Bruno di Segni, said of this parable, “These words are most necessary both for the rich and for the poor, because they bring fear to the former and consolation to the latter.” [iii] In Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel Redburn, his protagonist invokes the parable when he cries, “Tell me, oh Bible, that story of Lazarus again, that I may find comfort in my heart for the poor and forlorn.” [iv]    

We all love reversal stories, where the bad get their comeuppance and the lowly are given a happy ending. I have to confess that I myself would take pleasure in a story where, say, the governor of Florida is tricked into boarding an airplane, only to find himself dropped in the middle of a burning desert, with nothing but the desperate hope that a passing migrant might appear with a canteen of water. “Oh Señor, have mercy on me! I beg you, give me a drop of your water to cool my tongue!”

So is Jesus telling a reversal story in the parable of Dives and Lazarus? Or is he doing something else? The Bible certainly can be critical of wealth’s dark side. We’ve heard plenty of that in today’s readings:

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, 
and for those who are complacent on the mount of Samaria…
Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory, 
and sprawl on their couches,
stuffing themselves with lamb and veal, 
singing idle songs and drinking wine by the bowlful,
who anoint themselves with the finest oils,
but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. (Amos 6: 1, 4-6)

And St. Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, warns that “those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” (I Timothy 6:9-10)

But while the parable presents a strong contrast between situations of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, between high social status and low social status, between easy pleasure and terrible suffering, the point is not about changing places, or even about trying to reduce the contrast to some extent—a little less for the rich, a little more for the poor. This parable isn’t about making the game fairer, but about changing the game entirely. 

Right now, in our time, our country, the game is so much about individual winning. The lucky ones win the lottery, invent the Internet, crush the competition, or throw more touchdowns than interceptions. The rest must fend for themselves. Dog eat dog. There have been notable attempts to counter the personal, social, and environmental damage of our careless individualism, but in the absence of a more widely supported vision of the common good, it continues to be an uphill battle. Can we order our lives and our society to be more in accord with divine intention? We’d better. As W. H. Auden put it on the eve of World War II, “We must love one another or die.” [v]

We all enjoy the hymn, “All things bright and beautiful,” celebrating the wonderful world God has made: “Each little flower that opens, each little bird that sings,” and so on. But one verse—thankfully scrubbed from our hymnal—celebrates an archaic social order as divinely ordained:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

In the kingdom of God, the economy of God, such sundering of neighbor from neighbor is definitely not bright and beautiful. We all belong to one another; we are all intended to share God’s gifts in just measure. To forget this is to choose death and hell. 

Kathleen Hill, an American writer, lived in Nigeria when the traditional cooperative social ethic was being eroded by the lingering effects of colonial rule. She tells of a driver who sped by a hit-and-run victim lying on the side of the road. He didn’t stop because he was afraid that if he put the wounded man into his car, he’d get bloodstains on his new seat covers. “He’d felt no need to apologize,” Hill said, “no need to feel ashamed. It was a culture of money that was growing in Nigeria, a new emphasis on personal wealth.… [N]ow, without the play of traditional values that had connected one person to another, there seemed no limits to self-interest, to the tendency to regard someone else exclusively in the light of one’s own personal imperatives.” [vi]

Where there are no limits to self-interest, no one is my neighbor. Dives feasts inside his mansion, while Lazarus starves on the street. And never the twain shall meet. I think that Jesus would say that Dives was in hell from the start. He didn’t have to die to get there. 

But is this state of separation and disconnection the way things must always remain, now and forever, Amen? Is there any chance for the twain to meet? I think the key to this parable is the gate. The rich man is on one side; Lazarus is on the other. In the story, the gate never opens. In fact, its role as a barrier eventually translates into an uncrossable chasm in eternity.

Narciso Tome’s dramatic skylight seems to visualize a glimpse of heaven from a dark abyss,
like Dives’ view of Abraham and Lazarus across the great chasm.

In the parable, Dives in hell is able to see, across that chasm, Lazarus at ease in the bosom of Abraham. But the gap between them is uncrossable. If only he had opened his gate and experienced Lazarus as a fellow child of God—not just a tramp on the street—there would be no uncrossable chasm between them now. He wouldn’t be stuck in the lonely hell of self-interest and self-isolation. It turns out that the closed gate keeping Lazarus out has also been keeping the rich man in. Even after death he remains in the prison he built for himself, behind the locked gate preventing the communion for which every person is made. 

New Testament scholar Bernard Brandon Scott says this about the gate: “In this parable the rich man fails by not making contact.… The gate is not just an entrance to the house but the passageway to the other.… In any given interpersonal or social relationship there is a gate that discloses the ultimate depths of human existence. Those who miss that gate may, like the rich man, find themselves crying in vain for a drop of cooling water.” [vii]  

“I came that you might have life,” Jesus said, “and that you may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). So is there abundant life in the rich man’s future? Can the chasm ever be bridged by repentance and mercy? Ebenezer Scrooge, after being shown what a mess he was making of his own future, put this question to the final spirit in A Christmas Carol,: 

“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.” [viii]

Can there be a different outcome to the story of Dives and Lazarus? A couple of poets have explored interesting options. James Kier Baxter (1926-1972) of New Zealand concentrates on Dives, who is far worse off than Lazarus even before he departs this life:

Two men lived on the same street
But they were poles apart
For Lazarus had crippled bones
But Dives a crippled heart

In an intriguing twist, Baxter leaves Lazarus on earth and puts Dives in the Divine Presence. ‘My poor blind crippled son, [God] said, / ‘Sit here beneath My Throne.” And instead of eternity in Hades, Dives is given a chance to change his life: 

‘Go back and learn from Lazarus
To walk on My highway
Until your crippled soul shall stand
And bear the light of day,
And you and Lazarus are one
In holy poverty.’ [ix]

Canadian William Wilfred Campbell (1860-1918) focused his poem on Lazarus, giving him a voice he never had in the original parable. While enjoying the bliss of the afterlife, Lazarus is suddenly troubled by a “piercing cry of one in agony, / That reaches me here in heaven.” It’s the rich man’s anguished plea from hell, drowning out the more amiable sounds of heaven.

So calleth it ever upward unto me
It creepeth in through heaven’s golden doors;
It echoes all along the sapphire floors;
Like smoke of sacrifice, it soars and soars;
It fills the vastness of eternity.…

No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings,
The seraph chanting in my rest-tuned ear;
I only know a cry, a prayer, a tear,
That rises from the depths up to me here;
A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.

O, Father Abram, thou must bid me go
Into the spaces of the deep abyss;
Where far from us and our God-given bliss,
Do dwell those souls that have done Christ amiss;
For through my rest I hear that upward woe.

Lazarus can’t ignore the sinner’s plea, nor does he want to. In a replication of both the Incarnation and the Harrowing of Hell, he begs “Father Abram” to let him descend to the uttermost depths on a mission of redemptive love. The journey is immense, and when the poem ends Lazarus is still on the downward way, with cries of pain ahead, shouts of glory behind. As he traverses the infinite gap between heaven and hell, we suspect this outward motion of self-diffusive love will go on and on, until that day when the tears are wiped from every eye and “God is all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28).  

Hellward he moved like radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue with rain of gold at even…
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout…

‘Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven, across the jasper walls,
But hellward still he ever floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout. [x]

It’s a striking image: Love perpetually reaching for the hopeless and the lost, opening every gate, overcoming every obstacle that separates us from God. However, in the original parable, the rich man’s repentance is not off to a promising start. In his cry from hell, Dives doesn’t deign to speak to Lazarus at all. Instead, he asks Abraham, a personage he considers of equal status, to treat Lazarus like a common servant. “Have him dip a finger into cool water and come to me, so he can drip it onto my tongue.” Even in his agony, the rich man’s arrogant self-interest is unabated. 

In Luke’s gospel, this parable always ends the same way, no matter how many times we read it. Dives will stay stuck in the prison of his own making for as long as the story is told. If we want a new ending, we must write it with our own lives and times, as we push through the gate into a deeper union, a more loving communion with our fellow creatures. This is not only radically personal work, it is also the collective endeavor of Church and society. In a time when the common good and neighborly love are in acute peril, love and mercy ceaselessly call us to choose the better way. 

This homily was written for the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

[i] Matthew 25: 31-46 (The sheep and the goats) is also about the afterlife, but many scholars say it does not fit the definition of a parable. 

[ii] The term was popularized by Liberation theologians and activists in Latin America in the 1960s as a key element of Catholic social teaching.

[iii] Cited in Stephen L. Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 255.

[iv] Herman Melville, Redburn (1849), ch. 37.

[v] W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939.”

[vi] Kathleen Hill, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons (Encino, CA: Delphinium Books, 2017), 57.

[vii] Bernard Brandon Scott, Hear Then the Parable: A Commentary on the Parables of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 159.

[viii] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (18­­43), Stave IV. 

[ix] James Kier Baxter, “Ballad of Dives and Lazarus,” in Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry, eds. Robert Atwan, George Dardess, & Peggy Rosenthal (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 260-261.

[x] William Wilfred Campbell, “Lazarus.” For complete text: https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10045686

Bushy the Squirrel: A Justice Parable

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My father, an Episcopal priest and producer of Christian media, made a series of filmstrips called Parables from Nature in the 1950s. Based on a children’s book by John Calvin Reid, they retold the parables of Jesus using characters from the natural world. One of these was “Bushy the Squirrel,” inspired by Luke 12:13-21 (the Lectionary gospel for Proper 13, 8th Sunday after Pentecost). The illustrations were painted by Hollywood animation artists, and some of them are included here.

Once upon a time there was a squirrel named Bushy. He was a fine little squirrel, but as he grew older everyone began to notice a change in him. All he cared about was gathering nuts. Every day you could hear his voice ringing through the forest: “Gotta get more nuts! Gotta get more nuts!”

As soon as he stored the nuts he had found, he’d run off to find some more. “This is not enough. Gotta get more! Gotta get more!” Bushy was so obsessed with getting more nuts, he drove all his friends away. And when anyone came to his door collecting for the needy, he just said, “Aw, don’t bother me now. I’m too busy getting nuts.”

After a while, he had so many nuts, he needed a bigger place to put them. And one day he saw an old hickory tree with a big hole in it. It was perfect. But some woodpeckers had made their home in that tree. That didn’t stop Bushy. He kicked the woodpeckers out, and filled the tree with nuts.

Bushy’s neighbors had a hard time finding any nuts left for them to eat. But Bushy didn’t care. He had what he needed. The other squirrels were not his problem.

When winter came, Bushy relaxed in his tree, the happy owner of all those nuts. He didn’t have a care in the world.

Then one night, when he was fast asleep, a wind began to blow, and the wind was so powerful, it broke his tree in half and sent Bushy tumbling into the lake.

“Help me! Help me!” Bushy cried. Mr. Bear heard the shouts, and called the other animals of the forest to the rescue. Suddenly Bushy found that he was not the only person in the world – luckily for him! He needed the others and they needed him.

Bushy’s heart was changed by his experience, and he became a new squirrel, sharing everything he had with anyone who needed it.

The story of Bushy is like a parable Jesus told: There was once a rich man who had a problem. He had too much stuff and didn’t know where to put it all. So he built bigger and bigger storage units. But that didn’t solve his problem, because his appetite for acquisition could never be satisfied. “Gotta get more nuts, gotta get more nuts!”

So is Jesus trying to be Marie Kondo here? Is he offering a useful method of self-help so we can reduce our clutter and make our lives more beautiful and satisfying? Is that why he tells this story––to foster self-improvement? Or is he doing something more radical, more demanding?

What if Jesus had said, “This story is not about you––it’s about us. It’s a story about the foolishness of trying to live as though ‘I’ am the only person in the world. It’s a story about the foolishness of being oblivious to community.” Well, he didn’t say those words, of course. He just told the story, trusting us to have ears that hear.

A certain rich man’s lands brought forth bountiful crops. And he deliberated within himself, saying, “What shall I do, since I do not have a place where I may gather my fruit?”

He deliberated within himself” is a telling image of isolation, suggesting a self utterly cut off from other voices, other perspectives. And notice how he seems surprised by the size of the harvest. As a rich man, he would already possess considerable storage space. But this harvest is bigger than he ever expected or imagined. And when the Bible talks about abundance that is excessive and surprising, that usually means one thing: God is involved, showering down blessings.

A first century listener, steeped in the stories of God’s miracles of generosity, would have picked up on this. And they would have noticed that the rich man’s first response is not one of gratitude or wonder. Does the rich man thank the Creator for the miraculous harvest? Does he laugh in wonder at such a gift? No. His first thought is, “I’ve got a problem. Where am I going to put it all?”

Then he gets an idea:

“I will do this: I will tear down my granaries and build larger ones, and I will gather there all my grain and all my goods and I will say to my self, ‘Self, you have many good things stored up for many a year. Eat, drink, and be merry!’”

In a world full of hungry people, here’s a man who has more than he knows what to do with, and it never occurs to him that he could feed all those hungry people.

As hunger experts point out, hunger is not a problem of supply; it’s a problem of distribution. But distribution is the last thing on this man’s mind. He isn’t just ignoring other people. He seems oblivious to their existence. He is the perfect expression of rampant individualism – untroubled by any sense of interdependent community.

The story makes fun of his isolationism, by having him talk only to himself.

“I will say to myself, ‘Self, you have many good things…”

A narrator would say something like: “Then the man said to himself, ‘Self, you have many good things…’” Instead, the rich man takes over his own narration: “I will say to myself, ‘Self …” and so on. Do you see the difference? This guy doesn’t need anyone, even a narrator. He takes over the telling of his own story. He’s in control, totally self-sufficient.

Whatever the future may bring, he can deal with it, no problem. Just kick back and “eat, drink, and be merry.”

Isn’t this the ideal to which consumerism aspires? Those of us with enough money can acquire everything we need to be self-sufficient. The fundamental unit of our culture is not the tribe or the village, but the single family home. We each have our own rooms, our own food supply, our own car, our own entertainment center, our own set of tools and appliances, our own insurance policies.

The only reason we need to leave the house is to earn the cash in order to maintain the autonomy of our domestic units. If we get rich enough, we don’t even have to do that.

The whole trajectory of the consumerist dream is to declare our independence from the traditional supportive networks of extended family and neighborhood community.

Vincent Miller, a Catholic ethicist, points out that the cash demands of the single family home encourage people to act selfishly:

“Social isolation and the burdens of maintaining a family in this system make it unlikely that other people’s needs will ever present themselves. If and when we do encounter them, we are likely to be so preoccupied with the tasks of maintaining our immediate families that we will have little time and resources to offer. The geography of the single-family home makes it very likely that we will care more about the feeding of our pets that about the millions of children who go to bed hungry around us.” [i]

When we live in isolation from one another, when we fail to nurture the vital aspects of interdependent community, we minimize the ways in which we can either offer help or receive it. Even if we have all the goodwill in the world, we remain trapped within the cash-intensive demands of the consumerist dream. “Gotta get more nuts!”

Ideally, a local church can function as a support system for its members. If someone gets sick or has a family emergency, others in the community step up to provide meals and other forms of assistance. But this kind of support system is exceptional in a society based largely upon isolated autonomous households.

If you don’t have the cash to keep a roof over your head, there is no village to take you in. Maybe you have some relatives somewhere, but they’re probably scattered around the country. And they’re probably running on a tight budget themselves, and don’t have any spare rooms. We’re a long way from the traditional support systems of former times and simpler cultures. Just ask the homeless to tell you their stories.

In American mythology, this is the country of the Lone Ranger, the self-made entrepreneur, the hard-boiled detective with no attachments, or the trucker rolling down that endless highway, free as a bird––and lonesome as hell.

When vast numbers of Vietnamese refugees settled in southern California in the 1970s, they found American culture to be fatal for something they had always taken for granted: the supportive network of extended family. They had to learn, as one writer puts it, that the land of the free means “the perfect freedom of strangers.” [ii]

So Bushy the Squirrel, and the rich man with the storage problem, might be seen as the products of a consumer culture. They don’t need neighbors. They don’t need community. They’ve got everything they need close at hand. There’s nothing for them to do but eat, drink and be merry.

But then what happens? Just when Bushy settles in for a long sleep, a storm breaks open his tree and casts him into the raging waters. In the Bible, whenever something breaks open your neat little world, you can be pretty sure that God is in that storm.

But in Jesus’ parable of the rich man, God intervenes even more explicitly, not with a storm but with words. God speaks to the rich man. In fact, this is the only one of Jesus’ stories where God appears as a character within the story.

And what does God say to the rich man? “Fool!” God says. “Fool!” Now that’s something to wake up your prayer life––to hear God calling you a fool.

Do you remember the most famous use of the word “fool” in the Bible? It’s in the first verse of Psalm 14: The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’  The fool is the one who denies God’s presence, who thinks he or she can grab the gift without acknowledging the Giver––or the Giver’s way, which is not the self-possession of me/myself/and I, but rather a ceaseless pouring out of self.

“Fool, on this night they will demand your life from you.
And all the stuff you have stored up, to whom will it belong?”

In an instant––“this very night”––the rich fool discovers that his autonomous life is not only unstable––it is unsustainable.

He had thought that life was a commodity that could be owned and held onto. But he discovers that God operates a very different kind of economy. God’s economy, which we call the Kingdom of God, is a gift economy, where everything is received and nothing can be held onto.

Everything is like the air we breathe. We take it in, we receive the life it gives us, and then we give it back again. Breathe in, breathe out; receive, give back.

A commodity-based economy is an attempt to hold your breath. You take possession of God’s gifts, you take them out of circulation, you lock them away where others can’t use them.

Whereas a gift always keeps moving from hand to hand, a commodity is grasped and hoarded. And to grasp and to hoard is to live outside of God’s economy, where the gifts are always in circulation, always being given away as fast as they are received. If you reject God’s gift economy, and try to live apart from the interdependent circulation of life’s gifts, you are in effect denying the Trinitarian reality––the eternal self-offering, the ceaseless circulation of gifts, that comprises the heart of God.

That is why the Bible insists that if you try to live as though you were the only person in the room, if you try to exempt yourself from interconnectedness and interdependence, from the need to both give and receive, then you are indeed a fool, trying to live against the way we are made to be as images of the divine reality.

The divine reality is a circulation of gifts. When you are oblivious to the presence of your neighbor, you are oblivious to God as well. When you deny communion, you deny God.

On this night they will demand your life from you.

Most translations use the passive voice: “your life will be demanded of you.” But the original Greek verb is in the active third person plural: “They will demand your life from you.” So who might “they” be? The plural language could be a remnant of archaic mythological imagery, a way of speaking about death as the operation of avenging spiritual powers. But this is not really that kind of story. It’s not steeped in old-fashioned apocalyptic imagery like the Book of Revelation. For all we know the rich man dies in his sleep, without any thunder from heaven.

But what if the “they” who demand his life refers to everyone else in the world, all those neighbors whose existence has been ignored by the rich fool? Other people didn’t exist for him. He took what belonged to his fellow beings and kept it for himself. Now they want it back. As the story puts it, they “demand” his life. Is this punishment, or just a realistic understanding of how God’s universe works?

The story does not have God say, “I will demand your life…” The man’s fate is not an apocalyptic intervention from heaven. It’s simply the way things are in an interdependent reality.

The rich man tried to live outside the way of things, outside the economy of God, and in the end it all caught up with him. In the gift economy in which we live and move and have our being, he discovered that you have to keep the gift moving. You have to give everything away, even your very life.

The parable ends with a question:

What will become of everything that you have stored up?
To whom will it belong?

The question is being posed to the rich man in the parable. But it is also being posed to us. To whom does our wealth belong? Not just our money and our stuff, but every good gift we have been given since God put us on this earth, including our souls and bodies, and every breath we take––to whom does all this belong?

In a country plagued with obscene economic inequality, where the rich and powerful will even take food from the mouths of children to gather more wealth for themselves, how shall we respond to this parable? How do we answer its disturbing question?

Maybe greed is normal now. Maybe selfishness is normal now. Maybe crushing the poor and killing the planet for profit are normal now. But Jesus came to tell us that such things are decidedly not normal––not in God’s world. And we would be fools to think otherwise.

In my father’s filmstrip, Bushy learns his lesson and repents of his selfish ways. Its happy ending was meant to encourage the children who watched it in Sunday School. But Jesus concludes the original parable more ambiguously. He leaves us hanging, without knowing the ultimate fate of the rich man.

I suspect that Jesus is inviting us to finish the story ourselves, to construct a happy ending out of our own actions, as we work together to create a world whose blessings are not hoarded, but freely shared; a world where no need goes unmet, and all God’s children can flourish and thrive.

God, bring that day closer!

 

 

 

[i] Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture(New York, Continuum, 2004), 50.

[ii] Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World(New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 88.

This homily for Proper 13, Year C, will be preached August 4, 2019, at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.

American Nomads

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You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it,
and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.

–– Bob Wells

I’ve found all space is hallowed ground,
If we will but look around
In our sacred search for the New Earth.
Queens of the Road!  

–– Sylvianne Delmars

 

At last weekend’s Search for Meaning literary festival at Seattle University, there was a multitude of interesting authors speaking on “topics surrounding the human quest for meaning and the characteristics of an ethical and well-lived life.” The challenge was to select only one out of nineteen offerings per hourly session. That was tough for for an indecisively curious omnivore like me. Among the choices were “Rain: A History for Stormy Times,” “Spotlighting Forgotten Injustices Through Historical Fiction,” “Competing Fundamentalisms: The Violent Face of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism,” “The Tao of Raven,” “Writing on the Canvas of Eternity,” and “The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse.”

I was a little surprised by where I ended up––in Jessica Bruder’s “Nomadland: Surviving in the Shadow of the American Economy.” Instead of sticking to a well-hewn path of accustomed interests, I felt pulled aside by the strange and unfamiliar, like Moses yanked off course by the unlikely voice from a burning bush. The analogy may seem grandiose, but the session, and the book it led me to read, turned out to be a revelation which continues to haunt me.[i]

Jessica Bruder is a journalist who spent three years immersed in the alternative world of “vandwellers”––the “houseless” (not “homeless”) ascetics,[ii] mostly of retirement age, who wander the marginal spaces of America, surviving on ingenuity, grit and arduous seasonal labor. In her beautifully written book, Nomadland, she documents the daunting challenges and indomitable spirits of downwardly mobile elders who find ways to survive the hardships and cruelties of an economic system whose shocking inequality puts America near last place among developed nations.

The foreclosure crisis and the 2008 crash only accelerated the ongoing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Three American billionaires––Bezos, Buffet and Gates–– are now worth more than the bottom half of the whole U.S. population. Wages remain stagnant or falling while the system continues to suck money upward, stranding the majority in a barren waste of meager scraps. Nearly half of middle class workers contemplate a food budget of $5 a day in retirement, while one in six American households now spends more than 50% of their income on shelter (the recommended maximum is 30%).

As Bruder writes, the choices are becoming excruciating for many: “Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?”[iii]

For the elders who have played by society’s rules all their lives, the prospect of perpetual misery in their golden years has prompted them to go off the grid and live in the margins. They dump their biggest expense––housing––and take to the roads in RVs, vans and campers, for “a life just a little freer, a little more autonomous, and less anxiety-ridden, a little closer to their heart’s desires.”[iv] This rapidly expanding nomadic movement has been dubbed “the Old Rush.”

As Sylvianne Delmars, age 60, puts it in her “Vandweller’s Anthem” (to the tune of “King of the Road”):

Old beat-up high-top van,
Like livin’ in a large tin can.
No rent, no rules, no man,
I ain’t tied to no plot of land.[v]

Bruder describes vandwellers as “conscientious objectors from a broken, corrupted social order. Whether or not they choose their lifestyle, they have embraced it.”[vi] It is not an easy life; for many of us, it is almost unimaginable. In my youth I sometimes slept in my car outside of Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, enjoying pleasant evenings of reading in its luxurious public interiors before retiring to my free lodging in the parking lot. It was hardly comparable to the rigors of nomadic life, but that tiny taste of slipping beneath the system’s radar returned when I read Bruder’s book.

Nomadland left me in awe of the enterprising can-do spirit of the vandwellers, who generously share their hard-earned survival knowledge both online and in tribal gatherings. “Boondocking” is one of the most essential topics: learning to be self-sufficient in the boondocks, without any hookups to electricity or water, using solar panels, gas generators and water tanks. “Stealth parking” is also a vital skill: how and where to park overnight or longer in towns and cities without getting the dreaded “knock” on your vehicle’s window.

Even such a radically frugal and improvisational lifestyle requires infusions of cash, which “workampers” earn through seasonal labor. They may flip your burger at a Cactus league game, take your ticket at NASCAR races, staff tourist traps like Wall Drug, run the rides at amusement parks, lift your Christmas tree onto your car roof, or guard the gate at a Texas oil field.

The three jobs which Bruder treats in detail are campground host, beet picker and “CamperForce,” Amazon’s motivational euphemism for shopping season warehouse temps. All three are physically hard and verge on exploitation. But since the work is temporary, the justice questions are not pursued. As long as the seasonal end remains in sight, there seems to be tacit agreement by both employers and workers to live with necessary evils.

“Get paid to go camping!” is a typical recruiting slogan for campground hosting, where you are paid for 30 hours a week even if the job really requires 45 long hours of cleaning, maintenance and managing. That leaves hosts little time––or energy––to enjoy the natural beauty. You work for a private concessionaire hired by government agencies who look the other way if you lodge a complaint, and you can be terminated at any time without cause. But the literature still insists that “retirement has never been this fun!”

Signing up for an autumn beet harvest in North Dakota, Bruder spent a short time working twelve-hour shifts, dodging beet bits and dirt clods flying off a conveyer belt while holding vinyl sacks to collect beets pouring down a vertical chute. “It felt like catching bowling balls in a pillowcase,” she says. Although she was 30 years younger than many of her co-workers, her whole body hurt at the end of every day.[vii]

Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1927)

Her experience at Amazon, though, provides the most harrowing reading in the book. It reminded me of the factory scene in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where workers are mere cogs in a rigidly determined mechanism. In an Amazon warehouse, you are constantly under the eye of your masters. Your scanner sets off a timer monitored by computers. Take too long walking to your next scan, and a supervisor will suddenly appear to deliver a reprimand. At the end of the day, you endure a 30-minute (unpaid) wait in a security line to be screened as a potential thief.

Amazon loves the elderly plug-and-play labor force. They are conscientious workers, and few complain about the lack of benefits. But it’s grueling work for aging bodies: walking 15 miles a day on concrete in a warehouse the size of 13 football fields, going up and down stairs, lifting 50 pound loads in 90 degree heat, injuring arms, back and shoulders, or getting “trigger-finger,” a repetitive strain from operating barcode scanners.

The motivational newsletters are cheerful about “getting paid to exercise,” power walking the vast spaces to lose weight and get those “buns of steel.” But the ubiquitous wall dispensers full of free painkillers tell a different story. The 68-year-old former university academic advisor who begins and ends every Amazon workday with 4 ibuprofen is not untypical.

Although CamperForce recruiters advertise the fun of camaraderie and friendship with fellow workers (“worth more than money!”), Bruder’s own conversations during an “undercover” stint in an Amazon warehouse sometimes felt “like talking to prison inmates. It was tempting to cut through the pleasantries and ask, ‘What are you in for?’” [viii]

Some workampers take pride in surviving the ordeal of a demanding seasonal job, like the marathoner or Camino pilgrim who embraces physical hardship as a spiritual trial. Disparagement of “whiners” and slackers is not uncommon. But Bruder also records instances of joy and pleasure even in the rough stretches. “The truth as I see it,” she writes, “is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges. This doesn’t mean they’re in denial. Rather, it testifies to the remarkable ability of humankind to adapt, to seek meaning and kinship when confronted with adversity.”[ix]

Nomads live for the day when the work ends and they can return to the road, where open space and distant horizons provide the allure of reinvention, or at least escape. Many of them are loners, thriving on solitude and detachment and treasuring their self-sufficiency. But like the Christian desert hermits of the ancient world, they also take genuine joy in the community of tribal gatherings, such as the annual Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.

For two weeks every winter, thousands of vandwellers gather in Quartzsite, Arizona, to trade nomadic wisdom, share stories of work and travel, renew friendships, and bask in the love of a community that loves and accepts them. As veteran nomad Bob Wells has suggested on his popular website, CheapRVLiving, “In many ways we vandwellers are just like the Mountain Men of old: We need to be alone and on the move, but we equally need to occasionally gather together and make connections with like-minded people who understand us.”[x] Or as another nomad describes the experience of community where no one feels a stranger, “This is what family looks like.”

Another blogger, LaVonne Ellis, conveys the sense of melancholy when the Rendezvous ends:  “One by one, they are leaving for other places. I will see some of them again, I’m sure, but this sadness is an inevitable consequence of nomadic living. People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang on to them forever.”[xi]

Nomadland’s chief protagonist, 64-year-old Linda May, dreams of settling into a permanent home of her own, beyond the reach of consumer society, “something she owned free and clear, something that could outlast her.”[xii] Others resign themselves to endless wandering until they become “bleached bones in the desert.” And some hold dear the final image of Thelma and Louise––as if they too will one day vanish into an unimaginable beyond. But few seem to look backward, or dream about the day when they can return to their former life.

Perhaps, Bruder suggests, the vandwellers “are analogous to what biologists call an ‘indicator species’––sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.” Some even hope that this nomadic phenomenon foreshadows the emergence of “a wandering tribe whose members could operate outside of––or even transcend––the fraying social order: a parallel world on wheels.”[xiii]

Nomadland left me with so many questions about our unjust and damaging system, and my own participation in it. Can I ever buy another book from Amazon without thinking of the exhausted person who has to walk miles to retrieve it? Will I start to see the nomadic elders beneath the cloak of social invisibility? How will my own comforts and privileged insularity be challenged by these stories of struggle and pain? And are there any alternative to our nation’s passive acquiescence to the insatiable predations of the one-percent?

Bruder’s remarkable book is unsettling, but it is by no means a downer. She has given us a life-affirming, inspiring and often funny read, filled with engaging and memorable characters––not just survivors, but pioneers, pointing the way toward a world more free, more just, and more loving. Whether any vandwellers finally reach that future of human flourishing, or provoke the rest of us to try the same, their single-minded pursuit of something radically better cracks open the cave of our collective complacencies to admit the light of New Possibility.

It wouldn’t be the first time a desert drop-out performed such a divine labor.

Photo by Jim Friedrich

 

 

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[i] Jessica Bruder’s book is Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017).

[ii] I employ this largely religious term because the nomads’ rejection of the dominant system, their practices of radical simplification, and their love of the desert seems akin to the monastic flight to the wilderness in the third and fourth centuries. I will say more about this in another post.

[iii] Nomadland, xii.

[iv] David A. Thornburg, Galloping Bungalows: The Rise and Demise of the American House Trailer (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1991), q. in Nomadland, 76.

[v] Sylvianne K. Delmars, “Queen of the Road,” q. in Nomadland, 17. Her song is also quoted in the epigraph. Her blog is Silvianne Wanders: The Adventures of a Cosmic Change Agent.

[vi] Nomadland, 204. Bruder is paraphrasing Bob Wells, drawing on his book, How to Live in a Car, Van, or RV: And Get Out of Debt, Travel, & Find True Freedom (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014).

[vii] Ibid., 187.

[viii] Ibid., 57.

[ix] Ibid., 164-5.

[x] RTR invitation posted in January, 2014, on Bob Wells’ website, cheaprvliving.com, q. in Nomadland, 136. I also quote Mr. Wells in the epigraph.

[xi] Posted on LaVonne Ellis’ blog, completeflake.com, q. in Nomadland, 157.

[xii] Nomadland, 235.

[xiii] Ibid., 247, 79.