Dear Friends,
I loved hearing from Rabbi Michael Lerner on Sunday. Rabbi Lerner is a person of great wisdom and insight. His words have had a profound impact on people from the streets of Berkeley to the White House, and it was a deep privilege to have him in our pulpit.
One of Rabbi Lerner’s ideas that I find particularly attractive is his suggestion that our society needs to develop and articulate what he calls a “new bottom line”. The idea for a new bottom line is this: under our culture’s current value structure the bottom line refers to financial success and/or influence and power, such that an enterprise is deemed valuable and successful when it makes money or has a broad impact. In contrast, a new bottom line would see an organization or enterprise as successful when it furthers the wellbeing of humanity and fosters the health of creation. This concept is similar to what is articulated eloquently in the late Lou Mudge’s book We Can Make the World Economy A Sustainable Global Home, which a number of us are in the process of studying.
It’s a beautiful idea, but for me there is a rub: I have an easy time dreaming of a world where the business ventures of the “one percent” are guided by compassion and environmental sensibility. It’s nice when the new bottom line applies to others and is someone else’s responsibility, but I suspect it applies to us as individuals as well. This means that if I am going to take the idea of a new bottom line seriously, then I have to start judging myself not by how much money I earn or by how much time I spend in the office, or by how much influence I have, but by the extent to which my life is making the world a better place for all God’s children and, indeed, for every living thing.
That’s a little bit harder, but I decided to give it a try this week when I had a meeting in Pleasanton on Monday afternoon. It would have been an easy enough drive–to Pleasanton before the commute hours, and then home with a reverse commute. Had I driven I would have had an extra hour or so in the office, where I would have been productive in one way or another. But living according to a new bottom line compelled me to get to my meeting using a combination of bike and BART, which was a little bit complicated. I had to pay close attention to a time-table. I had to make two transfers. I had to find a place for my bike on the train, and I had to trust that the church office would survive without me.
My journey was not entirely unproductive in the traditional sense–I wrote this Contact piece on the BART, for example, and I provided pastoral care to a Salvadorian immigrant who had been physically assaulted by her boss–but mostly, living by a new bottom line meant I had to readjust my expectations of what should be accomplished in a day of working, and that wasn’t easy. In fact, I found myself feeling kind of sorry for big corporations. If it’s hard for me to adjust my life to embrace a new bottom line, how much harder must it be for a corporation like Monsanto, or Halliburton, or DuPont? Yet they must change. The survival of the planet and the wellbeing of humanity depend upon it. And I must change as well.
The takeaway for me is this: living according to a new bottom line, valuing that which heals the earth and nurtures the human family is not just something for the big cats. Each of us must change our value systems. Each of us must reorganize our priorities. In the end humanity isn’t decided between the one percent and the lower 99. All of us are in this together and each of us must do our part to embrace the new bottom line.
Peace!
Ben