Retirement

My wife and I have been pondering recently the feasibility of the American cultural value of retirement.  Specifically the idea that one is supposed to work hard and pay their dues so that when they reach 65 they can retire and not work for the rest of their lives.  We have been meeting with financial planners in the last month who have been trying to sell us this dream and give us their best advice on how to get there.  We have come to think, however, that there may be some flaws in their assumptions.  First of all the amount of money that would be required to cease working after 65 would be unrealistically large if one were planning to live off of the interest alone.  In order to keep up our standard of living with 1 car in a 2 bedroom (really 1) apartment with all the trappings of daily life we would need around $500,000-$750,000, assuming that we would earn a 6% return each year.(My parents suggest I would need 1-2 million)  And that would not be the kind of retirement that many Americans dream of which includes living in florida, eating out, traveling when they feel like it or buying big toys.  Many people I would assume have discovered that this is not realistic and have saved up equity in their home enough to sell it off and, with the interest on that plus supplements from social security, eek out a living.  Another method of retiring is by doing what my father is doing and working at the same job for 30 years and getting a pension for the rest of his life.  Neither of these last options sounds appealing for us since Social Security may not exist by the time we retire and neither of us is planning on working at the same job for 30 years.

Yet despite the lack of feasibility for us to save enough, this dream is based on recent cultural assumptions that have been lacking for the majority of human history and for the majority of current cultures around the world.  A major factor behind this manner of retirement is due to the cultural value of not burdening our children with caring for their elders and conversely valuing not having to care for your elders.  I can see the appeal of this sentiment since I would neither enjoy changing my parent's diapers or having my children change mine.  Yet, I wonder if something is culturally lost if we follow this idea.  Does this create more distance in our families? Does it teach us to not take responsibility for others?  The rest of the world seems to take caring for your elderly as a matter of course.  

It is also interesting that it is a recent idea that people would stop working before they were no longer able to.  I grant that the increase in the life span has complicated things where people live a lot longer after they are no longer able to work, which gets expensive.  Yet the model that most Americans seem to be shooting for is based off of rich CEOs who can afford to not work after 65.  This model would not be applicable to most Americans nor I would argue sustainable for our society.  

So here is our plan.  Firstly, if we have children, we need to teach them that it is our value as a family to care for our elderly and model this with our own parents. (They won't care for us if we ship our parents to the nursing home :) )  Secondly, We plan on working until we can no longer work.  Thirdly, we see the need for rest from work as important in order to maintain sanity and quality of life so we propose the idea of a "Sabbatical" every 7 years.  After saving enough money over seven years of hard work we would have a year long break to reflect, rejuvenate, and plan the next part of our lives. (And get excited about working again.)  If we start this plan when we are 30 we will have 7 sabbaticals before we are eighty.  Over this 50 yr span we would need to save roughly $280,000 (assuming $40,000 saved for each sabbatical yr,~$6,000 saved each yr), about the equivalent of a nice suburban home.  

One potential difficulty I forsee would be getting hired again after our sabbatical year.  We both have fairly marketable qualifications and are in careers where I think it would be possible, yet the older we would get the more difficult it may be to be hired by companies.  It would also be difficult to save $6000 per year especially if we had children and limited our income to one provider.  Also I have yet to do the math on what would get us more bang for our buck in terms of if we were to invest $6,000 in the stock market every year.   We will keep thinking about this one.  :)

Paved with Good Intentions

Over the Christmas break, I read a book recommended to me by a professor in response to a deep sense of unease that I felt in some of my classes last semester. The author of "Dead Aid" Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian economist educated at Harvard and Oxford, and her thesis is far from politically correct: Development assistance funded by the West is doing more harm than good to the African continent. Against the voices that call for more and more aid to the developing world, she shows how the African nations' current dependence on foreign aid for recurring expenses breaks the ties of accountability between governments and their people, shifts the source of incentives from the prosperity of citizens to the whim of international development agencies, and fosters a culture of corruption. At face value, it makes sense that if a government depends on someone other than its own people for much of its revenue, it will not care as much about ensuring that the people live in a climate that fosters the growth of businesses and makes hard work profitable. It also makes sense that in the presence of a large pie of foreign money attracts those who would like to have a slice just to themselves - thus the Swiss bank accounts of African dictators and their aides.

A similar argument was recently put forward by Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist who also wonders how it is possible that since the 1960s the West pumped over $600 billion into Africa, but the GDP and life expectancy in most of the countries who received the aid have actually fallen. While the relationship between the two is hard to establish, especially given the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it is troubling to think that what we consider as goodwill and charity of Western nations may actually be contributing to the plight of countries where life expectancy is under 40, and most people live on less than a dollar a day. It is especially troubling to me given my current field of study, international education development, which trains Western specialists to help solve the problems of the developing world. The ensuing dilemma is not a comfortable one. Do you rush to the aid of people dying of hunger and preventable diseases and by your presence reinforce the deep causes behind these symptoms, so that the scenario is repeated in the next generation? Or do you, as Moyo sugessts, exercise "tough love" and turn off the stream of money that corrupts politicians, risking that your action might cost the sick and hungry of this generation their lives? Whose lives have more value - the sick and hungry of today, or those who will repeat their lot tomorrow if something does not change? And finally, why are the terms of this debate determined on American campuses and not by those whom they most intimately concern?

The older I get, the more questions. I persevere because I hope for a third way that is based neither on guilty charity nor on tough indifference. I don't know quite what it looks like, except that I know that it is harder, and in light of the Way of Jesus, I can't help but believe that it exists.

The Kingdom is Among You

Sadly, the neighbors across the alley have moved away.  (See "Bad Neighbors" post from May)  But before they did, something quite incredible happened.  Marta was working in the garden one day when the boys from across the alley came out to help her.  As they were working the boys began talking about the other children who lived on the block and asking Marta why they never play with them.  Marta reminded them of the time that the paintings, which had been hung in the alley by our landlords, had been slashed with a knife suspiciously after a large fight with the landlords over trespassing.  She explained how the Landlords were very hurt and angry over this event and told their granddaughter that she could not play with them which in turn caused the parents of her friends to not allow their children to play with the boys either.   The boys were distraught, claiming that it was their cousin who had slashed the paintings, and asked Marta what they could do to change the situation.   Marta suggested that they could write apology letters to the landlords.  The boys instantly became excited and jumped on the opportunity, running up to our apartment to trace their hands and color pieces of paper that would transmit their repentance and hopefully forgiveness.  When they were done, Marta had the boys deliver the letters to our landlords and to their surprise they were able to talk to the landlord face to face and explain themselves.  After a short lecture and clarifying of the rules the two parties shook hands and parted, at least in part, reconciled.  

I have been amazed recently at how the kingdom of God shows up in the most unexpected places.  Jesus himself taught that it will not come with "careful observation" but that it is among us.  We often try to create the Kingdom of God through movements or programs but it is when we are simply loving people and being the people of God that some of the greatest stories come from.  Subsequently, I have never been more proud of my wife.  I see in her a true citizen of the kingdom.  

Makarios

μακάριος (makarios): blessed, fortunate, happy

It is one of the ironies of my existence that just when I come to live in the Land of Streets Paved With Gold, as we imagined it in my childhood, America enters into its greatest recession since the 1930s. For the last couple of months, hardly a day has gone by without some bad news: foreclosures, bankruptcies, bailouts, record-high unemployment, plummeting GDP - judging by the tones of some experts on the radio, an economic Armageddon. We have not been affected as severely as others, being that we're both young and have no stake in the stock market; but it's sobering to watch how deeply this crisis bites into the hopes and financial futures of many people we know. 

As analysts continue to predict doom and gloom, we continue as a house church in our meditation on the Sermon on the Mount - a radical reversal of the idea of who is really well off in the first place. Recently, Billy led us in a discussion of the fourth Beatitude - "blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." As with all the Beatitudes, this one in particular makes me wonder at times whether Jesus forgot to point out some mysterious connection. Blessed are those who see the endless destruction, corruption and exploitation? Who notice the abused kids, discriminated minorities, battered women, hypocritical preachers; the ravaged earth, cycles of poverty and trampled human dignity - who see these things clearly enough to cry out for justice? 

 

"Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise" - I thought to myself recently at Disneyworld, where all I could see at one point were the tons of disposable plastic disappearing at the magical touch of minimum-wage "cast members" after being thrown away by crowds who had just stepped off the "Living with the Earth" ride featuring eco-friendly fish farms and sustainable crops. Do you see yet why I haven't blogged in a while? When all you see in "the happiest place on earth" is plastic, you begin to wonder... 

I will admit that I do not come at the Beatitudes as a clean slate - they have always made me extremely uncomfortable. I think it started when I was a little girl and sometimes heard the Bible interpreted  in ways which implied that God is so entirely different from us that His  definitions of good or evil might actually be the opposite of ours - so in God's view, I might actually be "blessed" by being utterly miserable. When you are five years old and hear of a good God who orders the Canaanite men, women and children slain without mercy, textual criticism does not exactly emerge as a possible solution - either the good God or the definition of goodness has to go. Parting with the latter seemed like the choice of a lesser of two evils, and although I gave up this dichotomy a long time ago, it still surfaces as a haunting suspicion that may just lie beneath the surface of all conscious sin - "God, are you really good?" 

Imagine my amazement, then, when no one in house church ever brought any of this up. I sat there waiting for somebody else to voice my suspicion, but it never came - what came instead 

was a collective insight so simple and brilliant that my suspicion suddenly appeared like the whining of a disgruntled teenager. Of course those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are filled - their appetites are directed towards a healthy and nutritious kind of food, as opposed to empty fast-food calories. The gods of Greed, Consumerism and Security, rooted in the ancient lie of self-serving gain, are gods all right - but gods with no power to fill or save. This is one of my favorite aspects of doing theology as a community - thanks to the company of others on the journey, I'm able to discover my own slant and hidden prejudice, and be faced once again with the unimaginable reality of a God who really desires to give me hope and genuine abundance, even in the midst of crisis. 

Counterscript (I)

Last Saturday, the Storks' Nest once again became a bustling seat of activity as our home filled up with some of our favorite people in the world, gathered once again to remember the story we have all chosen to live by, and to nurture one another as we all seek to follow the alternative scenario of the kingdom of God.

Those gathered in our living room come from various religious traditions - some have been raised in Evangelical megachurches, some graduated from a Pentecostal Bible college, others grew up Catholic, were part of a house church, watched preachers on TV or attended liberal churches with a strong emphasis on social justice. We've gravitated towards each other not just in reaction to our respective traditions - although we do vary in our level of criticism towards where we came from and openly bring those to the table, open to the realization that we've each been equipped with a set of key questions, commitments and preconceptions.

What pulls us together is a common sense that the dominant scripts of our culture, including the religious ones, fail to deliver the safety and happiness they promise. At the same time, we've all stolen glimpses of a very different story, one which makes my heart sing. It seems implausible, impractical, counterintuitive - and yet it is here that the blind see, the poor inherit a kingdom, those in mourning find their tears carefully counted; it is here that being takes precedence over having or doing, happiness is not an impossible goal but a pleasant side effect, and we find the heavens friendly and near.

The trouble is that those glimpses are fleeting, and we live in proximity to many powerful idols: Consumerism, Progress, Technology, Militarism, Romantic Love, Therapism, Liberal Guilt, Prosperity Gospel - to list just a few of the ones we mentioned the other night. They are compelling and popular stories that we repeatedly give in to, only to come full circle with Qoheleth - "all is vanity and striving after wind." That's when we remember the strange distant music of the Gospel. We gather again in someone's living room to hear the Counterscript, perhaps in the Beatitudes. We hear the truth about the shape we're in, and that truth telling makes us free.