Month: July 2015

Folks attending a small church in Chicago one Sunday were stunned when their pastor invited all members to pick up a $500 check as they left the sanctuary. That is a different kind of Stewardship Sunday experience!

On the NPR program, “Here and Now,” the pastor who issued the invitation explained that the church had made a $1000 investment several years ago at the invitation of a wealthy parish member, using $1000 he donated to add to the several thousand dollars the man was investing for himself. The donor’s intent was to help the church create a revenue source from earnings on investments. The church struggled to meet its budget each year as many churches do, and a regular revenue source would help.

Recently, the church member cashed in the investment. The church’s share was $1.6 million. As the “Here and Now” reporter noted, that was quite a return on investment.

A natural assumption would be that, well-invested, the money could insure that there would be few worries about budget again. The minister had another idea.

Why not, she thought, do a reverse tithe? Take 10% of the total and distribute it equally among the members for them to use as they saw fit?

The uses varied. Most found philanthropic purposes. One used the $500 to pay her rent. She did not elicit any bad feeling from the others because paying the rent bought a month where she did not have to choose between food and medication.

The pastor preached on the Parable of the Talents that Sunday. The story describes how a master gave three servants sums of money for a period of time. Two servants invested and doubled their money. The third buried his sum for fear of losing it. The Parable engendered much discussion after that Sunday.

Was donating the money to a food bank or the fight against Ebola akin to investing it? What would constitute burying the money?

The story prompted me to ponder what I would do if given a sum of money unexpectedly and told that I had free reign to spend it as I saw fit. I’ve imagined winning a large lottery before, so my fantasies along this line are well practiced.

In the winning lottery ticket scenario, my first act after collecting my millions would be to set up a charitable foundation named for Judy and me. I have come to realize the expression of ego such an action would represent because, of course, I would want to be involved in directing donations. Only those causes I thought worthy of our support would receive grants.

There would be less ego evident to others if I made direct contributions anonymously. But, still, there is hubris involved in thinking that we could make a situation right if only we could bestow our money on the needful causes.

My mythical millions have built a gym and a theater at the school I co-founded. I would endow scholarships. And, of course, I would reserve enough so that we would not ever again worry about meeting our personal budget.

My chances of winning a lottery and setting up the foundation are smaller than my chances of being hit by lightning. And I do not attend a church with a congregation in Chicago that has come into unexpected riches.

But, I have become a person of a certain age with some amount of talents, figurative and literal, allowed to me. It will be for others to judge whether or not I have lived up to the expectations of the master in the Parable. I don’t think that any of us would aspire to be the third servant, the one who buried his talent. As that story concludes, he loses even that while the others get to keep both the gift and the earnings.

I wonder if there is a trap in retirement that lures people into burying their talents rather than finding ways to use them beyond a paying job?

The questions remain: if a gift like that enjoyed by the church members came my way, what would constitute burying it? And what would be akin to investing wisely?

The church still has $1.4 million about which it will decide. One novel idea that has emerged is to set up a credit union for use by people in the community who don’t usually have access to reasonably priced credit. The church’s story is unfolding.

So is your story and mine. Here and now. We have our array of talents. Have done for many years.

Good luck!

Daniel E. White

July 22, 2015

The first Wednesday in November, 1960, several other members of the CYF (Christian Youth Fellowship) and I came to our weekly afternoon meeting sporting hand-printed tags on our chests reading “Impeach Kennedy.”

Obviously, Constitutional subtleties eluded us as teenagers; you can’t impeach someone until he or she is in office. But, as non-Catholics, we were parroting the conviction of many of our parents that America was about to be ruled by a Pope.

As I recall, all of us present that day mourned with everyone else in November 1963 when our youthful President was assassinated. Somewhere in those three years, we had all changed our minds.

I was reminded about this when reading the newspaper recently. A presidential candidate, speaking about President Obama’s “change of heart” between 2008 and the present regarding gay marriage, bloviated, “well, he was either lying then or he’s lying now.” That’s the first time I have seen a change of mind called lying.

One of the few times I have been moved to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper was when that paper criticized the Governor of the state for changing his mind on some key issue. Heaven help us if we elect people who do not have the capacity to change their minds.

If a candidate for office changes her mind to appeal for my vote that would be called pandering. But, if once in office, she helps to enact what I wanted to happen, don’t I win? Does her motive for changing her mind negate my winning?

Much has been written about the speed at which public opinion has changed in America about gay marriage. The rapidity is unprecedented but a change in the dominant opinion of people in the country has happened many times.

Remember laws against interracial marriage? Shock at the idea of women in combat? Thinking that sending Japanese neighbors to relocation camps was okay? Seeing “Red China” as the epitome of evil? (I thought about that standing on the Great Wall one Thanksgiving Day.)

Make this more personal. When have you changed your mind? I’m betting that most, if not all of you, would have no trouble changing your mind if evidence you believed to be trustworthy surfaced that countered your previous way of thinking.

How many of us see things through not just a lens, the magnification of which might change over time, but through a prism that plays with light and can sober our judgment that we are seeing things as they really are?

How many of us, People of a Certain Age, look at the same thing differently with the passage of time because experience intervenes? Re-read a book you really liked thirty years ago and see if you don’t take away new understanding.

In the data about Americans’ acceptance of gay marriage is the fact that millenials are far more accepting than their elders. Might that be because they have grown up in a different world than we did?

I am aware of the danger posed by those who use serial changes of mind to control others. A classic tool of authoritarian autocrats is to crack down on something today that they allowed to happen yesterday, then permitting it again, keeping their subjects in a constant state of uncertainty about what is acceptable or not. I have known some parents and teachers who, though most probably not meaning to do so, sent so many mixed signals to kids about what was acceptable and what was not that the kids were damaged by the lack of consistency.

Like most aspects of life, we’re always seeking the right balance between consistency and flexibility, conviction and open-mindedness.

George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

When I was six, God was a man who wore a black robe and looked very much like the minister. By age sixty-six, I was okay with God being either or no gender and not much concerned about wardrobe. Point is, I believe in God. For me, that is a consistent conviction that I don’t anticipate changing my mind about.

Much else is subject to evidence, my place in life, my attitudes, my beliefs, and whatever other factors construct my prism.

As happened between 1960 and 1963 for those impassioned teenagers (a redundant phrase?) in San Diego, sometimes changing one’s mind changes one’s heart for the better, too. What’s wrong with that?

Daniel E. White

July 7, 2015