The Currency of Bees

April 15, 2011

The Currency of Bees: Creating the Joyful Wealth of Living Sustainably.

My father often wryly and lovingly complained. “I would be a rich man with all the money your mother has saved me over the years.” In other words, life in our house was barely sustainable economically speaking and made less so on occasion by a “find.” However, what he understood in his blissful poverty was that we were wealthy for what was done with what money we had, planted into the context of a full household of nine that drank powdered milk, had a dog, unreliable cars and seasons of the soul that the material world was made to obey. That obedience included wall paper everywhere, a little rose garden, prom dresses made out of thin air, art lessons and wedding receptions in the back yard and an expansive sense of charity.

Elemental to sustainability is balance: the balance of a checkbook; the solvency of a business or a government; plans for the future with the reality of the past; and now the life of the planet. Presently, sustainability of life globally has gathered particular muster. In the unease, fanged in that polite way crises build moral imperative, there is guilt that our North American consumerist way of life itself is to blame. An individual can be left with the feeling he is unduly at fault, bearing the sins of his parents, orphaned by excess.

At the very least we have in America a collective feeling of gluttony, that what we consume for our luxury is at the expense of the world’s necessity. With 1.4 billion, nearly a fifth of the world’s population, living under a dollar and fifty cents a day--though a better statistic than the 1.9 billion it was in 1981--the language of poverty behind cheaply-made goods and the unfolding environmental disaster of the emerging economies learning our worst habits is creating the perfect storm around the word “sustainability.” The meaning it has gained in the past few years is something very particular and local as well as something universal. This is a significant development. Not long ago the solution to a doomed world was to abandon it for another. Perhaps that is modern history since Columbus. Now that the Space Shuttles are being retired to museums so to is the exit strategy. Therefore, the solution, if there is one, has to be here. That has all the hallmarks of a new era.

While making amends for consumerist sins is in order, the method of implementing reform, whatever reform is chosen, ought not wield Carrie Nation’s ax, that is to say without hope. John the Baptist is a more convincing voice of reform: share your goods joyfully. Eating wild honey, locusts and wearing homemade clothing, he heralded what people wanted to do anyway but needed to now how. His recommendation to be baptized, be made clean in intention as well as outwardly, is professed in public and willingly so by hordes that flooded to the river. Significant is the journey from the general need to the particular realization and action. The newly baptized return to the same world they came from, but changed, especially with respect to the specifics of living harmoniously within the community of Israel. “You soldiers, accept your pay and stop extorting.” These baptized lack only the spirit that comes from the Messiah. They have been invested with the “currency of bees,” a means of converting dross into sweetness.

In a similar vein we have been looking for an excuse to say that we are tired of endless new technology programs to fix the symptoms of what is wrong without addressing the cause. Sustainability for us as humans is living in community and choosing to do so freely. It was easy to leave home and brave the new world. It is harder to go back. It is harder to accept the limitations that being earthly and house-bound imposes on us especially if perceived in the harshly rational light we are prone to use. I would like to suggest as a proposal for this book, that we look upon the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” as a terrain of the imagination, an opportunity to be “interior pioneers” as Seamus Heaney refers to such a homeward journeymen.

I have chosen a term “the currency of bees” to describe the value of converting light and inspiration into sweetness. The term is derived from Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books. The scholar and poet Seamus Deane pointed this passage out as a favorite of his generation that, at that time when I studied under him, was waiting for Chernobyl’s cloud to pass over Ireland. Swift championed the bee as superior to the spider as a means of knowledge. The spider, says Swift, is a kind of mathematical knowledge that spins a web of filth and air in order to catch its prey in darkness, poison it and suck out its life. The bee on the other hand is a standard bearer of knowledge that is not diminished in being shared. The bee follows an errant path of light and beauty and gathers in sweetness from it.

In the six years since I began Goods of Conscience I have seen the inherent worth of combining the joy of creating with the desire to live sustainably. Sharing resources assembled in a parish among peers to answer necessities with creativity and know-how moderates the consumerist impulses. A way of life is forming in many ways that could inherit our parish structure in America.

I would like to plot out in this book how this system of benefices could work. I will describe what I have already done in Goods of Conscience and offer nine points of reflection on sustainability for further theological investigation. My theory is that creating local benefices with global support to engage the natural creative life of a small community shifts the cultural emphasis away from the nomadic tendencies of the technological culture and toward a more generative and sustainable local culture. By forming bonds of friendship and direct trade, the “cycle of charity,” with communities in more needy countries makes the dialogue of social and cultural identity an immediate work. I wonder if we could recraft “I would be a rich man with all the money your mother has saved me all these years” to “from this smallest of seeds a tree has grown to offer a home to the birds of the air.”