Eucatastrophe Reader

"We will have to sacrifice the textbook morality play of 'greedy businessmen' fleecing the public."

The Myth of the Robber Barons by Burt Folsom

This blog post is dedicated to my friend George Ryan and his company, Hatchwise. Live long and prosper

Burt Folsom has an ax to grind with a number of the textbooks that I have or presently use in teaching history. His is an entrepreneurial friendly history of the era of American industrial expansion. His argument, I think is legitimate. American history textbooks tend to conflate all of the leaders of the American Industrial expansion into one criminal class. Folsom does the student of this history the service of giving each industrialist and key company its proper due by noting how it functioned as a “taker” or a “maker.”

Folsom makes the argument that there were some “robber barons” who were not robbers at all. They made money by providing people with the opportunity to make money and they did it with intelligence, courage, risk taking, and hard work. In another group, he argues, were a group of individuals who made their money by manipulating the government and profiting from taxpayers. The later were,

“in fact comparable to medieval robber barons, for they sought and obtained wealth through the coercive power of the state, which is to say that they were subsidized by government and were sometimes granted monopoly status by government. Invariably, their products or services were inferior to and more expensive than the goods and services provided by market entrepreneurs, who sought and obtained wealth by producing more and better for less cost to the consumer.”

Folsum argues that the conclusions that history textbooks lead students to are often contrary to facts, or are often unable to distinguish between the ways that different people acquire similar levels of wealth and remuneration. In the course of the book, he looks with more detail into the rise of these men of great fortunes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Leland Stanford, Andrew Mellon, and others. At the heart of his argument is this notion that there may be ways of obtaining success and wealth in business that benefit a society at large and others that act in a more parasitical fashion.  “Political promotion of economic development is inherently futile” says Fulsom,

“for it invariably rewards incompetence; if incompetence is rewarded, incompetence will be the product; and when incompetence is the product, politicians will insist that increased planning and increased regulation is the appropriate remedy.”

 Essentially, his point is that when the government began to give subsidies to industries, they became all the more interested in increasing them rather than in actually doing what needed to be done to convince the actual “consumers” that their product was worth purchasing. As these industries failed to provide goods and services people wanted, people went to government to demand regulation. Take the steamboat industry for example.

“With annual government aid, Collins had no incentive to reduce his costs from year to year. His expenses, in fact, more than doubled in 1852: Collins preferred to compete in the world of politics for more federal aid than in the world of business against price-cutting rivals.”

Ultimately Collins’ subsidized steamboat services could not compete with the more efficient, safer, faster, steamboats that Cornelius Vanderbilt was producing. (Think about this in terms of public education or healthcare.) When Collins’ subsidies were removed, he was totally unprepared to compete with unsubsidized rivals.

This argument can be clearly seen in the history of the Union and Central and Northern Pacific railroads. The former two were government subsidy based affairs. James Hill’s Northern Pacific railroad was a privately funded initiative. Here is what Folsom writes:

“While some of this rush for subsidies was still going on, James J. Hill was building a transcontinental from St. Paul to Seattle with no federal aid whatsoever. Also, Hill's road was the best built, the least corrupt, the most popular, and the only transcontinental never to go bankrupt.”

“Since congressmen wanted the [Union and Central Pacific] road built quickly, they did two key things. First, they gave each line twenty alternate sections of land for each mile of track completed. Second, they gave loans: $16,000 for each mile of track of flat prairie land, $32,000 per mile for hilly terrain, and $48,000 per mile in the mountains.”

“The UP and CP, then, would compete for government largess. The line that built the most miles would get the most cash and land. The land, of course, would be sold; and this way the railroad would be financed. In this arrangement, the incentive was for speed, not efficiency. The two lines spent little time choosing routes; they just laid track and cashed in.”

“The rush for subsidies caused other building problems, too. Nebraska winters were long and hard; but, since Dodge was in a hurry, he laid track on the ice and snow anyway. Naturally the line had to be rebuilt in the spring. What was worse, unanticipated spring flooding along the Loup fork of the Platte River washed out rails, bridges, and telephone poles, doing at least $50,000 damage the first year. No wonder some observers estimated the actual building cost at almost three times what it should have been.”

“The aid bred inefficiency; the inefficiency created consumer wrath; the consumer wrath led to government regulation; and the regulation closed the UP's options and helped lead to bankruptcy.”

Folsom argues that it is vital to distinguish between those who make their fortunes serving and those who make them “bilking.” The Scrantons he argued obtained their prosperity by bringing prosperity.

"Scranton's founders, as entrepreneurs, created something out of nothing. They created their assets and created opportunities for others when they successfully bore the risks of making America's first iron rails. Without them, almost everybody else in the region would have been poorer. The amount of wealth in a region (or a country) is not fixed; in 1870, Scranton, Platt, and Blair got the biggest piece of the economic pie, but it was the biggest piece of a much larger pie—made so by what they cooked up when they came to Pennsylvania thirty years earlier.”

“When the Scrantons came to the Lackawanna Valley, it was a poor farming region with no close ties to outside markets. In 1850, according to the federal manuscript census, no one in the Lackawanna Valley was worth more than $10,000. In 1870, after the Scrantons had established their city and their iron works, thirty-three families in Scranton alone were worth at least $100,000; and one was already a millionaire. Thousands of other families were working their way toward better lives. The Scrantons' iron works and railroad were the means to this end.”

“Because the Scrantons did what they did, thousands of Americans had new opportunities in life.”

“A lot can be learned from the story of the Scrantons. The first lesson is that entrepreneurs are needed to create wealth; when they succeed, others then have the chance to build on what they started.”

As one former President of Standard Oil said of John D. Rockefeller, when asked to explain his company’s owner’s success,

"Well, it is simple. In business we all try to look ahead as far as possible. Some of us think we are pretty able. But Rockefeller always sees a little further ahead than any of us—and then he sees around the corner!”

Folsom argues that Rockeffeller’s genius for improving quality and lowering costs were unpopular with all those who wished to compete with him. But that ultimately, the light that the public read by at night, and that allowed them to live more productive lives themselves came from that very ability. “Some of the oil producers were unhappy,” he writes of Rockefeller’s Darwinian tactics for squeezing out the opposition,

“but American consumers were pleased that Rockefeller was selling cheap oil. Before 1870, only the rich could afford whale oil and candles. The rest had to go to bed early to save money. By the 1870s, with the drop in the price of kerosene, middle and working class people all over the nation could afford the one cent an hour that it cost to light their homes at night. Working and reading became after-dark activities new to most Americans in the 1870s.”

His last chapter about Andrew Mellon is particularly interesting in light of recent debates over getting the wealthy to “pay their fair share” of the American tax burden. Mellon’s experience and observation led him to believe that one could lower tax rates and increase tax revenue. How? His argument was that people will contribute taxes up to around 25% of their incomes but that at that point, they begin to think of taxation as a confiscatory exercise and fight back by withdrawing it from taxable endeavors. There is, he was suggesting, a “phase transition” that takes place when you ask too much of people who feel that they have given their “fair share” already (whether you think they have or not). At the lower levels of the economy, workers will stand to have their wages reduced only so much before they strike and entrepreneurs will stand to have their taxes raised only so much before they go looking for ways to hide their profits in in tax free safe havens. Mellon argued that wealth was being diverted to tax free municipal bonds so as to protect it from confiscatory taxation and that when that happened, the government was forced to get the taxes from the middle class (who are less adept at hiding it.

“When Harding died in 1923 and Coolidge became President, Mellon found himself with a strong ally to help break the Congressional deadlock. Coolidge studied the tax problem and agreed with Mellon's conclusions. "I agree perfectly," Coolidge said, "with those who wish to relieve the small taxpayer by getting the largest possible contribution from the people with large incomes. But if the rates on large incomes are so high that they disappear, the small taxpayer will be left to bear the entire burden."

For Mellon (and Coolidge) “taxes had to be slashed "to attract the large fortunes back into productive enterprise." “The Progressives denigrated his achievements whenever possible,” writes Folsom, “They could hardly dispute his results.” Thus, “On one level, Folsom shows that the ‘Robber Baron’ school of historians of American business enterprise was partly right and partly wrong but was unable to distinguish which was which.”

This is history with an agenda. IF you want better services at lower prices, let the markets determine who gets paid, not the Congress or Parliament in the case of England.

“John B. Thompson of Kentucky said, "Give neither this line, nor any other line, a subsidy. . . . Let the Collins line die. ... I want a tabula rasa— the whole thing wiped out, and a new beginning." Congress voted for this "new beginning" in 1858: they revoked Collins' aid and left him to compete with Vanderbilt on an equal basis. The results: Collins quickly went bankrupt, and Vanderbilt became the leading American steamship operator.”

“Without government aid to inefficiency, the Cunard Company would have been compelled to adopt improvements in order to compete with other and more progressive lines.”

The Myth of the Robber Barons does not suggest that there were none. It’s argument, as articulated above is that history is generally more complicated than a simple formula like “If you got rich, you cheated and someone suffered.” “To sum up, then,” the book concludes,

“we need to divide industrialists into two groups. First, were market entrepreneurs, such as Vanderbilt, Hill, the Scrantons, Schwab, Rockefeller, and Mellon, who usually innovated, cut costs, and competed effectively in an open economy. Second, were political entrepreneurs, such as Edward Collins, Henry Villard, Elbert Gary, and Union Pacific builders, all of whom tried to succeed primarily through federal aid, pools, vote-buying, or stock speculation. Market entrepreneurs made decisive and unique contributions to American economic development. The political entrepreneurs stifled productivity (through monopolies and pools), corrupted business and politics, and dulled America's competitive edge.”

“If we seriously study entrepreneurs, the state, and the rise of big business in the United States we will have to sacrifice the textbook morality play of "greedy businessmen" fleecing the public until at last they are stopped by the actions of the state. But, in return, we will have a better understanding of the past and a sounder basis for building our future.”

Question for Comment: Yesterday, I listened to a radio interview with my friend, George Ryan. A few years ago, he was making $10 an hour at a lumber yard and was unhappy with his job. So, he started a business. Today, he is what you might call a successful entrepreneur and small business owner at http://hatchwise.com . His company no doubt takes business away from traditional graphic art businesses and gives it to freelancers all over the world. In short, he profits from saving people money and giving people work. What is needed in the American economy (and education system) for this to happen more often?

"Power is the best alibi"

Arbitrage REVIEW

“When I was a kid,” says Robert Miller (Richard Gere) “my favorite teacher was Mr. James. Mr. James said world events all revolve around five things. M - O - N - E - Y.”

Through the course of the film we discover that this may be so.

First of all, I am not a businessman and I don’t play one on TV. MY understanding of the term “arbitrage” is therefor and elemental one. The verb, “arbitrage” as I understand it means to make a deal that involves limiting risk by buying something and selling it almost immediately after. In theory, if you buy at a price lower than the price you can sell something, you make money without doing anything. Someone who is good at it knows when there is someone out there desperate to sell something at below its value and also knows there is someone out there who desperately wants to buy something so much they will pay more than it is actually worth. A talented trader has the ability to convince someone to sell low and buy high and for that reason they must be able to understand why people spend money and require money.

In Arbitrage, billionaire Wall Street investment mogul Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is at the center of numerous “deals.” The movie focuses on the various “deals that he has to negotiate, not simply on a business level but on the personal level of family as well. Money is involved in all of his deals with his business partners, employees, investors, and lovers but none of them are based entirely on money. None of the people he makes deals with makes the deal simply for the money. There is always something else they want, or something just beyond the money. In each of the deals he makes in his effort to stay out of jail, he has to offer money and something else. He has to hide his own desperation and exacerbate the desperation of the “buyer” somehow. “The more time that passes, the more lies get told,” his lawyer informs him. We see this to be the case in the unfolding of the plot.

The movie might make for an interesting case study in negotiation taking a slow motion replay look at how he negotiates with his mistress; with Mayfield, the man offering to buy his company; with his daughter after she discovers the way that he has been altering the books; with the young black man, Jimmy Grant, who bails him out of a jam at a crucial moment in the film.

“What you did is way beyond the money,” Miller says to Grant in expressing his appreciation with a two million dollar trust fund. “Nothing is beyond money for you, Robert,” Jimmy responds, “We both know that.” “Buy the truth and do not sell it” the book of Proverbs advises. Arbitrage advice for us all. Don’t look for any heroes in this movie. There are none.

Question for Comment: Have you ever sold something worth more than you sold it for? Or bought something worth less than you bought it for? How were you induced to make such a bad deal? What keeps you from doing so again?

"Things were neat only in theory."

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power  by Jon Meacham REVEIW

“I would rather be thought worthy of [the Presidency] than to be appointed to it for well I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.” – Thomas Jefferson, upon being nominated for the office.

I have been listening to Jon Meacham’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, The Art of Power on my way to and from work for the past few weeks. I have been struck by the interesting themes that Meacham draws out of Jefferson’s life. He was, as it seems, a person capable of maintaining high aspirations and goals while yet compromising almost acrobatically in the means he applied in the pursuit of them. Jefferson, over the course of his life, was willing to reverse himself so as to avoid turning around you might say (a paradox). “So which was the real Jefferson?” Meacham asks of his vicissitudes,

“the philosopher advocating the end of binding laws or the politician who believed that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time . … The likely truth is that these competing Jeffersons were both real. He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras. And sometimes he thought differently more or less simultaneously.”

Before he took office and thus obtained the power to expand the Federal government beyond Constitutional limits, he was a staunch opponent of doing so. After he had the power to do so, he became more adept at expanding Federal and Presidential powers than the Federalists (the party he accused of doing exactly that to excess) had ever been. Before he became President and thus responsible for maintaining order, he opposed the build-up of military powers. After he became President and had to actually deal with raids on American shipping in the Mediterranean, he was less hesitant to give himself the power he needed to solve the problem. Ironically, he began to understand what Federalists had been arguing all along. The Nation needed to have the ability to command respect. “We ought to begin a naval power,” he wrote then,

“Be assured that the present disrespect of the nations of Europe for us will inevitably bring on insults which must involve us in war.”

In other words, peace through strength but only when I am the one wielding that strength. In the Federalist era, Jefferson was a staunch strict constructionalist, insisting that the Federal government was a government of narrowly defined and circumscribed powers. When Hamilton wanted the Bank of the United States to be funded by public moneys and yet controlled by private interests, President Washington privately asked Jefferson for his view on the bank bill’s constitutionality. In response, Jefferson said,

“To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power no longer susceptible of any definition.”

When asked his opinion about George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation, Jefferson demurred that he did not think it was in the President’s purview to make statements on national policy that were reserved for the Congress. In Jefferson’s mind, the President was usurping the power of Congress to make declarations on subjects relating to war or peace.

When the Federalists enacted legislation to stop people from slandering them in the press, Jefferson was appalled. But he himself, when President, felt unjustly abused by the press and longed for a way to shut them up. “I have been sometime used as the property of newspapers,” he said. “I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.” He opposed Hamilton and his band of Federalists as “tribe-patriots” but later founded his own party. “Those destined for command,” he said, “had to bring the floating ardor of our countrymen to a point of union and effect.”

That was precisely the work of popular leadership he argued. And precisely what the Federalist party was doing.

 Jefferson made himself the arch enemy of the Federalists use of power, criticizing both their means and their ends. And yet when he himself was faced with a national problem as President (The strategic city of New Orleans in the hands of Napoleonic France), he barely blushed to assume powers nowhere spoken of in his beloved Constitution. “Jefferson’s decision to acquire Louisiana without seeking a Constitutional amendment,” writes Meacham, “expanded the powers of the executive in ways that would have likely driven Jefferson to distraction if another man had been President.”

Jefferson, the man who opposed the idea of incurring a National debt when that debt was being contracted by his political opponents, was equally willing to take the country into deeper debt than it had ever been when he deemed the object desirable. During the Federalist era, Jefferson wrote to James Monroe “We are ruined sir if we do not overrule the principle that the more we owe, the more prosperous we will be; that a public debt furnishes the means of enterprise, etc. etc.” Faced with the possibility of acquiring the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, he changed his tune.

“Things were,” Meacham observes, “neat only in theory.” “It was easy to speak theoretically and idealistically about politics when one is seeking power,” he adds,

“The demands of exercising it once it is won however, are so complex and fluid that ideological certitude is often one of the first casualties of actually governing. . . . The man who had as secretary of State argued against broad construction in the case of the Bank of the United States found that his own powers as President benefitted from the broadest kind of construction.”

In brief, Thomas Jefferson despised the notion of control when he was not the controller. He was an opponent to preistcraft and monarchy and would use the powers that they had always wielded to oppose them when he could. According to Meacham, the primary differences between Jefferson and Hamilton were to be found in their ends and in their styles, not in their means. Hamilton and Adams believed that nature distributed its talents and merits unequally and therefore justice required that men should distribute powers and privileges unequally in accordance with nature. They thought the way to do this was to act forcefully and overtly to protect the “rights” of the “righted.” Jefferson saw inequality as primarily a consequence of privilege and resisted it at every turn. But unlike the Federalists, he preferred to wield his weapons anonimously, publishing his arguments through the pens of others, shaping National policy less overtly through the medium of his “toadies” in positions of power. “Better to work through allies in Congress than to appear monarchical” he confided to one of his supporters. And he preferred offices, he said where he could “do its duties unseen by those for whom they are done.”

Did he think that U.S. diplomats should be paid more for their labors when he was an ambassador in France? He would not ask for more money directly but attempted to speak to the government through Madison; “I would pray you to touch this string with Congress with the utmost delicacy as I would rather be ruined in my fortune than in their esteem,” Jefferson wrote him.

The author of this biography neither defends Jefferson nor overly condemns him for being a man with flaws, with inner inconsistencies, and with elements of courage and cowardice. Meacham’s Jefferson is a man who’s goals for America cannot be undervalued and whose attempts to bring us closer to the ideal should not be forgotten. “Jefferson believed in forces that were trying to re-establish the rule of priests and kings,” we are informed, “But he was free to maneuver in matters of detail. Jefferson had a core belief but tactical liberty.” “We must be content to travel on to perfection step by step,” Jefferson had insisted. “He wrote beautifully of the pursuit of the perfect. He knew good when he saw it. He would not make the two enemies.” “He longed to be great …” writes Meacham, “He was both an unflinching political warrior and an easily wounded soul. He always would be.”

There are a few passages of the Art of Power that may not fit nicely into a well-constructed argument but I thought I would include them here as an example of both Thomas Jefferson’s and Jon Meacham’s gift for expression.

Here, Jefferson writes of the American relationship with Britain in words that indicate that he has a good understanding of human nature.

 “There can be no medium between those who have loved so much. . . . As with lovers and intimate friends there can often be no middle ground between engagement and estrangement. In the presence of passion or of former passions, acquaintance is impossible. It is all or nothing. For once affections have cooled it is very difficult to bring them back to a middling temperature. In such cases, human nature tends to rekindle the flames to their old force or consign them to perpetual chill.”

Here, Meacham describes Jefferson’s equanimity and stoicism:

“It was a gift this capacity to maintain a placid exterior no matter how much turmoil. He was usually a master of his emotion. One of his friends wrote ‘I know of no gentleman better qualified to pass over the disagreeables of life than Mr. Jefferson, as he makes his calculations for a certain quantity of imposition which must be admitted with his intercourse with the world.”

Here, Jefferson explains his perspective on party politics.

“I am not a Federalist because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion in philosophy or politics where I was capable of thinking for myself. … Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all, therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of Federalist but I am much farther from that of the anti-Federalists [i.e. those who would have no federal government to speak of at all].”

Of Jefferson’s tendency to live his life constantly in debt, Meacham writes:

“Why would Jefferson, a man who sought power over men and events, concede his power to creditors and continue to incur debts when he was already so burdened? Part of the explanation may lie in his tendency as he put it to take things ‘by the smooth handle’ and avoid difficult personal choices. It was always easier it seemed to sign another note and defer payment to another day than it was to face a stark financial reckoning. Oddly too, his innate sense of control and place may have enabled him to see debt as an abstract problem rather than a concrete one. He was part of a family and class in which borrowing money and mortgaging lands was as much a part of the culture as hospitality or hunting. The prospect of ruin was real but in Jefferson’s mind, remote.”

Resemblances to features of recent Presidencies may be instructive.

“Stockjobbing drowns every other subject” Jefferson said of New York. Of the tendency of Congressmen to use political power for financial gain and financial gain to obtain political power Jefferson wrote:

“Too many of these stockjobbers and kingjobbers have come into our legislature or rather too many of our legislature have become stockjobbers and kingjobbers.”

We might all in the 21rst Century say a heart “Amen!”

Ultimately Thomas Jefferson; The Art of Power concludes that Thomas Jefferson spent his entire life in fear of a rear guard action on the part of the forces of monarchy and tyranny. For him, “absolutism was always just a step away.” He suspected Britain of and conservative monarchists desiring to re-assert its control over a free people and he “road shotgun” guarding our newfound civic and economic liberties from precisely such a fate (whether it was real or imagined, we can only now conjecture). “We must see it how he saw it,” says Jon Meacham, “Not as we know it turned out.”

 Question for Comment: Have you ever reversed yourself on some issue that you once pontificated about? Why? Why not? Is the ability to do such a sign of strength or weakness in a human character?

"Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.”

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese REVIEW

“I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest.” – Hippocratic Oath

There are, no doubt, multiple layers to the meaning of this novel’s title. The main characters are all named Stone (Thomas, Marion and Shiva Stone) but the title seems to really be rooted in a line from the Hippocratic Oath. Its meaning at the time it was written was pretty simple; The physician taking the oath was promising to leave surgery to surgeons. He was promising not to try something he was not trained to do even if the patient needed the service. It is interesting that Abraham Verghese is a surgeon who has taken up the practice of writing. And it may well be that he understands that surgeons cannot heal what only story tellers can heal. “Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery,” the novel’s narrator says at one point in the book,

“but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.”

In a sense, Verghese is “cutting for stone” himself – making the attempt to heal someone’s pain through story rather than through surgery. And it may well be that the “someone” whose pain he is trying to heal is his own. Early in the novel the narrator, Marion Stone, writes,

“WE COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.”

I know from my own experiences of autobiographical writing that the attempt usually both heals and wounds. Ironically, the main characters in this novel, all doctors, all wound themselves or others in their attempt to heal others or themselves. We are constantly confronted with this reality that in life we often bring about healing and hurt no matter how much we try to avoid the later. Explanations of how this happens in the novel would all be plot spoiling contaminations of your reading.

I confess, there are moments while reading this novel where I could feel the pain of my own life’s memories being brought to the surface. And yet always there is the voice of comfort. Under the pain of Veghese’s depiction of suffering - physical, emotional, spiritual – is the background music of grace, whispered in the ear healing, forgiving, redeeming. Patients are healed. Broken relationships are made whole (between Marion and his father, Marion and his brother, Marion and Genet, Ghosh and Thomas Stone, Hema and the same, and even between the living and the dead.) "Forgiveness works through our ongoing willingness to give up certain claims against one another,” says L. Gregory Jones, “to give gifts of ourselves by making innovative gestures that offer a future not bound by the past." Cutting for Stone is a story of deep emotional injuries forgiven.

“I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am,” says the narrarator (and we assume, Veghese),

“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

Each of the characters in Cutting for Stone comes to realize how they have been blind to something, and have caused pain to themselves and others by being so. Healing comes when we learn to forgive ourselves and others for not being omniscient in our youth, or even wise, or even something less than stupid. Thomas Stone realizes but too late that a life that tries to replace love with work is a mistake for example. Leaving his children was a mistake. Genet, Shiva, all look back with regret. The only people who don’t are the people who “wake up” in time. But no one is so lucky that they do not live blindly for some period of time. The characters of the novel speak with one voice when they encourage us all to see what is important sooner than they did:

To see that one has a purpose:

“No, Marion,” she said, her gaze soft, reaching for me, her gnarled hands rough on my cheeks. “No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”

To see that we were made with a need for others as well as God:

“What she couldn’t bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She’d wanted to cling to him, to cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she’d never known existed.”

To see that we have a need to leave part of ourselves to carry on when we die:

“As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn’t that the adage Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema’s second thought was that she, deliverer of countless babies, she who’d rejected the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that lived on the bodies of men.”

To see that none of us can live out another’s life:

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

To see that every moment of our lives is either significant or has the capacity to be:

“If I hadn’t come to America. If I hadn’t seen Tsige. If I hadn’t opened the door for Genet . . . The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.”

What this book celebrates most is the character trait of attention. Its heroes are the people who see actual people and not “patients” as repositories of illness to be cured. It’s heroes are people who wake up to what their wiser selves are trying to tell them.

“At times it seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were incidental to their work. Thomas Stone was different.”

Cutting For Stone asks us all to be wiser – to realize how powerful is our capacity to harm and heal with our words and actions and to take our responsibility as “surgeons” so armed seriously.

Question for Comment:

“When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?” Matron leaned her head on the windowpane. “God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by”—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—“by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

“But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

How have you contributed to the volume of brokenness in the world (whether trying to or not) and what are you doing to bring healing to that volume of brokenness? What brokenness are you leaving to another generation and in what ways are you empowering the people in your life to be better healers of that collective human woundedness? In what ways are you still a broken person and where do you expect healing to come from?

"Mystical union. This, the highest degree of importance."

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp REVIEW

First of all, Thanks.

“The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane.” G.K. Chesterton

“How we behold determines if we hold joy,” says Ann Voscamp. “Change comes when we receive life with thanks and ask for nothing to change.” “Eucharisteo [the giving of thanks] always, always precedes the miracle . . . All fear is but the notion that God’s love ends.”

Ann Voscamp’s message is one that most churchgoers will have heard before. But rarely will they have heard it expressed so eloquently and by someone whose voice can convey the message with such authenticity. She speaks not as one born with the gift of trust or one given such a life that trust came easily. Indeed, her book begins with the story of her loss of trust. At the age of four, her life (and faith in a good God) was shattered by the accidental and tragic death of her sister Aimee in an automobile accident in front of her house. “The year when blood pooled and my sister died and I, all of us, snapped shut to grace,” she writes, “And with the laying of her gravestone, the closing up of her deathbed, so closed our lives. Closed to any notion of grace.”

Eloquently, she draws the connection between the “impossibility” of gratitude on that day as the origin of a “fall” that she must now, as an adult, be “saved” from.

“Really, when you bury a child—or when you just simply get up every day and live life raw—you murmur the question soundlessly. No one hears. Can there be a good God? A God who graces with good gifts when a crib lies empty through long nights, and bugs burrow through coffins? Where is God, really? How can He be good when babies die, and marriages implode, and dreams blow away, dust in the wind? Where is grace bestowed when cancer gnaws and loneliness aches and nameless places in us soundlessly die, break off without reason, erode away.

No, God? No, God, we won’t take what You give. No, God, Your plans are a gutted, bleeding mess and I didn’t sign up for this and You really thought I’d go for this? No, God, this is ugly and this is a mess and can’t You get anything right and just haul all this pain out of here and I’ll take it from here, thanks. And God? Thanks for nothing.”

“I wake and put the feet to the plank floors, and I believe the Serpent’s hissing lie, the repeating refrain of his campaign through the ages: God isn’t good. It’s the cornerstone of his movement. That God withholds good from His children, that God does not genuinely, fully, love us.”

“Satan is an ingrate. And he sinks his venom into the heart of Eden. Satan’s sin becomes the first sin of all humanity: the sin of ingratitude.”

“From my own beginning, my sister’s death tears a hole in the canvas of the world.”

“Losses do that. One life-loss can infect the whole of a life. Like a rash that wears through our days, our sight becomes peppered with black voids. Now everywhere we look, we only see all that isn’t: holes, lack, deficiency.”

For Ann Voscamp, the quality of our lives hinges upon our capacity or willingness to survive the moments of “hard eucharisteo” and to practice consistently the art of frequent easy eucaristeos. The habit of giving thanks must simply be practiced she argues and it must be applied whenever we see beauty and whenever we see tragedy that we cannot explain. Like any other motor skill, we have to ask gratitude of ourselves always and make time to express it. And, this flow of daily gratitude must not be interrupted by the notion that there are things that happen to us that do not come from the hand of a loving God.

“I can hear Him, what He is telling the whole world and even me here: this is for you. The lover’s smile in the morning, the child’s laughter down the slide, the elder’s eyes at eventide: this is for you. And the earth under your feet, the rain over your face upturned, the stars spinning all round you in the brazen glory: this is for you, you, you. These are for you—gifts—these are for you—grace—these are for you—God”

“Though I cry, this I know: God is always good and I am always loved and eucharisteo has made me my truest self, “full of grace.” Doesn’t eucharisteo rename all God’s children their truest name: “Loved one.”

“As long as thanks is possible,” she argues, “then joy is always possible.”

“The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live…. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything. . . . Non-eucharisteo, ingratitude, was the fall—humanity’s discontent with all that God freely gives. . . .  Then to find Eden, the abundance of Paradise, I’d need to forsake my non-eucharisteo, my bruised and bloodied ungrateful life, and grab hold to eucharisteo, a lifestyle of thanksgiving. Might a life of eucharisteo really work the miracle of the God-communion? I rise from the chair. . . .  There it is—the secret to living joy in every situation, the full life of eucharisteo. Twice Paul whispers it: “I have learned …” Learned. I would have to learn eucharisteo. Learn eucharisteo—learn it to live fully.” . . . This is why I had never really learned the language of “thanks in all things”! Though pastors preached it, I still came home and griped on. I had never practiced.”

To rebuild this atrophied habit, the author begins to keep a journal of her blessings, intentionally slowing the busyness of her life so as to better appreciate the source of it and hence the title One Thousand Gifts.

“When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks.”

“And I see it now for what this really is, this dare to write down one thousand things I love. It really is a dare to name all the ways that God loves me.”

No doubt thousands of readers have absorbed the message and found it coming up against those events in their lives that defy gratitude. We all have them lying in wait for us – daring us to see them as something to be grateful for. “How could a good God have let me … How could a good God have let them … How could a good God have allowed …?” And thus do we “amputate ourselves, “hacking our lives up into grace moments and curse moments” instead of seeing it all as grace. Ultimately Ann Voscamp would have us look back on our lives as though we were already in heaven. “There are times,” she writes,

“when we need to drive a long, long distance, before we can look back and see God’s back in the rearview mirror. Maybe sometimes about as far as heaven—that kind of distance.”

And this brings me to the subject of mysticism (for what is mysticism if not the act of putting ourselves in some heavenly realm while we remain bodily planted in this soil of our material limitations?) Ann Voscamp is asking us all to be mystics. The Bible, she argues, it what makes this all a rational act but it is mysticism that we must embrace if we are to be grateful often and always. “Mystical experiences do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind,” writes R.M. Jones, “rather, they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities.” What Ann Voscamp does by journaling her blessings is precisely that. She has opted to make her faith concrete, ascribing all goodness to God with the zealous fervor of an accountant.

“I want that kind of crazy, happy joy, God. Jeans to the right, socks to the left. How have I lost it in the growing older, duller? How to see the world again through those eyes? To live in the wide-eyed wonder of a world that unwraps itself grandiose and larger-than-life, so otherworldly? . . . Everywhere, everything, Love!” . . . “In a thousand ways He woos. In a thousand ways I fall in love . . . Mystical union. This, the highest degree of importance. . . . Is there a greater way to love the Giver than to delight wildly in His gifts? . . . “With each blessing uttered we extend the boundaries of the sacred and ritualise our love of life. One hundred times a day, everywhere we turn, everything we touch, everyone we see.”

It is no wonder that Ann Voscamp’s book has left such an impression and filled such a void. It reverberates with that Christian “call of the wild” – the call to return to the mystical roots of a faith overburdened with all that is not mysticism. “Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism," I remember Tom Robbins saying in Skinny Legs and All (Not a book favorable in the least bit to religion).

“The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.”

Question for Comment:

“Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
― Meister Eckhart

When you look at your life, can you see a story of “gifts” or is it a story of random luck and misfortune? How do mystics convince themselves that they are not imagining? What events in your life remain the greatest obstacles to your own ability to retain your trust in a beneficent lover behind the curtains of it all? What events make it impossible to succumb to cynicism and despair?