From Accumulation to Abundance

CAC & Richard Rohr Weekly Summary:

Sunday

Jesus is absolute about money and power because he knows what we’re going to do. Most of us will serve this god called mammon.

—Richard Rohr

Monday

If you withdraw your consent from the rich fool’s human system of wealth, if you transfer your trust to the larger system, if you seek first and foremost the divine ecosystem, you will end up with everything you need. —Brian McLaren

Tuesday

Each of us experiences a lifelong tug-of-war between our money interests and the calling of our soul. When we’re in the domain of soul, we act with integrity. We are thoughtful and generous, allowing, courageous, and committed. We recognize the value of love and friendship. —Lynne Twist

Wednesday

We put almost all our moral concern on the greedy or ambitious individuals. We tried to change them without recognizing that each isolated individual was on bended knee before the powers and principalities of the market and more. —Richard Rohr

Thursday

I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to a commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty.

—Robin Wall Kimmerer

Friday

Native Americans are not immune to hard work. In fact, some of the hardest-working people we have known are Indigenous. But in order to maintain a life of harmony, there must be a balance between work and rest, or recreation. Work hard and rest well.

—Randy and Edith Woodley

Week Forty-One Practice

Resting Is an Act of Resistance

Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, critiques the “grind culture” engendered by capitalism and reminds us of our divine right to rest in body and mind:

We are a grind culture. Grind culture is our everyday behaviors, expectations, and engagements with each other and the world around us.

We have been socialized, manipulated, and indoctrinated by everything in culture to believe the lies of grind culture. In order for a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs in productivity and labor must remain.

We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in Spirit and exhausted in body. So we push ourselves, and each other, under the guise of being hyperproductive and efficient.

From a very young age we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our bodies’ need to rest and are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion….

Our bodies and Spirits do not belong to capitalism, no matter how it is theorized and presented.

Our divinity secures this, and it is our right to claim this boldly. I’m not grinding ever. I trust the Creator and my Ancestors to always make space for my gifts and talents without needing to work myself into exhaustion…. [1]

Rest is as natural as breathing and waking up. Rest is part of our nature. Resting is about getting people back to their truest selves.

To what they were before capitalism robbed you of your ability to just be. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way.

We must be focus on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off a list. You can begin to create a “Not-To-Do-List” as you gain the energy to maintain healthy boundaries. Our opportunity to rest and reimagine rest is endless.

There is always time to rest when we reimagine. [2]