Religious Scholar

Tweet @ReligiousSchola November 2012: True saints speak of poverty of spirit and emptiness. Only when empty of greed & selfishness do we reap abundance of spirit.

Praying for stuff is gaining ground! It all started with Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance a few years back. “Abundance.” What a slippery code word for “more stuff.” Soon Joel Osteen was on the bandwagon. “Abundance” was the word to watch in a series of Osteen’s televised sermons that I followed in 2010.  God’s affable pitchman even authored a book titled, Living in Favor, Abundance, and Joy. The idea is, you pray for God’s Favor, He rewards you with Abundance (aka more stuff), and you have Joy (happy happy, joy joy).

Lately, Deepak Chopra’s has latched on to the lure of Abundance.  In early November, he announced a daily guided meditation journey to an “Authentic Abundance Consciousness.” (my quotation marks and caps for emphasis). “…discover and leverage the secrets to attract abundance of all kinds in to our lives through the power of meditation,” Deepak’s Web page exclaims. Don’t you just love that word, “leverage,” too, with its suggestions of high finance and its whiffs of risky business deals?

Even followers of a Hindu master have bought into Abundance. This week I received an e-Newsletter from the promoters of one of my favorite 20^th century gurus, titled, “Creating Prosperity Consciousness.”  “Prosperity Consciousness”! Whatever happened to the austerity and spirit of detachment found in the gospel of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita? Two full chapters of this holy work are devoted to detachment from things of the world. Nothing there about “creating prosperity.”

I know that these and other traffickers in spiritual understanding have a ready answer to criticism. “Oh, we’re not talking about money!” they retort. “We are speaking of abundance of spirit, being more than you are, giving more because you get more!” Of course, according to Abundance Theory 101, when you grow in spirit, you also grow in…you guessed it…material wealth.  Nifty, huh?

Well, sorry, I am not convinced. The lure of abundance is designed to bait a new market:  the “What’s in it for Me” crowd who seek tangible results for their investment of prayer, meditation, and “free-will offerings.” After all, religion that results in self-knowledge or communion with the Divine isn’t for everyone.  Can you pay down your Mastercard with inner peace? Will deep meditation help your child get into Harvard? Is fasting in the desert really as cool as Botox and Viagra?

The truth of the matter is, religion and spirituality are all about what’s under the superficial appearance of abundance. Strip away abundance, say Jesus and Krishna, and you find the real treasure underneath. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in Buddhism with its focus on Emptiness. Be still and know that I am God, wrote the Psalmist. (But it is true, as Shakespeare wrote, that the Devil can cite Scripture to his own purpose.)

The truly successful spiritual voyagers of history, without exception, found peace, humanity, and understanding by minimizing distractions and focusing on what is most important. For us today, that includes self, family, friends, neighbors, nation, nature, world. The message of the world’s religions is to cultivate stillness, help others, listen for solutions, to be thankful and, as Buddha’s last words express it, “work out our salvation.”   Leave the quest for abundance to Donald Trump and the Kardashian sisters. Folks, we have work to do!