Flourishing Through Contrition: Hunger and Transformation

 
July 2011 by Shannon Jung, Saint Paul School of Theology

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Who among us can eat well when we become aware that what allows us to flourish precludes other people’s flourishing? That is the conundrum that will shape this essay. The following are the steps of an argument intended to grapple with that problem.

Step One: Food is intended for delight and nourishment
Food was created and is intended for human delight and sharing. There is enough for all![1]

Step Two: The distribution of food is not equitable, with the delight of some contingent on the suffering of others
Those in affluent cultures (and that probably includes all, or most, who read this essay) delight in good food, but participate in a system that precludes distributing food equitably enough so as to avoid others’ starving or being chronically malnourished. Whether or not we intend to participate in this unjust system, it is clear that most of us do not know how to do otherwise. In short, the affluent appropriate the benefits of a global food supply system that unjustly costs the producers and other “service workers” who enable those benefits.[2] These benefits also come to the affluent at the cost of the health of the wider earth community. And let us not be deceived: the consequences of such benefits are structural, built into the economy, and require considerable resistance to imagine and live differently.

Step Three: The result is injury to all parties
Furthermore, these costs are damaging to the health of both the affluent and the poor; to the economies even of “developed” nations; to farmers and rural communities; to the earth community; and to the spiritual well-being of the affluent.[3] Evading the recognition of reality does not evade the consequences of evading reality, as Ayn Rand herself is quoted to have said.

Step Four: We are complicit
Those costs, I believe, are indirect, not deliberate, largely unseen, and not a matter for so harsh or overwhelming an accusation as that of guilt. But they are a matter of complicity, a weak complicity when considered individually, but a powerful complicity when considered socially, ecologically, and globally. Consider just a few examples that come to mind: Katrina, Haiti, climate change, world hunger, tsunamis, starvation, wars, Japan, epidemics, political rebellion, and economic downturns and their consequences. The affluent must face the reality of their individually weak but cumulatively powerful complicity.[4]

Step Five: Contrition is the way to and beyond complicity
So what exactly is involved in becoming aware of our complicity on a visceral level? It is contrition that is both the trigger to awareness and simultaneously the result of awareness. If we are to flourish we must face complicity and be moved to contrition. That is the path to being transformed and flourishing. Elsewhere I have made the case that contrition is a gift of grace in the face of complicity. Consumerism blocks contrition and is a barrier to our transformation.[5]

This fifth step is the focus of the present essay. However, let me lay out two further steps whose shape will depend on the answer to this fifth one.

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Step Six: To be successful in this “conversion,” we must re-educate our desires
Contrition involves the re-education of desire in a consumer culture such as ours where we are taught there is no such thing as “enough.” For example, take the matter of easy, costly credit. A woman protesting the credit card (and payday loan) industries once complained, “I just see how it has caused us to want more and more.”[6] Our desires will need to be re-educated from the senses outward if we are to begin to share and be transformed. That may in fact involve such basic and unconscious processes as brain chemistry and other forms of body memory. Clearly it will involve an alternative form of desire to what we presently experience in our culture – community and compassion will be among the values embodied in that alternative.

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Step Seven: Transformation is grounded in hope.
It is a matter of hopeful belief that people (and especially the affluent) can be transformed so as to enjoy their lives and to recognize that their well-being and that of others are conjoined. The nature of that transformation and the steps that will reinforce it are significant. It will necessarily involve a greater sense of community—a community of mutual benefit, a reduction in the significance and amount of consumables in affluent people’s lifestyles and identity; a real and sustained effort to reduce hunger to a minimum;  and a sense that others’ needs are on a par with our own.[7] (Note: Mark Bittman reports today that “the amount of grain being fed to industrially raised livestock in the United States alone is enough to alleviate much if not all of world hunger.”[8] Presumably some of that grain would be used to feed malnourished people first in what this seventh step is labeling a transformed world.)

The answer to the opening question is co-terminus with the answer to the following one: How can we both delight in the goodness of food and know that we are enabling others to delight? Part of the solution to that question resides in our ability and willingness to accept and live a story that stands over us in accountability and that has the power to effect transformation? In part, that means that we will need to be able to live within limits. My guess is that we will find such living a joy rather than the threat we now perceive it to be. Being contrite logically necessitates an experience of accountability to some standard or rule of life or story; without the ability to accept such a norm into our lives, we are rudderless and often, one suspects, flying by the seat of our feelings.      

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