Reflection by Phyllis Strupp:
“The Green Thing”
CREDO Faculty Convocation
Memphis, TN
February 2, 2008
Theme: CREDO is a living stream with a sustainable spirit.
Let’s reflect together on the Green Thing.
My name, Phyllis, comes from the Greek word for green (as in the word chlorophyll) and I’m on the financial faculty of CREDO, an Episcopal clergy wellness program. At a recent CREDO convocation, I was asked to reflect on the theme “CREDO is a living stream with a sustainable spirit.”
The two conceptual rocks on which this theme is built are mystery and resources. How does an inanimate stream look and act alive? That’s a mystery. How does the spirit of an organization or person sustain itself? By balancing the giving and the taking of resources—financial resources, natural resources, and human resources.
From my experiences with CREDO, let me share an example of how this theme works in action. During my twenty-six years in finance, I met thousands of people in various occupations—primarily business owners, executives, and professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and dentists—but no priests. Then I came to CREDO—and the conference participants were all priests. It was certainly an abrupt transition
Early on in my work with CREDO, I wondered whether or not, when it came to their personal finances, priests would behave and react the same as everyone else.
Generalizing from a sample of eight CREDO conferences and over two hundred priests, I have concluded that priests are indeed different when it comes to money, in two ways. First, they make the same mistakes as everyone else, but they feel ten times worse about it. Second, priests are attracted to mystery—the mystery of God, the mystery of the Trinity—and that allows them to tolerate mystery in some other very strange places—such as in their checking accounts or on their balance sheets.
This makes CREDO an interesting and fulfilling experience for financial faculty, because most people in finance careers are attracted to solving mysteries!
The CREDO team leaders with whom I have worked have all said that financial faculty always get the highest scores on the faculty evaluations completed by participants at each conference. That’s no mystery—take priests from all over the country and put them together with financial faculty from all over the country and you have a match made in heaven! The priests get a little less mystery, and the financial faculty get a little more.
You experience a living stream of hope and joy from the sustainable spirit that arises when you balance human resources, and thereby invite grace into human hearts and endeavors.
Through CREDO we have all directly experienced the benefits of a sustainable spirit—something our society needs desperately right now. We have a responsibility to bring our wisdom and witness on sustainability back to our families, congregations, workplaces, and communities.
We live in a society that accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population, yet consumes over 25 percent of the world’s natural resources. You don’t have to be a financial professional to see that this situation is not in balance—it is unsustainable.
As faithful Christians, we have some powerful tools to help us find ways to bring this situation into balance: our tradition, including the Bible and the sacraments.
Let’s look at an example. Water is prized for its unique life-giving properties and its ability to cleanse. The physical and spiritual properties of water are closely related. The sacraments of baptism and communion both rely on water. Where does the water for these sacraments come from—some special pool of living water out behind the church? Or from the church’s tap or supply of bottled water?
We have reverence for the water we use in our sacraments. Do we have the same reverence for the water we use for drinking, bathing, watering the lawn, and other daily activities?
The human body needs one gallon of water a day to survive, so how is it that the average American uses one hundred gallons of water per day? That’s a mystery we can solve by accounting for the water use of our own households, workplaces, and congregations. We can be the change that we hope to see in our beloved country.
Would you like to help accomplish the Millennium Development Goals without leaving home or writing a check? Use less water than the average American. People and other living creatures all over the world will directly benefit from your judicious use of water.
Would you like to see more people in their twenties and thirties come to church? Offer spiritual leadership grounded in the living stream of our tradition and guided by the wisdom of science.
Our society is yearning for spiritual leadership that can help people appreciate the presence of God in the natural world and create a sustainable spirit in our use of natural resources, a spirit that expresses the great spiritual values of our tradition: hope, love, joy, and faithful action.
Love and joy are never far apart.
I’ve noticed in this election year that the presidential candidates on both sides have had little to say about the environment. Does anyone remember the presidential election of 1992, when President George H. W. Bush lost his bid for reelection in large part because of the “vision thing”?
My hope is that some day we will hear people in our church say that “___ won the election as bishop because of the Green Thing—s/he got it.” And people in our society will say that “___won the presidential election because of the Green Thing—s/he got it.”
When will that day come? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. Sometimes the mystery is solved before our eyes, as it was for Simeon in Luke 2:25–35, and sometimes it is not.
But I believe that is where we are headed, and that is where God’s reconciling love is hard at work in today’s world—gently inviting us to bring the living stream with a sustainable spirit that we experience at CREDO into our daily lives, into our congregations, and into our communities.
All resources—natural, financial, inner mind-body-spirit, human community—come from the same clump of atoms and molecules that were the inheritance God gave to this universe almost 14 billion years ago. All resources come from God, in both a physical and a spiritual sense. So how we use all resources reflects on our relationship with God.
Just as David said almost three thousand years ago, “All things come of thee O Lord, and of thy own have we given thee.”
Amen.
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