You can't batten down the hatches alone

My great uncle Bill served in the US Navy for decades as a deep sea diver, a sailor through and through. Over the past months, I know Bill would have been going around saying "Batten down the hatches", telling everyone to get ready, prepare themselves for the storm.

The storm is here. I woke up this morning to CNN's headline that 1 in 50 children are homeless, mostly due to foreclosures. Over at USA Today, the headline reads that 24 million go from thriving to struggling. The American dream is in peril, many say. Retirees and those facing retirement have lost large percentages of their investment accounts. Unemployment figures are so high that headlines no longer shock us. This in an economy in which many already struggled with costs of health care, a burgeoning problem as many who join the ranks of the unemployed are unable to afford to keep health insurance.

Although the storm is here, we're still struggling as a society to come to terms with the fact that we're all in this together. Some days when I try to find help for people, it seems as if Scrooge has taken over, and his disgust for the poor seeps out via the old 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' theory, even in economic times that are causing global havoc.

Scrooge is not a nice guy by any stretch. "The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, made his eyes red, his thin lips blue, and he spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice..." That's why he needed to be yanked out of his bed in the wee hours of the morning and given a reality check by those ghosts. If he was living today, maybe he'd be given a tour of Wall Street and GM, then taken to a homeless shelter, but most likely, the Scrooge of today grew up middle class, a child raised by parents with the American dream intact, cautioned by those who remembered the Depression, but not old enough to be touched by it. So today's Scrooge who made it, wants to - even needs to - convince people (but mostly himself) that those who have fallen into trouble have done so because it's their fault. Each one of them. He sees no need to help others, or even to have gratitude for what he has.

Even the sight of a homeless child yanked out of school after school, losing not only her home but falling behind in her ability to read and learn, doesn't bother the modern day Scrooge. Part of that is because his past doesn't include that kind of hardship. There is no child within the modern day Scrooge who went hungry, who felt abandoned, who was cold. The modern day Scrooge whose heart is not touched by what is going on around him is not cold and indifferent because he is suppressing his own traumatic past, but is willfully indifferent to that kind of suffering.

Who is this Scrooge? Where can we find him, you might ask, and I bet a few of you would volunteer to drag him around to enough places to shake him up, to get him to understand that our collective future depends on him having a wake up call.

We don't have to go far, because Scrooge is in all of us when we refuse to live more kindly, to share with those who have it worse. It is when we ignore those times we can choose kindness, not selfishness, when we can give, not take. It is when we choose fear rather than crying "batten down the hatches!" and recognizing that we are going through a storm - together. I am Scrooge. You are Scrooge. We are all capable of being Scrooge-like, but we are also capable of so much more. Yes, we are all at peril and our instinct may be to hunker down with what we still have, but that's not going to get us through this.

Bill would have told us that, on any ship, one sailor can't batten down the hatches alone. The ship's crew would have to work together, so that everyone would survive. And, in this economic crisis we're in the midst of, the same is true for us as citizens. We need to start seeing each other as brothers and sisters in this together, not as free agents somehow wandering around, disconnected. That's easier to do on a ship, with the ocean waves rising and the peril immediate and visible. But how much more is it going to take before we realize that we need to work together - quickly - to stem the suffering of those most affected by the economic crisis? If we are one of the lucky ones with money still at our disposal, how best to spend it? How can we practice good stewardship with what has been given to us and recognize not that we are better than those who don't have it, but that having it makes us responsible and accountable to God?

So the question we need to ask ourselves is this: what can I do today to help? What do I have that someone needs? Can I volunteer services? Goods? Time? Who can I comfort today? Can I feed someone? In other words, can I set aside my own fears and find a place to help on the ship?

We live in times that truly call us to serve others. We can see this as a terrible inconvenience or as an opportunity to connect in ways that we otherwise may not have chosen.