Choose ABUNDANCE in 2025

Christmas Eve 2024. National Public Radio’s Lisa Desjardins reports on political word of the year. The public suggested: Broken, Unstable, Whiplash, Banjaxed (Irish slang meaning broken, not working, messed up), along with Polarized, Divided, Determined and Trumped.

Choices were then narrowed to three: Weird, Shift and Exhausted. The overwhelming winning descriptor of the year? EXHAUSTED!  It won with 56% of the vote!  No surprise: we have lived with incessant chatter, blaming, misinformation, false choices designed to gaslight and/or diminish others.  It has been a wearying time, a fraying at the edges of social and psychological well-being. 

For me, it is a spiritual vertigo. Things true, good, right, virtuous and just, seem tossed aside. Christmas 2024 finds our nation and world displaying an overwhelming appetite for grievance, retaliation and greed. Is this the new normal or the old normal? I say “NO.” Such national and cultural behaviors are cyclical, washing over nations and cultures tragically, all too frequently, leaving behind wounds that last for generations.  When politicians display toddler’s temper-tantrums whining “It’s mine,” it is time to return to a better script. Our nation deserves leaders who, like a wise parent, counsel “our household practices fairness for all.”  

On the first Christmas, King Herod employed brute force, exclusion and scarcity as the preferred instruments of power and authority. Who could have guessed an immigrant family, left to find shelter in a humble stable, would offer a more enduring and flourishing way of life to future generations?

One cannot avoid the reality that much of human history including the “development” of the United States has come from a selfishness and domination like that practiced by King Herod or the Roman overlords. OUR story carries uncomfortable, yet true, episodes of abuse, violence and betrayal. However, this is not OUR only story. There is another national narrative. It is the notion of the Commonwealth, of a nation begun on the premise that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Reaffirmed by Lincoln at Gettysburg and Dr. King in the pursuit of civil rights and lived out by millions of faith-filled and honorable women and men across the decades. 

We have a choice. There is a spiritual and a civic “better way.”  It is the way of sharing, of seeking an abundance resulting from welcoming the gifts resident across all the people in establishing the common good.  I write as a person who has been blessed by privilege, so it might be understood that these are easy words to say.  Still, I know others sacrificed and shared so that I could now have such privilege. The virtuous act is not hording more for myself but sharing with others, understanding true wealth is gained when my neighbors are also secure. In the Biblical story Abraham and Sarah had the choice of seeing the world with abundance or scarcity. At their best they chose abundance to benefit following generations. The parables told by Jesus and the miracle stories reported teach that everyone is neighbor and all who hunger are to be fed. 

In their forthcoming book Abundance (March 2025), Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point out the virtues of such living. They note our ability to see problems in terms of scarcity has grown over recent decades, while our imagination for new systemic interventions has diminished. 

What if instead of promoting individual grievance, we sought to improve and extend our systems of immigration, healthcare, housing, employment, transportation and education? What if we acted so that every child was offered an opportunity to learn a trade or have access to quality higher education?  What if instead of seeing professors as “the enemy” we valued the sharing of knowledge as critical to human flourishing.  Engage in debate, of course, still listening and learning from all. What if healthcare systems assumed the discovery of new ways to expand and include neighborhood-based delivery systems and worked alongside the native healers in a community? What if we made a commitment to safely house everyone and not leave those suffering from addiction or poor mental health to find cardboard bedding on the sidewalk?

Yes, the world’s resources are limited. I hold there is enough intelligence and imagination to act our way to a place beyond greed and scarcity.  What paradigm shall we choose: scarcity or abundance? Here is wishing you an early Merry Christmas 2025. May it be a time to look back and say we chose to value again the way of ABUNDANCE.

Philip Amerson, Christmas Day, 2024