The Nuns Tell Their Stories

Sister Lesley is a Catholic nun of the Carmelite contemplative religious order. Our friendship goes back many years to a time when we were both very enthusiastic, newly-minted Buddhists. Our seriousness about the practice was a reflection of our teacher, B. Alan Wallace, who was at the time a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Lesley and I not only sat arduous meditation retreats but we both volunteered to be on the board of directors for a startup retreat center. While anyone can have a go at meditation, relatively few are persuaded to join board meetings of any sort. We were dedicated.

My sharpest and fondest memory from that time, however, is neither the comradery of the retreats or the board meetings, but the time when Lesley and I very inappropriately got the giggles together while attending a scholarly lecture on the jhanas. This was a solemn and elevated discussion of the stages for the development of Right Concentration which is one of the eight parts of the Eightfold Path, the path taught by the Buddha for reaching enlightenment. No one else was laughing.

In my experience, a giggle fit is an uncontrollable force of nature; contagious and unstoppable until it plays itself out. Lesley and I could only stifle our laughter into silent, body-shaking spasms while attempting to be invisible. I may have indefinitely postponed my understanding of Right Concentration and the Eightfold Path, but Lesley just took a different direction altogether.

Following her conversion to Catholicism, Sister Lesley lived in a Carmelite monastery in the UK for twenty years. She recently returned to live in the States because of health issues and to be closer to her family. A circle of old friends periodically springs her from her Catholic retirement home in pursuit of adventure.

Old friends, Anna, Sister Lesley, and I on an ice-cream rampage

Our latest outing involved taking Sister Lesley to visit the nuns at a local Carmelite monastery in Seattle. Carmelite nuns spend most of their day, and their lives, in silence but the nuns were obviously delighted to play host to a sister of their order. They had taken great care and effort with the preparations.

St. Joseph Monastery sisters

St. Joseph Monastery grounds

We are ushered into a large room with chairs and table trays set up in a semi-circle. Sister Lesley, good friend Anna and I are the guests of honor and we are seated in the middle of this arrangement flanked by fourteen sisters of the order. Off to the side is a buffet table draped with an elegant white tablecloth and laid out with cheeses, an assortment of desserts, homemade ice-cream, and coffee.

Initial conversation is somewhat forced. It feels a bit like joining a large table of strangers for dinner conversation on a cruise ship. Contemplative nuns are not gregarious, glad-handed extraverts as a rule, but the sisters are eager to make this a pleasant experience, and they genuinely want to hear Sister Lesley's story. Sister Lesley actually is an extravert and she is at ease recounting her convoluted path to God and sisterhood. When she finishes, there is a lull as we collectively wait to see where the conversation might go.

Sister Lesley seems to be a natural at leading dinner table conversation and she's looking for ways to keep things lively. In that spirit she turns to me and asks me to share my story. This is a completely unexpected and alarming turn to the conversation and I can't imagine how my life story is going to fit this occasion. I begin rambling about my early childhood years with no idea where this story is going or how to end it. I am telling the sisters about my first year of teaching when I was hired to teach in a parochial school in the Mission district of San Francisco. Having been raised in a small farming community in Ohio, I'd had little interaction with Catholics before this act of immersion into the culture and I was intrigued by Catholic ceremony and religious spectacle. I added a few fragmented elaborations on the experience, and having brought my entire life story up to a point in my mid-twenties, I just stopped there.

My story may have gone a bit off the rails but Sister Lesley is undaunted and I'm beginning to imagine her as a cruise ship social director on the road not taken. She's now inspired to ask the sisters to tell their stories about how they found God and made this life choice. There is a momentary pause and I'm wondering if the sisters might be reluctant to disclose their intimate history. But the sisters are quite willing and it touches me deeply as I watch their faces brighten and shine with the chance to testify and relive their often circuitous paths to this calling.

As if preordained, the sisters finish telling their stories just in time for Evening Prayer. The sharing circle has been a great success and we move toward the exit in good humor like old friends briefly reunited.

Their stories run together now in my mind and I remember only snippets. One sister played the French horn for years in professional symphonies in Denver and Louisville and finally in Seattle where she made her surprising leap to monastic life. Another sister was an accountant in her past life; her story heightened by a confrontation with authorities at the Canadian border over visa problems. Each nun had given up all material comforts to join the mostly silent, monastic life but curiously, I was most moved by the sister who spoke so quietly about leaving her dog behind.

All of these stories must have had a familiarity to Sister Lesley as she'd surely heard similar tales from the nuns in her monastery in the UK, but I was unexpectantly quite moved by our visit. Anna and I had been welcomed into a normally closed world not accessible to the uninitiated. I think this particular adventure for Sister Lesley was even more poignant for me than it was for her.

Government Spending & MMT

The Truth about Money Can Allow Us to Spend More Federal Dollars to Help People Post-Pandemic – Without More Taxes

by Vandana Whitney

In 1971, President Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard. Fifty years later, the members of Congress seem convinced we’re still on the gold standard and they are not alone in that mistaken belief. While going off the gold standard made radical changes to our monetary system, the national conversation about how money works barely changed at all.

Under the gold standard, the federal government was very restricted as to how much currency it could issue because dollars had to be backed up by a certain amount of gold. If the public or other trading countries started demanding gold for the dollars they held, then the gold reserves would drop, and the government could issue even less currency to spend into the economy. There was a finite number of dollars that could be issued and be in circulation at any given time depending on gold reserves.

Since going off the gold standard in 1971, we have what is called a non-convertible fiat monetary system, meaning you can’t trade U.S. dollars (USD) into the government for anything other than new dollars. Eliminating the need for the government to defend its gold reserves also means that there is no financial constraint on how much money the government can issue. Congress remains steadfastly, if somewhat erratically, unaware of the change.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to authorize spending, so Congress determines how much money is created and issued in a fiscal year; that is the power of the public purse. But as we have all witnessed once again this year, while Congress has no trouble whatsoever in authorizing and creating the money for the bloated military budget, the members insist that there is only a finite number of dollars available for domestic spending. The public is frustrated with Congress and suspects that something is terribly amiss with this budgeting process, but like Congress, the public has been educated to believe that we’re still on the gold standard.

Economists in the field of Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, are working diligently to educate both Congress and the public to an entirely different understanding of our money system. Over twenty years ago, this group of economists began an analysis of the Federal Reserve’s accounting system, and the Federal Reserve’s interaction with the Treasury. Their research contradicts the standard narrative about our money.

Professor Stephanie Kelton became the public face of the MMT economists because she is exceptionally good at explaining complex economic issues to people who have no background in economics. Kelton’s book, The Deficit Myth, was published in 2020 and immediately became a New York Times best seller. Kelton also knows how to talk to members of Congress. She served as chief economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee for the Democratic staff in 2015 and as a senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders in 2016.

The first myth, or mistaken belief, that Kelton addresses in her book is that the federal government should budget like a household. It is irrefutably true that the federal government is the monopoly issuer of our currency, the USD. The government is the currency issuer while everyone else is a currency user. That is a very important distinction that is obviously true but is hardly acknowledged. State and local governments have to tax or borrow before they can spend. Households and businesses must earn or find the money before they can spend. The federal government does not have to find the money before it spends because it creates our money. The government must spend dollars into the economy before the rest of us can get dollars, so it plays by an entirely different set of rules than businesses or households.

When Congress authorizes new spending, the Federal Reserve, acting as the Treasury Department’s bank, creates new digital dollars on its computers. Digital dollars are known as bank reserves, and since we live in a digital age, most of our money is just numbers on a spreadsheet that exist on computer hard drives in electronic bank accounts.

The hardest myth to overcome is the mistaken belief that taxpayers fund the government. The taxpayer money mantra came about in the 1980’s during Ronald Reagan’s administration in this country and Margaret Thatcher’s administration in the U.K. It was deceptive by design and because it was repeated so effectively, we now have most people believing that the public funds the federal government. That was never true; it is exactly the reverse.

As a point of logic, a government that issues its own currency must spend before it taxes, or else there would be no currency to collect. In accounting terms, when the government spends, it’s crediting or adding to bank accounts. When we pay taxes, the government is debiting or subtracting from bank accounts. At the federal level, our tax dollars are just deleted; they don’t fund anything.

Even though the federal government is self-financing, taxes are essential to the monetary system. If the government continued spending dollars into existence but never drained any dollars back out, it would have a definite inflationary effect. So taxing dollars out of the economy removes those dollars from circulation and helps to control inflation. This is an important point because MMT economists maintain that while the government is not financially constrained, there is a real restraint to spending: available human resources, natural resources, and inflation. Additional reasons for federal taxation are 1) that it creates a demand for dollars as the government will not accept any other form of payment, 2) it can be used to alter the distribution of income, and 3) it can modify spending behavior through tax incentives.

Another glaring misunderstanding of our money system is the idea that we have a national debt that must be paid back. The annual deficit is just government spending in a fiscal year minus taxes taken back out of circulation (we normally spend more than we tax) and by law the federal government must issue Treasury securities (bonds) to equal the difference. We are told that the government is “borrowing” money when it issues bonds which is very misleading terminology. The government has no need to borrow in a currency that it alone issues.

Our so-called national debt is nothing more than Treasury bond money held in what are called securities accounts at the Federal Reserve. They are functionally identical to savings accounts at commercial banks. At maturity, the bond money is moved out of savings into Federal Reserve accounts (checking accounts) with added earned-interest dollars. Those Treasury bond dollars are never used or needed as a source of government revenue, and the earned-interest dollars are not a problem as the U.S. can always create the dollars in its own currency to cover all debts or obligations. The U.S. has no debts in a foreign currency.

Under our current system, if the federal government doesn’t run deficits, then the public doesn’t have Treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are only issued in response to deficits. So, while members of Congress unite in their fear and loathing of a federal deficit, everyone loves Treasury bonds. If you’re an investor, U. S. bonds are safe, they’re liquid, they’re free of default risk. Bonds help you diversify your portfolio, and they pay interest. It’s a false narrative dilemma that is completely illogical but persists because of our collective ignorance about our fiat monetary system. Stephanie Kelton is working to change that.

Based on her own interactions with lawmakers in Congress, Kelton estimates that roughly one-third of Congress is now MMT conversant. By that she means that they could articulate—in very general terms—that the federal government is the issuer of the currency, that its budget is not constrained like that of a household or private business, and that inflation, not solvency, is a real constraint on spending.

Right now, all new bills in Congress must pass a review by the Congressional Budget Office to check for whether the bill will increase the deficit. (Non-spending bills obviously don’t need a CBO review.) MMT economists say this is totally wrong thinking and that we have government agencies that could instead calculate the inflationary pressures associated with any new bill. Government agencies do have tools to help control inflation.

If the public clearly understood how our money system functions, members of Congress would, in fact, be put in a far more uncomfortable position. Such knowledge would not help the corporate interests that push to privatize all public services. As we know, corporate PAC money funds a high percentage of congressional campaigns. It is much easier to declare that the government can’t afford to fund public services than to hold more relevant debates as to whether such spending would be inflationary.

Rep. John Yarmuth, current House Budget Committee Chair, is one of the few members of Congress who publicly uses MMT talking points. Yarmuth said recently in an interview that MMT’s influence in Congress is greater than its visibility. “There aren’t many people who are willing to be out front about it because it doesn’t resonate with what the average person thinks,” he said. Educating the average person is key to changing a political system that is clearly not working for the American public.

Fallen Ancestors

 

The Ancestors

The sculpture called The Ancestors stood on a hill in a wooded area on the University of Washington campus at Bothell. The carved cedar pieces are ten feet tall monumental figures that evoke the human form. A year or so ago the wooded area was eliminated to make space for a new building and the sculpture disappeared. I've been looking for them and recently I found what feels like the dead bodies of the fallen ancestors. They've been dumped into the wetlands area, still tagged with individual numbers presumably so they can be reassembled.

As the fall rains set in, the wetland ravine takes on an eerie atmosphere. The sculpture pieces are separated into sections but taken together it evokes the disquieting scene of a massacre. There is a power in the silence of these artfully sculped figures whether huddled together or lying asunder. 

A Swift Demise

 

I was walking the wetlands trail and came upon a very dead crow in the middle of the path. Not long dead but the eyes were gone as they always seem to go first. Not much damage to the body and didn't look to be the work of a predator. 

The trail was quite boggy from the recent rains and I soon turned back and retraced my steps to the main path. A second dead crow was lying beside the trail where I had just passed twenty minutes earlier when there had been no crow in sight. This newly dead crow was completely intact, not even the eyes were missing.  

One side of my brain had the yellow crime scene tape out and was thinking like a detective from the bird homicide division. No sign of a predator, or a weapon, or cause of death. 

That was conflicting with my inner philosopher/poet who wanted to write an ode to the fallen bird that must have been bewildered by its swift demise. Earlier this morning the crow was most likely flying about doing a routine search for food with a band of fellow crows. This afternoon, its heart stopped and it unceremoniously landed here in the sun. And of course I was confronted, as we all are, by how dropping dead unexpectantly can happen to all living beings.