Can I be honest? I’m tired of hearing about the economy. The relentless drone of facts and figures, projections and dissections, and the endless stream of macro-economic analysis are simply mind-numbing.

We are bombarded daily with speculation, tales of new, tragic developments, another report, another tiny step toward legislation, or away, refinement of past analysis, corrected assumptions, followed by a dozen new ones. Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice to be informed. But there’s a point at which we become so battered by adrenaline, cynicism and Wall Street jargon that even our impending collective doom becomes meaningless. Hell, Alan Greenspan, Henry Paulson, and the full pantheon of finance gods don’t know what’s going on. No, really. They all keep telling rooms full of reporters that they’re confused and overwhelmed. Is it any wonder that we’re all feeling a little on edge?

That said, this is another story about the economy.



Out of respect, I promise not to use terms such as “market stabilization” or “Apocalypse.” I won’t use cosmic figures like “eight-freaking-trillion.” Nope. In honor of the holy days, rather than subject you to more boring analysis of a worldwide calamity, I asked a few local religious types what all of this means.



I mean, it has to mean something, right? And isn’t it time to start asking and talking about that? We kind of have to, don’t we?



I’m not alone in asking. Places of worship all over the country are filling up with people. Religious leaders are coming out of the woodwork to call for more communal caring for the victims of this mess. Some religious leaders are using the crisis as an excuse to beef up congregations while others are using the crisis as an excuse to reflexively chide America for its collective greed.

Encourage Pierce County

Dean Curry, pastor at Life Center in Tacoma, had a pep rally. Well, not so much a pep rally as a gathering for the distraught, concerned, unemployed and downtrodden. Dubbed “Encourage Pierce County,” the impromptu event invited anyone and everyone to the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center, where they found support, people to pray with and people with whom they could share their concerns. Curry says the goal was to combat despair and isolation and to remind people that now is the time to move. You know, as opposed to being paralyzed and helpless. 



“We spew a lot of negative stuff, and it begins to feed on itself,” says Curry. “So we rented a room at the Convention Center and invited all the unemployed and discouraged people so we could tell them about some good things and that we’re going to pray for them. Anytime you have a massive destabilization, anytime something cataclysmic happens, people have all these negative expectations. But we’re not passengers on a runaway train. We’re in charge.”



Curry contends that a great deal of the despair and panic can be transformed into something — anything — else. Uncertainty has a way of paralyzing people when they need to be active and engaged.



“You have to take control of your feelings and find perspective,” says Curry. “When bad things happen and people don’t take charge of (their) emotions, they end up jumping out of buildings. I try to remind people that this isn’t the end of the story. It’s just a chapter. I talk to people all the time who said that 20 years ago they lost a job and it was the best thing that ever happened to them. This isn’t a denial of the facts. This is a decision to take those facts and instead of obsessing about the problem beginning to obsess about solutions.”



Curry also considers this crisis to be an opportunity to spark some good old-fashioned introspection. Curry is refreshingly reluctant to moralize the issue, though he concedes that many people are suffering because of their own greed. It’s worth noting that America has a bit of a spending problem and has been living beyond its means for some time. In June 2005, the rate of personal savings in America sank below zero for the first time in history. Sadly, this occurred during a time when the largest segment of our population — 76 million baby boomers — is reaching peak earning years. In the meantime, we’re borrowing more and more every year, drowning in credit debt. Household debt rates began increasing by double digits in 2003 and 2004. The toll of our wild spending habits is evident in the rising personal bankruptcy rate, which doubled between 1994 and 2004. And while Curry might agree that some people are now experiencing the consequences of bad habits, he refuses to abandon compassion for them.



“There are a lot of people who aren’t being hurt by their own greed and many who are hurting because of other people’s greed,” says Curry. “For me, it doesn’t matter why you got there — it matters that you’re hurt.”



That said, Curry considers this a time for reflection.



“For a long time we’ve been saying that the best things in life are free, and then we go live life otherwise,” he says. “This gives us a chance to live within our affirmation.”

Moral failure

Beyond compassion, Michael Ali McCauley would like to see some attempts at redemption. A member of Tacoma’s Islamic community, McCauley suggests that a great deal of this crisis can be attributed to simple moral failure. He joins religious leaders from numerous faiths in calling for a deep, hard look at the way we live and how we can change the way we live to avoid similar disasters in the future. Shortcomings such as greed, deception, poor regulation, and usury are at least partially to blame, he points out, reminding us that in each case a person made a decision at some point to push that shady mortgage, or sign that bad loan, or use his home equity like a piggy bank.



“Commitments to wisdom, truth and justice might’ve helped us avoid this situation,” he says.



There are plenty of practices in Islamic finance systems that Americans might learn from, says McCauly. If that sounds strange, consider that in 2002 the United States Treasury and a group of financial policy gurus hosted a seminar on Islamic Finance at the U.S. Treasury Department as part of an increasing international effort to understand Islamic financial structures, which many finance gurus have contended would never have allowed the kind of rampant, bad debt generation that has occurred in the United States for decades.



“An Islamic economic system would, by its nature, be immune from these abuses as the lender shares the responsibility for the gain and loss in the value of the contract. Therefore, making risky loans is not in the lender’s interest,” writes one local observer, who asked not to be named, in an e-mail forwarded by McCauly. “And making these loans to people with little chance to make good on their share of financial responsibility is recognized as counterproductive. The Islamic economic system is built on future value systematically as properties are bought on future values for the life of the contract and the monthly payments never increase. It is not based on rewarding the lender through charging interest (riba, or usury), an action forbidden in Islam.”

Hidden lessons

It is worth noting that these financial regulations have their roots in religious teachings and prohibitions geared toward loving people — you know, by not exploiting them. Orders against deceit and deception, usury and abuse of information for profit is prohibited in Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism and a host of other religious traditions.



Obviously — regardless of which tradition it springs from — the ideal has yet to be achieved.



“Profit and money can’t be the only thing that the compass needle points to,” says Darshan Eden Pearlstein. “We have so much power and wealth at our disposal. But without any grounding or awareness of what ends it all goes to, we just end up walking through the same door over and over again. I think we need a collective check in.”



From a Judaic and rabbinic perspective, disasters often contain hidden lessons, says Pearlstein, emphasizing that any critique contained within those lessons is not meant to chide people for being bad. Rather, disaster presents an opportunity for an accounting of the soul — Cheshbon ha-Nefesh in Hebrew. It even involves taking stock, but not the kind you can sell on the trading floor. Hidden within every crisis is a sudden shock that presents an opportunity to step out of our daily routines and consider things we might normally ignore — and might want to consider when making decisions in the future.

The saint is one who knows that every moment of our human life is a moment of crisis — a chance to choose a critical direction — according to Aldous Huxley.



“It’s a sobering experience,” says Pearlstein. “It’s certainly not meant to be a chance to become self-congratulatory and put a Band-Aid on things so we can get back to business as usual. It’s about getting to the source of a problem and what we can do about it. The lesson could be a whole gamut of things, and it’s always based in our time and unique situation. I think these types of crisis states are initiated to alert us to an imbalance, and they allow the opportunity to look at where we’re at — and look at what may have contributed to getting us there.”



Before that can happen, he says, we have to slow down. Take the time to reflect, reset the circuits, figure out where we are, and make a distinct effort to consider where we want to go.



“My mom used to tell me that when you make a mistake you need to step back. Instead of acting from the confused state and continuing to make bad decisions, she said I needed to take the next step from a clear place,” says Pearlstein. “When we’re in a crisis, it’s very hard to maintain perspective. Our general inclination is to act, act, act so we can get out of the situation. We’re like that guy in the comedy sketch who steps on a shovel, and in his confusion and shock, he steps again and steps on a rake. If he would stop and think for a minute, he would see he’s surrounded by shovels and rakes and could then move on.”