Personal Crisis

I don't really, 401 K to the contrary, care much about the stock market. But like some people I know, I keep feeling drawn to check in on the financial debacle nervously, as if those shifting S & P numbers were tea leaves for my own future.

I'm a worrier, and I always have worried about the second great depression. I read every word of War and Peace when it was assigned, ditto for Crime and Punishment, but to me Tolstoy in a funk could never terrify like Steinbeck. I used Cliff Notes for The Grapes of Wrath because the scenes were more than I could bear.

I've always seen images of my greatest fears in the Great Depression, and I've always felt that someday I would have to live through it myself, in penance for every egg shell I carelessly tossed into the garbage unscraped and every Little Caesar's Hot & Ready I bought in a moment of overscheduled weakness. If waste not is want not, then surely someday all of us who have wasted will have to want.

So this has been a tense week for me. On Friday, I happened across an article on the internet that changed my perspective, though. It involves Plato, but stick with me here. It discusses Plato's distinction between faithful images that are true to the original, and "another, more insidious image that is intentionally distorted in a manner to make the reproduction itself appear real to those who see it." Plato refers to this type of image as simulacra.

This article goes on to discuss the concept of simulacra in the current economic crisis, and the idea that we are entering an era of devaluation that is also revaluation--we discover that what we hold has no real value, and we remember that out there somewhere are things which are both real and valuable.

I thought suddenly of a radio interview I heard a month or so ago where a professor of Islamic studies calmly asserted that no western person of intelligence seriously believes that God is actively involved in daily life. That comment jabbed me a little. I thought, "Maybe we really are ripe for destruction here."

Then on Friday after reading the simulacra article, I started to think about the prosperity cycle in the Book of Mormon. I had always assumed that the cycle of prosperity was a kind of graph that the Lord used to watch and see when society was ready for a little calamity.

But it occurred to me that usually these cycles, these choices and consequences, causes and effects, are simply the result of natural laws playing out. It suddenly seemed obvious to me that the cycle of prosperity is really twin, inversely related cycles of prosperity and faith, and that as prosperity increases, we create our simulacra. They, whether in the image of a golden calf or credit default swaps, are simply distorted images of faith, warped man-made security blankets to comfort us in our selfishness and greed and insulate us from the prodding of the spirit and the nagging of our own consciences.

And perhaps this is not the day of doom that I have so long feared, but really the day of reckoning I have prayed for, when we will all repent and revalue, and the world will become a temporally harder but spiritually easier place to live.

Or perhaps not--not for everyone. Last night we went to the Temple though, for the first time in a long time, and as we walked through the door and up the escalators, I felt peace and security wash down over me. It was an amazing feeling, and it reminded me of President Eyring's words, "The great test of life is to see whether we will hearken to and obey God's commands in the midst of the storms of life. It is not to endure storms, but to choose the right while they rage. And the tragedy of life is to fail in that test and so fail to qualify to return in glory to our heavenly home."

I guess instead of watching the S & P or checking my food storage, I had better look to my faith and remember that my great challenge is not to survive the second great depression, but to learn to trust in the arm of the Lord. I know, an exceptionally religious blog, but then I'm starting to think that maybe that kind is the only kind that really matters. And inspiring those thoughts in all of us may be the natural--and critical--consequence of the current crisis.