This morning as I was scanning The Daily Beast for responses to the State of the Union Address, a misread word gave me a great insight: I’d misread the word access as excess. This Sunday many churches will preach on the Sermon on the Mount, and what many see as a high point in Jesus’ rhetoric, the Beatitudes. They speak of satisfaction, of seeing the face of God, of inheriting the Kingdom of God. Just a week ago we remembered another great orator tell a multitude gathered in Washington that he had been to the mountaintop and had seen the Promised Land.
But the mountain that appeared in my mind (clear as the electronic bell on my cell phone that woke me) was a bell-curve, what statisticians call the graph of normal distribution. On the leftmost “tail” of the curve I saw the word “access.” On the rightmost end, I saw “excess”. And in this simple chart I saw the dilemma of my world, my country, and myself. We fight for access to what we need, and those of us who acquire what we need are often carried forward in our momentum to acquiring what we want. We felt our needs from the inside, from our stomachs and our hearts and our cold fingers and the faces of our children. But these wants come from the outside, from advertising and the smell of perfume on a passing mannequin.
In our climb up the mountain of equitable distribution for access, our momentum carries some of us all the way down the other side, to a life of comfortable and comforting excess. There the bright lights of success keep us from the truth that we are not, after all, in the Promised Land, but again in a valley, kept from the mountaintop of true happiness not by affliction, but by comfort.
In our times of compassion, we consider the hard climb for the poor, out of the valley of their need; we consider the justice of providing access. But how often do we consider our own inability to climb that same mountain from our comfortable side, where our possessions are an impediment to the journey?
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