You only need to do a quick Google search on the word abundance to see that it is associated primarily with financial prosperity and new age sentimentality. First Nations spiritual teaching has a very different approach. The Medicine Wheel, for example, celebrates the gifts of the four directions, with each direction - North, South, East and West - representing different human qualities.
The East is the place of all beginnings. The new day comes into the world from the East. It is the direction of renewal and reawakening. It is a place of innocence, and of naturalness, and a place to be happy, joyous and free. It is also the place where we learn to believe in what we cannot yet see. (Judy Bopp, The Sacred Tree)
There it is. Abundance - unlike its garish, evil twin excess - is invisible, ethereal, mysterious, and subtle. Abundance exists in the place that religious historian, Robert Orsi, calls lived religion-that daily practice of faith that is inexorably linked with the thoughts, practices and activities of the rest of our everyday life.
Lived religion exists in the space in between: "… In between body and spirit, in between public and private, in between the inner world and the outer world, and most importantly, in between the real and the imaginary." (Lansdowne Lectures, University of Victoria, 2003) It is here that abundance resides.
Halloween is a microcosm of the excess/abundance dyad that I think exists in our world culture. Some children hoard their candy, concerned about how long it will last as though there will never be any more. Other children experience this bounty from a place of abundance, willing to share and enjoy what they have received.
There seems to be a societal belief that we need more than enough to be satisfied, and we must constantly compete and scramble to get it and keep it, versus the counterview that the Universe provides exactly what we need on a minute-by-minute basis. I think there is much to be gained in shifting our thinking away from the model of excess/scarcity towards the model of abundance.
- Terry Harrison
Congregational News November 2005 Vol. 12 No. 1