When I got back to school after taking a week off to go to a theological conference in Tijuana, Mexico, one of my classmates asked who the speakers were.  I said, “Francis Moore Lappe was one, and she was super cool.”  My classmate, who has at least once told me that she could, “be my mother,” smiled and said, “Oh Frances Lappe she’s from my day!”  So I guess Lappe has been writing and advocating for social change for some time now, but she is still on the cutting edge as far as I can tell.

While I was at the conference in Tijuana that January 2010, this is when the wind was blowing so hard and the rain falling so much that the steets were flooded all over Southern California and Northern Mexico, I bought her latest book.  I finally got around to reading it this summer when I got out of school.  It’s called, “Getting a Grip” and it rocks!

I guess it would be a stretch to call it a theological book, but it is a book that people who care about living their faith in the world should surely read.  Lappe is all about the social real and she is all about democracy – “living democracy.”  That is the main idea that she develops throughout the book.  The phrase means more than just a certain form of government, but rather a thriving environment in which citizens actively participate in determining their futures.

Lappe’s examples are plentiful as she dots across the globe witnessing to communities that have pulled together and raised their voice to create a world that they want to live in.  And this is perhaps the sub-theme of the book.  Each and every human being has more power than they realize in determining reality…and I’m not talking any sort of new-age “believe it into being.”  Rather, Lappe lays out how people who truly believe and live in a framework that affirms people are able to enact change. She calls it the Spiral of Empowerment.  It is based on the premise that there are plenty of goods to go around and plenty of goodness in all of us.  If we believe in that, she arugues, we will not become lazy mooches but rather we will be active in our communities creating the world we want to live in.  The alternative is the cycle of of powerlessness.  That is based off of the premise that there is not enough goods nor goodness to go around.  In that sort of world the individual would do best to take what’s theirs and take care of their own with little regard to the rest of the world.  Of course, anyone can see the limiting scope of such a view.

These two cycles remind me of the theological ideas put forth by Wlater Brueggeman.  He called them the myth of scarcity and the myth of abundance as exemplified in the stories of Manna in the wilderness.  In his interpretation, God teaches the reader that there more than enough to go around if each person lives with what they need.

This hits home for Lappe, and she was one of the first to raise a contrarian voice decades ago when world hunger was blamed on the fact that there just wasn’t enough food to go around.  Lappe told us that she sat in the library in Berkely with a slide rule and found that her calculations showed that there was more than enough food in the world.  Thus hunger is a problem of distribution (sharing) not of production (scarcity).  Since then many people are still surprised by this fact, but thanks to people like Lappe the facts, as counter intuitive as they might be, are there to lighten our spirits and give us hope!  And they do.  “Getting a Grip” is a great way to inspire yourself, and get spurred, to get a grip and get active in the process of making this a world where you want to live and where everyone has what they need.