This spoken monologue is adapted from my 2017 article, Sitting in the Right Pew but Wrong Church, written shortly after encountering the work of philosopher John McMurtry and his life-value onto-axiology.
The central message is simple but urgent: humanity’s mistake was not that we valued growth, but that we confused the growth of money with the growth of life. True economy means the wise stewardship of the household — our bodies, communities, ecosystems, and Mother Earth. A civilization becomes life-coherent only when its religions, politics, economics, sciences, laws, and technologies are answerable to the conditions that make life possible.
This video is a call to move from money-value accumulation to life-capital regeneration; from scarcity and violence to care, provision, and right relationship; from “Take care” to “Give care.”
Dedicated in gratitude to Professor John McMurtry, whose work on life-value, universal human life necessities, and the civil commons offers an anchor, compass, and steer for a more life-coherent world.
Sitting in the Right Pew, but the Wrong Church
A Life-Value Monologue for Mother Earth
What if I told you that nearly everything we were taught about human nature was only half a truth, and sometimes not truth at all?
What if I told you that the story we inherited about the human journey was not the only story, not the deepest story, not the story written in the bones of the Earth or in the beating chamber of the human heart?
What if I told you that we have not been too poor in knowledge, but too confused in worship?
We have been sitting in the right pew, but in the wrong church.
We knew there was something sacred about growth. We felt it in the seed splitting open. We saw it in the child learning to speak. We watched it in the forest after rain, in the wound closing over, in the hand reaching out, in the community rising after sorrow.
Growth was never the mistake.
The mistake was kneeling before the wrong altar.
We mistook the growth of money for the growth of life. We mistook the swelling of accounts for the healing of households. We mistook the price of things for the value of beings. And somewhere along the way, we learned to count what could be sold and forgot to protect what makes life possible.
We were told the world was a market. But before it was ever a market, it was a mother.
Before it was a marketplace, it was a garden, a cradle, a womb, a watershed, a breathing body of soil and seed, water and sunlight, flesh and kinship, care and belonging.
And we were not placed here as owners standing above creation. We were born into a household already alive, a nested household of bodies, families, communities, ecosystems, and generations still waiting for their turn beneath the sun.
That is what economy once meant: the wise tending of the household.
But we allowed economy to be turned into something else. We allowed it to become the art of accumulation, the ritual of endless taking, the discipline of turning forests into figures, rivers into revenue, care into cost, and human need into opportunity for profit.
We called it progress. But too often it was extraction in a choir robe.
We called it development. But too often it was deprivation with polished shoes.
We called it freedom. But too often it was the freedom of the few to bind the many inside rules they did not write and could not survive.
And so our religions became anxious over the next world while this one was burning. Our politics became a contest for power while the powerless were asked to wait. Our economics became a church of scarcity where abundance was hidden, enclosed, priced, and rationed away from those who needed it most.
But listen. Listen beneath the machinery. Listen beneath the slogans. Listen beneath the old hymn sheet that taught us to sing of money-value growth while the living world groaned under our feet.
There is another song.
It is older than empire. Older than markets. Older than flags. Older than the walls we built between ourselves and the Earth that feeds us.
It is the song of life-value.
It says that anything is good only insofar as it enables life to be, to breathe, to feel, to know, to belong, to create, to care, and to flourish.
It says that the first wealth of any people is not gold, not currency, not weapons, not stock markets, not the glittering monuments of power.
The first wealth of a people is clean water, nourishing food, safe shelter, loving care, health, education, meaningful work, social belonging, ecology intact, and time enough for the soul to become human.
This is life-capital.
And life-capital cannot be measured only by money, because money can grow while life is being destroyed.
The market can rise while the river dies.
The gross domestic product can rise while children go hungry.
The economy can expand while loneliness spreads, while soil is exhausted, while forests fall, while hospitals overflow, while the young inherit anxiety instead of assurance, debt instead of dignity, and heat instead of seasons.
So let us say it plainly: not all growth is good.
Cancer grows. Debt grows. Deserts grow. Prisons grow. Weapons systems grow. The distance between the rich and the poor can grow. The temperature of a wounded planet can grow.
The question is not whether something grows.
The question is: Does it grow life?
Does it protect the conditions of life? Does it restore what has been harmed? Does it provide what every human being needs not as charity, but as birthright? Does it leave the Earth more fertile, the community more whole, the child more free, the elder more honored, the future more possible?
If not, then it is not true economy. It is chrematistics. It is accumulation without wisdom. It is counting coins while the house catches fire.
And we have been in that burning house too long.
But I do not come here only to mourn. I come to remember. I come to awaken. I come to say that the human being is not born only to compete, consume, conquer, and accumulate.
We are also born to bond. We are born to feel another’s suffering as a call upon our own hands. We are born to care for the young, to grieve the dead, to gather around the injured, to sing over the frightened, to plant after famine, to rebuild after storm, to forgive what ignorance has broken, and to learn again how to live.
We are hardwired not only for survival, but for kinship.
There are invisible hearts and feet moving through the world, though the old doctrines did not know how to count them.
The heart that bends toward the hungry child. The feet that walk toward the neighbor in trouble. The hands that plant, heal, teach, build, protect, and repair.
These are not sentimental decorations on the hard business of civilization.
They are the business of civilization.
A civilization that cannot care cannot last.
A civilization that cannot protect its life-ground cannot call itself wise.
A civilization that teaches its children to become successful at the expense of the world has confused achievement with exile.
And yet, even now, we can return.
Not backward into nostalgia, but forward into remembrance. Forward into a new intelligence, one that joins science with conscience, technology with wisdom, policy with compassion, economics with ecology, and human freedom with responsibility to all life.
We can build institutions that ask first: What does life require here?
Not what can be extracted here? Not what can be monetized here? Not who can be defeated here?
But what does life require?
What does the child require? What does the soil require? What does the river require? What does the worker require? What does the body require? What does the community require? What does the future require of us now?
And when we ask those questions honestly, the old divisions begin to tremble.
Religion remembers that the sacred cannot be separated from the suffering body.
Politics remembers that power is legitimate only when it protects life-capacity for all.
Economics remembers that the household is not a machine for profit, but a living web of mutual provision.
Science remembers that knowledge without wisdom can become a sharpened blade.
Law remembers that justice must defend the conditions without which no person can live freely.
And the human heart remembers that care is not weakness. Care is civilization’s root system.
Yes, we have made terrible mistakes. We have worshiped the fruits of our own hands and forgotten the living tree. We have praised the invisible hand of the market and ignored the invisible heart of the caregiver. We have placed crowns upon the heads of those who mastered distraction, deception, and destruction, while the quiet builders of life were told to be patient, practical, and silent.
But we do not have to remain obedient to a false story.
We can forgive ourselves without excusing ourselves.
We can confess that we knew not what we were doing, and then we can learn.
We can look upon Mother Earth not as warehouse, not as battlefield, not as property, not as dump, but as the forever-giving ground from which every breath, every meal, every medicine, every child, every poem, every prayer, and every possibility arises.
And once we see that, really see it, we cannot unsee it.
The old hymn sheet will no longer hold our voices.
We will need a new song. A song for life-capital growth. A song for universal human life necessities. A song for right relationship. A song for healing the nested households of body, home, community, nation, planet, and future generations.
And that song must not remain in books. It must enter budgets. It must enter schools. It must enter hospitals. It must enter constitutions. It must enter treaties. It must enter farms, laboratories, courts, churches, parliaments, kitchens, workplaces, and streets.
It must enter the way we measure success. It must enter the way we honor work. It must enter the way we raise children. It must enter the way we treat strangers. It must enter the way we speak of Earth.
Because the true test of any system is simple: Does it give life, or does it take life away?
Does it widen the circle of care, or does it narrow it?
Does it heal the wound, or does it profit from keeping the wound open?
We are standing now at the edge of a terrible and beautiful possibility.
Terrible, because the weapons of our minds and hands have become powerful enough to end the long labor of life on Earth.
Beautiful, because the network of our hearts and feet may yet become powerful enough to save it.
We have made swords enough.
Now we must make plowshares.
We have trained for war long enough.
Now we must train for care.
We have built economies around scarcity long enough.
Now we must build economies around regeneration.
We have told one another, “Take care,” while building systems that took care away.
Now let us learn to say, “Give care.”
Give care to the body. Give care to the child. Give care to the elder. Give care to the worker. Give care to the stranger. Give care to the soil. Give care to the river. Give care to the forest. Give care to the wounded community. Give care to the unborn generations who cannot yet speak, but whose future is already pleading through the heat, the flood, the hunger, and the silence of vanishing species.
Give care.
Not as sentiment. Not as slogan. Not as charity from above.
Give care as law. Give care as economy. Give care as politics. Give care as worship. Give care as science. Give care as the measure of whether we have become worthy of the planet that bore us.
And so I end where the old prayer begins, but with our feet on Earth and our eyes open.
Our Mother, who art on Earth, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kinship come, thy will be done, as we awaken to thy forever-giving presence.
Give us this day our universal life necessities.
Teach us to forgive one another for the trespasses we have committed against your life-giving systems and against the life-supporting systems of our societies.
Lead us not into the temptation of complicity with human deprivation and ecological destruction.
Deliver us from violence, be it direct, structural, or cultural.
For thine is the kinship of soil and seed, the power of water and breath, the glory of life becoming conscious enough to protect itself.
Forever and ever.
Amen.
