When we had our first child, my husband and I were earnestly and joyfully committed to doing All the Things for her – parent and tot swimming lessons, story time groups at the library, bedtime music with album titles like Sleepyhead Mozart for Baby. (I’m sure many of you will be unsurprised to hear that her two younger siblings ended up being significantly less over-programmed…)
One of our main goals was to help her learn to communicate as soon as she was able. Our fervent first-time parent efforts were rewarded when our daughter said her first word, not spoken aloud, but signed in Baby ASL with her hands.
We had been feeding her something she really liked, banana or berries or something, and she looked up at us and tap-tap-tapped her fingertips together. More.
Cris and I just about fell over. “Did you see that?!”
“Did she do that on purpose?”
“MORE, Sweet Pea? Do you want MORE?” We signed it back to her excitedly and gave her some more.
Her eyes widened even further as she realized that it had worked, and she ate the extra blob of fruit and made the sign again and again. We laughed. Our first conversation with our daughter. She wanted more, and told us, and we could give it to her.
The next word she mastered was closely connected to this interaction. She would hold both her hands up with palms facing in, and then flip them both to face outward, indicating all-done or enough. Eventually she learned a few more signed words – nouns like milk, juice, and water, and slightly more complex ideas like diaper change and thank you – but most of the signing she did before she learned to speak and the signing trailed off was using those two first words: more and enough.
There’s a real agency in being able to communicate these ideas, and together, “more” and “enough” lay the groundwork for thinking of ourselves both as individuals with autonomy and as part of a social system where the things we need and want can flow from person to person.
It struck me though, that little ones (who have food security) don’t need to be reminded when they should flip their palms to say enough. When they’re satisfied, that’s it. Flip. Enough, mom. They don’t try to amass an endless supply of mashed banana. It’s all very “consider the lilies” as a system of trust that they are cared for.
Somehow, this balance of need and want, more and enough, give and keep gets thrown off as we leave babyhood behind. We become aware that there’s more to be acquired out there than mashed banana – possessions, money, POWER. And did I mention money?
I was reading a news article the other day about a billionaire wanting more. To be honest, I can’t even recall now which billionaire it was or what type of More he wanted, because there are so many such stories that they tend to blur together after a while. But what sprang into my mind was the first set of two signs that our daughter learned, and I thought: “The rich have no contentment! It’s like they learned how to say more but they never learned how to say enough!”
I remember a Vacation Bible School I attended as a kid where the week’s theme verse was 1 Timothy 6:6 – “But godliness with contentment is great gain.” Doubtless it would absolutely delight my childhood camp leaders that this stuck with me for nearly 40 years, but part of the reason it did was that the isolated verse nagged at me a bit through that week. I kept wondering, why does it start with But? If we back up in the text to 1 Timothy 6:4b-5, we get clarity that this passage is cautioning about teachers who claim that they’re speaking on God’s behalf but really aren’t:
They have an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions and constant friction between people of corrupt mind, who have been robbed of the truth and who think that godliness is a means to financial gain.
But. Godliness with contentment is great gain.
And this “unhealthy interest” easily spreads like an infection beyond the personal and into the institutional, systemic levels. It’s incredible to me how Jesus’ life and teachings could ever be interpreted as divine support of wealth and empire, but it sure has. We see that in the money-soaked, flag-draped, church-flavored rhetoric that pervades current events and social media these days, a culture driven by More but claiming that it speaks on God’s behalf. It might feel like a new phenomenon, but it isn’t; it was already enough of a problem in the early church that the author of 1 Timothy had to point it out in this passage as a growing concern.
Jesus’ most frequently recurring subject in his parables is the Kingdom of God, trying to convey glimpses of what that Kingdom is really like through metaphor and storytelling. Not one of these parables bears any resemblance to the endless, never-content desire for More that has always marked human empire-building. Instead, they’re subversive; all the defining tropes of Kingdom are unexpectedly flipped. Flipped like tables in a greedy, predatory religious system. Flipped like little toddler hands, from palms-in to palms-out. All saying: ENOUGH.
