The quest for gold...myth or reality?

chasing el dorado

by Brenda Evans

At first, I did not know that he was a man. Then I heard that in celebration he smeared his body with gold dust and plunged into a lake to wash it away—as if that deep yellow particulate matter were a useless pollution. It was in the highlands above Bogota, or so they say. And he owned jewels, too, and other splendorous objects. Above all, he was real—a king. They called him El Dorado, The Gilded One.

Later someone else said that El Dorado was a place not a man, an entire fabulous country of gold. And for certain it was real since Pizarro crossed the Andes from Quito in 1539 to find it, and in 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh plunged into the Orinoco lowlands to take a look.

Now, in this enlightened century, I know the truth: El Dorado is both real and not real. As legend, El Dorado is in the league with Midas’ tragic touch and Jason’s golden fleece—fiction pure and simple, enchanting myth, not history.

But in another way, El Dorado is real, as real as the New York Stock Exchange, for it has come to mean any place where wealth can be quickly and easily gained. For that matter, the market in all its permutations has certainly been an El Dorado in recent years. But for current chasers of that deep yellow metallic element, Wall Street has become the place where our wealth can just as quickly and easily be lost.

And gains and losses weigh heavily on my mind—too heavily at times I’m sure. Recently I heard two financial pundits give contradictory analyses of “the downturn” as we call it, each with authoritative vigor and supporting statistics. Amusing stuff, or so it seemed to the host of the show. I wasn’t so much amused as cynical about “experts” and about my ability to read the direction our economy is going and whether I should go with or against it.

I really cannot name my feeling about money right now. I know I feel jerked around, confused, my emotions as erratic as the market. In the spring, gold was back in serious investors’ portfolios and its value rising. According to The Wall Street Journal, some big investors bought gold and had Brinks deliver it rather than holding their investment in futures contracts or other securities. But over the past several decades has any investment been more volatile, more unpredictable?

Certainly, gold is a precious metal, elemental even, a thing valued as the finest of its kind and pleasing to the touch. But I don’t trust it, for it is as fickle and uninspiring as its color—a variable tone averaging deep yellow…like the yolk of an egg or jaundiced skin.

Barbara Slavin, managing editor for The Washington Times, titled her recent book on American-Iranian relations Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies. That’s close to how I feel about money right now: my enemy, my friend, both.

I like what Kathleen Norris says in Acedia and Me about knowing and naming your enemy: “Not knowing the true name of your enemy, be it a troll, a demon, or an ‘issue,’ puts you at a great disadvantage, and learning the name can help to set you free.”

So I’m working on naming how I feel about money. Two financial counselors have helped—Jesus and A. W. Tozer. Jesus referred to money’s usefulness as a commodity but unreliable in any ultimate sense. He warned his listeners not hold it near and dear as if it has infinite qualities. Money is a necessity, but spiritually it is capable of enthroning itself as a god in my life. There it is again: bitter friend, bosom enemy.

In The Pursuit of God, Tozer strikes my heart with his words. Things, he says, are a monstrous substitution for God, “an enemy which we tolerate at our peril.” Verbal clues of this enemy are my preoccupation with words like profit, gain, my, and mine, chief characteristics of possessiveness and covetousness.

I’m cautioned, too, by brief lines in Tennyson’s poem, Timbuctoo. Transient allurements can win my hearts even though they are creations of mere men. “Imperial Eldorado, roof’d with gold” is one of those temporary whims to which I’m tempted to turn “with yearning hope.”

I know that a lovesick chase of prosperity is as unreasonable as stalking a shadow. Spurred by an ache that makes me “content with discontentment, sulking, driven, bent like everybody else...in cheerless, drear pursuit,” as T. M. Moore warns, I joined the chase. It was a weakness of will, a failure of spirit.

Recently, as I sat in my office on the cusp of spring, I watched two astonishing events. Dismal stock reports scrolled across the television screen; the Dow was down more than 300 points that day to less than half what it had been in October 2007.

Outside my window, a plump bluebird pilfered a pyracantha bush, his feathers fluffed against a cold wind. The berries were almost black with desiccation, their vibrant orange long dead. Yet, in the absence of mealworms—the bluebird’s preferred diet—he found the berries edible. Besides, spring was on its way.

That spunky bluebird brought on a Eureka! moment for me, a bit like Archimedes’ exclamation after discovering a method for determining the purity of gold. I saw the name of what I feel about money: I’ll call it a stoppage, a closure. A letting go of what I’ve lost and gratitude and gladness for what I haven’t.

I have left the chase for El Dorado. Though there are no mealworms right now, and the pyracantha berries are dry, I’m satisfied. And above all, I’m grateful—very grateful.
I’ll let Robert Frost have the final word on deep yellow:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

 

About the Writer: Brenda likes medieval mysteries, memoirs, literary journals, and the new ESV translation of the Bible. Currently, she is reading two novels, a biography, and a memoir set in China. She is a member of a Southern writers book club, a women’s Bible study, and Second FWB Church in Ashland, Kentucky.