This is the time of year for the almighty buck, for me and for every other American. It is tax time, the time when our government asks us to account for our income and wealth and offer our share for the common good. This year my federal tax bill was $12,000. I have decided that my tax bill went to pay a month or two of salary for a government medical researcher to do drug research for AIDS and HIV. Nice thought – my tax dollar at work. Unfortunately, no American who supports the war in Iraq can pay for that with their tax bill for 2003. Our children will pay for it instead. But my tax bill this year went to medical research. Really. I know!
How we exercise control over our financial life reflects who we are in the world. If you could direct your tax dollars from last year, how would you direct your share? Why?
In his book "Money and the Meaning of Life" Jacob Needleman writes:
". . . when we place the problem of money alongside the question of the ultimate meaning of one’s life, then, invariably, lightning flashes. Looking at money from this perspective can also bring a feeling of hope and a sense of relief that we are, finally, “allowed” to step back and look at money without any concern about how to get it or keep it, but simply as the key to the question of who and what we are.”
Pretty lofty statement – money can tell us the meaning of our lives, can tell us who and what we are. Is it true?
Money itself, the green bucks we run around trading for goods and services, are meaningless in themselves. They don’t even have a gold standard behind them anymore. What do those green bills represent? They represent our labor. We also receive money from inheritance and investment, but those monies represent someone else’s work. Money represents human effort. Because we can earn money with our work we have two opportunities to express our values: first with the work itself, with the way we spend our time, and next with the manner in which we spend the fruits of our labors – how we spend our money.
When I sold clothes for a living, my work meant something to me. It meant something to me to make sure the person I helped ended up with something that was becoming on them. I ran my business with a moral flair: no one on my staff ever worked off the clock, despite how common that practice is for the average service employee today. No one was allowed to lie to customers to sell them something – if it didn’t look nice, then say so, and if it did, say that. When I hired new employees, I paid them as much as I was allowed to by company policy right off the bat. Why play games? I wanted to hire the best person, why not pay that quality person as much as I could?
It is not that your work has to have some great moral end – but it is essential that you do your work with moral intention and reflection, no matter what. Nothing about selling clothes is going to change the world, and I might even wonder about my participation in our consumer society. But, on balance my work and how I did my work resonated with my moral sensibilities.
Besides work, our values are reflected in the ways we spend our wealth. Every penny that I spend says something about who I am in the world. It says I value fine things and art. It says I value food, and my home. I have a roommate so that I can afford a larger home. I live in the block of my precinct with the highest crime rate. But it is a beautiful apartment! I eat free-range chicken. I like it that the chickens I eat got to run around and I’ll pay more to be sure that is the case. For some of you, your values tell you not to spend any of your wealth on meat at all and to follow a vegetarian lifestyle.
How I steward my money says something about me. Says volumes about the meaning of my life. I try to spend my money in ways that reflect my values – which sometimes means I am hedonistic – indulging in a great bottle of wine or an extravagant hotel room. But it may also surprise you to know that I am a fiscal conservative. What do I mean by that?
I save for my future and give away money in equal measure. The balance that provides for my life is so important. I save 10% of my income and give away 10% of my income. There has been some give and take with this over the years. When I was younger, with more debt and less income, the percentages needed to be lower, but the key is balance. In my work I have come to see clearly how important it is to balance what I give away and what I reserve for myself. When I spend too much time and energy here at the church I get stretched too thin; I get tired and I start to burn out. I need to tend to myself so that I am able to tend to others. But too much energy spent on myself can lead to narcissism – to self-centeredness. When we hoard too much for ourselves our soul gets all blocked up with greed and want.
The people I feel the sorriest for are people who have the capacity to give and share what they have financially, but they are so consumed with fears about money or so utterly focused on their own needs and wants that they are not generous. These are sad, frightened people, and I only wish they knew how much their hearts would change if they were able to have a sense of generosity and abundance in their lives.
There was a time when I had a different understanding of money than I do now. Money was scarce in my family, and my elders did not steward their resources well. We always gave money away, but we didn’t save anything for ourselves to speak of. When my mother got sick and lost her job, it took only a month before there was a financial crisis. I moved home to pay the mortgage and since then I have been keenly aware that I am the one who will be responding to the financial disasters in my family. It felt like a heavy burden.
What I have discovered is that money has along with it a huge faith component. It seems obvious when you think of it. The little slips of green paper mean nothing in themselves. If all the computers in the world crashed tomorrow, none of us would have anything. And we’d have to take care of each other without legal tender. Money only works because human beings have decided to trust that it is real.
What does it mean to have faith with money? A rich man comes to the teacher and asks how to have eternal life – to have the gift of ultimate security, ultimate joy. Jesus tells him to obey the commandments. But I do," the man cries. Then go and sell everything you have and follow me.
What might Jesus mean? We can take it to mean Jesus is a cult leader who wants people to give up everything and follow him. Or we can look at Jesus’s life itself to discover what it might mean to follow him. Jesus fed thousands with a few loaves of bread. When he cast the nets, the fish fed everyone who was there. Why? Because he lived and taught others to live with a sense of abundance. He tried to share that gift by sharing what he had. His faith showed him that to love your neighbor as yourself, one needed to possess a willingness to share what one had. Attachment to things in this life kept us from our own joy, hid from us true love. He knew how to love and share in the present moment. He trusted in life’s abundance.
It is a lot more fun to live this way. There is a joy and freedom to this kind of faith and trust. And, wed with good care of self, we strike a balance that reflects our care for our own lives and for others.
When I was more fearful and less faithful in life in general, I thought I had less to give. As my faith increases I find I have more to give. Our faith is one of the forces at work in our lives – it's one of the forces of wealth and power in our society. So is fear. We choose which ones we cultivate.
As religious people we are called to live out our values in every aspect of our lives. Our faith should inform how we live everyday: – in our work, in our family relationships and friendships, in our communities, in our free time. Our faith should be leading us always. Now, I know this isn’t easy – and we don’t always get it right, but a religious life is meaningless unless we live it out.
Money is value neutral until we touch it. Once we have touched it, how we direct our money says everything about us. Each choice we make in life adds some value to our lives: savings is personal security, a down payment on a mortgage is shelter, charity is generosity, and consumerism is greed.
Money has power over our lives, and money reflects the true meaning of our lives. But how much power is that?
Jacob Needleman recounts this exchange he had with two of his students:
“You mean there’s nothing that money cannot buy?” This was Bill speaking. [Alyssa and] I did not realize he had stopped snoring and was listening to us. “What I think we’re saying,” I answered, looking at Bill, “is that in the world we live in now, money represents everything [you] can actually do. Everything [you] can achieve through [your] mind and body as they function uninfluenced by a higher power or energy. . . ." By studying money, we can begin to understand all the things that are within our power and only then, after we have really understood that, after we have really mastered the world of money, can we begin to grasp what it is that money cannot buy.”
“This seems just plain wrong.” Bill replied. “We can’t control life and death, we can’t control our passions, we can’t buy artistic inspiration. I don’t see how you can say that. . . .You can’t buy love! You can’t buy happiness ! You can’t buy truth! You can’t buy loyalty! . . .. ”
“No,” is Needleman’s reply, “You can buy love, you can buy happiness and you can buy truth and loyalty! But there is a love you cannot buy and a truth, a loyalty, and a happiness you cannot buy. But we will never know what they are until we’ve understood the love, the truth, and the happiness we can buy. We can do many things to find love and truth can happiness, and finally, to position ourselves so that we can receive as a gift the love an truth and happiness that do not depend on our efforts.”
There are two different worlds. The world of what money can buy and the world of what money cannot buy – the physical world and the transcendent/metaphysical world. [faith and fact]
He goes on to suggest: “Health, war and peace, justice, pleasure and pain, they are all decided on the basis of cost. And we will stop deceiving ourselves about love, truth and happiness only when we have seen the kind of love and truth money can buy, the kind we can work for and achieve.”
“We are disappointed with the world because we expect the world to be God. I mean the world of the human ego, I don’t mean the world of raw nature. We become disappointed with love when we expect the love that money can buy – I mean the love that we can work for by our own efforts – to be like the love money can’t buy. When we expect the justice that money can buy to be like God’s justice. We continually make wrong divisions between the two worlds and then are disappointed when the world we thought was spiritual behaves just like the world of the human ego. We call a piece of stone God, dress it to look like a god, and then are disappointed when it behaves like a stone. That’s idolatry. We call art spiritual, art that comes from ordinary, talented people, but people like you and me, and then we are disappointed when the artist acts just like anyone else. . ."
Money can buy everything. The only thing it cannot buy is meaning. The ultimate source of every human activity, every human function, is something, some force, beyond the ego. Money cannot touch that, but it touches everything else.”
So how does our faith call us to live? Is there a contradiction between what we are and what we imagine ourselves to be? “What actually do we pursue for its sake alone? And . . . are we prepared to think of it as the real basis of wealth at its deepest sense?”