Money is a central question in everyday life. We, as modern people, cannot escape the world of money. It affects every aspect of our lives. Indeed it has already shaped every aspect of our lives. Our socio-economic status is probably the third most important factor in who we are today – after genetics and the dynamics of our families of origin. The amount of money our family had when we were young determined where we lived, who our friends were, the type of education we received, and our college experience (if we had one). It probably influenced who we married and had an impact on the course of our relationship. It has affected our vocation and where we live today and how we are raising our own children. The influence of money in our lives is absolutely pervasive.
The following meditation is a riff on three basic questions: What is money? What is religion or spirituality? What is the relationship between money, spirituality and the meaning of life?
What Is Money?
In my experience, most UUs feel conflicted about money. My sense is that there are some very good reasons for that discomfort and they stem from the nature of money itself and the fact that we are religious community.
On the one hand, we want to say that money is not terribly important. We want to say that the most important things in life are beyond what money can buy. We want to downplay the importance of money. On the other hand, in our culture, money is necessary for survival. It puts food in our stomach, a roof over our heads, keeps us healthy. Without it almost all of us would, quite literally, die.
If we are going to come to terms with this most powerful reality, we have to figure out what it is and how it works in our lives.
One common notion in the simplicity movement is that money represents life energy and in many ways this is a helpful concept. We have to expend a certain amount of life energy to get money. In our society we spend a lot of life energy in getting stuff and supporting the stuff we have. If we think about it in these terms, it allows us to be much more intentional about how important our stuff is to us and how much life energy we are willing to expend to get and maintain our stuff.
While this concept seems to work pretty well from an individual perspective, I fear that it may have some pernicious effects when we apply it on a societal level. Does it mean that the life energy of a migrant worker is worth less than a teacher’s which is worth less than a doctor’s which is worth less than a CEO’s. As Unitarian Universalists, we believe in the inherent worth and dignity of all people and would almost certainly want to avoid putting economic value on people’s “life energy”.
So what then is money? What is money? We can point to a $20 bill and say that is money, but money is not the same as cash. My debit card works to purchase the same thing that the bill does. Beyond that, I can sit at my computer and tap some keys, moving 1’s and 0’s around in cyberspace, with the result that my utility bill is paid. Money, then, is a slippery concept.
There is, of course, a vast literature on the question of the nature of money, but it seems to me that, when you boil it all down, money is like a bathroom scale. It is nothing more or less than a measurement tool and in this case, it is measures societal values. Just like a scale returns the weight of something in numbers, a price tag is a numerical representation reflecting the relative value of the thing it is attached to. While all of this valuing is guided by the proverbial invisible hand of the laws of supply and demand, we learn what society values through the measurement that money provides. If you want to know the relative importance of things, look at how they are priced in the marketplace. Is an iPod valued more than a loaf of bread? Is education valued more than roads? Is social welfare valued more than security? Is health care valued more than oil? All you have to do is look at the allocation of money and the relative price tags of these things and you will know what people and institutions in our society value based on the money scale.
Now I ask you to hold this thought for a minute – that is that money is the measurement tool of determining the relative value of people and things to our society.
What is Religion and Spirituality?
On to our second question: What is “religion” and “spirituality”? In the West there is a very long tradition of thinking about this question. Most Western philosophers tend to view religion or spirituality as rooted in some sense of the divine. Rudolph Otto talked about the religious response to the “numinous” by which he meant a mysterious presence. Paul Tillich talked about the ground of being. For Martin Buber, it was the “I and Thou” of religious experience. And these are the voices of the more liberal religious thinkers. Others are much more explicit in seeing the religious experience as fundamentally rooted in the divine presence – or, God.
The problem I have with this emphasis on the divine is that movements that all would clearly call religious have no need for a supernatural being. Zen Buddhism, philosophical Hinduism, secular humanism and…dare I say it… Unitarian Universalism are clearly religious movements which don’t, of necessity, require belief in a divine presence.
So what ties all of these disparate movements together? What element can we point to that is common to fundamentalist Christianity and Zen Buddhism? What do Islam and Taoism have in common?
Again, there is a vast literature, and I could cite Hume, Schopenaur, and William James. In the end, it seems to me that at least one element that ties all of these wildly divergent worldviews together is a common belief that the values or perspectives of the dominant culture are somehow insufficient to address some basic human needs. That somehow there is something missing in the general culture that is necessary to being truly human. In short, religious people tend to set a higher standard. It may be that the higher standard is related to the inner world – a search for enlightenment or truth. Or it may be in the world of action – justice and truth. And in most serious religious traditions, it is both.
As Unitarian Universalists, we hold certain beliefs – such as the inherent worth and dignity of each person. We live in culture that doesn’t adopt this as the dominant belief – it differentiates based on sexual orientation, race or economic status or a host of other criteria. In is fundamentally hierarchical – elevating some and denigrating others. Because we don’t buy this model, we are in fundamental tension with our culture. We believe in a higher bar – in a more demanding standard.
Now let’s pull the two threads together:
If money is the measure of our culture’s values (and we cannot escape the fact that we have been influenced by that culture), and if we, as religious people, have almost by definition a set of values that differs to some degree from the values of our culture – is it any wonder that we feel conflicted about money? If money is where the values of our culture find their most focused expression, is it any wonder that our value system conflicts with those ideas.
Money and the Meaning of Life.
So what do we do with that tension? I would respectfully suggest that the answer to this question has everything to do with the meaning of our lives. This is where I found Jacob Needleman’s book, Money and the Meaning of Life, so helpful. It is not that he offers answers and many in our book group found him pompous and the book badly written – and I cannot say that I disagree. What I did appreciate was that he raised some interesting questions and that he put the money question as perhaps the central question for modern spiritual seekers.
So what is the meaning of life? The question itself elicits snickers. It has been the brunt of jokes, stories, and even full length movies mocking the quest for the meaning of it all.
In philosophy, the question of the meaning of life falls within the field of metaphysics known as ontology. The first ontological question is “Why is there something rather than noting?” Inherent in that question is the question of the meaning of it all. Up until the time of Immanuel Kant, philosophers attempted to discuss this question meaningfully. Most philosophers believe that Kant conclusively demonstrated that the question itself is pretty much unanswerable…at least on an ontological level. That left the field wide open for comics of all sorts.
While the question may be meaningless on the ontological level, it may be possible to answer that question on an existential level.
If a few of us gathered in a room to discuss the meaning of the life of Gandhi, we would be able to come to a relatively coherent consensus on that question. The same would be true for Abraham Lincoln, or St. Francis of Assisi, or Hitler or Martin Luther King. If we can discern the meaning of their lives on an existential or historic level, what is to say that we cannot do the same for our own lives? When we pass on, our friends will be able to gather and have a meaningful conversation about what our life meant.
This all would suggest that we are building the meaning of our lives as we live them. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, year by year. Interestingly, it seems that the living out of our lives ultimately is about the outward manifestation of our inner values. In the end, it seems, the meaning of our lives, is a reflection of our values. Gandhi’s values were worked out in his life, as were Lincoln’s and St. Francis’ and Hitler’s and King’s. Our actions reflect what we consider most important and we act in ways consistent with those values. Over a lifetime the acts consistent with our values creates a legacy that becomes the meaning of our lives.
Which brings us full circle: if money is what our culture values and we, as spiritual or religious people, are in some tension with those values, then how we relate to money is a key issue in working out the meaning of our lives. There is that old adage that if you want to know what a person values look at their appointment book and their check book. There may be some truth to that. How we spend our money reflects our real values. If you want to know the quality of a person’s spiritual life – look at his or her relationship to money. We work out our values in our relationship to money.
So what do I conclude from all of this? I would submit that this all says that our wallets are, in fact, sacred space.
It may be that how we relate to money is absolutely critical in our quest to understand and work out our values in the broader world. If we are to be spiritual people, we are forced to come to terms with how we interact with money and one of the most important “spaces” where that happens is in our wallets and pocketbooks. It may be that the wallet (or the checkbook or the Quicken program) is the most sacred of spaces...more so than the meditation chair, the reading coach, the nature trail, or the sanctuary of our church. We can fool ourselves in any of those other places. Our wallets are not so forgiving. When we look at ourselves in the sacred space of money, we see ourselves for who we truly are – it marks our progress, mirrors our successes and goads us to deeper consistency with what we feel we must become. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t for a minute believe that our wallets are a space for guilt. But I do believe that they are a keen tool for self reflection and knowledge. In that sense, when we are in the sacred presence of money – when we view money as a sacrament – we are in one of the places that can cause us to become our best selves. And it is in this relationship with money that we can find one important avenue for discovering the meaning of our lives.
Amen, Peace, Namaste.
© 2006. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.
In my last blog entry I wrote about our denomination’s difficulty in addressing the needs of those who are “spiritual but not religious”. In fact, this group is not particularly new. While this group is a substantial percentage of the populations now, it traces it heritage back to the New England Transcendentalists. One of these, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a famous UU…at least in our time. While we enthusiastically claim him as one of our patron saints today, Emerson had a rough go of it in his own day. His ideas were not particularly embraced with open arms and he was a lightening rod for controversy throughout his adult life.
