Money, Spirituality and the Meaning of Life

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.

Of Creed and Covenant*

In 1931, a young theology professor returned to Germany from the United States. He had been doing post-doctoral work at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and ministering to impoverished black youth in Harlem where he regularly worshiped at a African Methodist Episcopal Church. This young man was a brilliant scholar; he could read and write in six languages and was conversationally fluent in two and he was a polished pianist and a poet. He came from a remarkable family. He was one of seven children. His father was a physician and a professor of neurology at the University of Berlin and chief of the Neurology and Psychiatry at Berlin’s most prestigious hospital. The household was incandescent. Regular guests at dinner included leading writers, historians, academics, artists, scientists and professionals. His desire to become a theologian, which he announced at age 14, made no sense to his humanist family – but he excelled in his studies and his doctoral dissertation became a subject for serious comment and discussion among the theologians of his day. He went on to write several scholarly works on Christology, the sociology of the church, and the nature of man. These works placed him as one of the few theologians who as able to bridge the gaps between radical German theological developments and the development of theological liberalism in the in English speaking world. He was widely recognized as a rising star.

While his career was on the rise, it was in the context of what Winston Churchill later referred to as the Gathering Storm. In January 1933, Hitler was elected as Chancellor and in March he was given dictatorial powers. In the face of the increasing Nazification of Germany, the church, as a whole, stood silent. As the church become yet another arm of the state the voices of those who opposed the dominant political and cultural trends were silenced one by one. Only a few brave pastors and theologians resisted. Our young theologian was one of these. He resisted – quietly, but without compromise, he spoke for an independent church – a confessing church that espoused Christian, not cultural, values. An Anglican Bishop commented “He was crystal clear in his convictions; and as young as he was and humble-minded as he was, he saw the truth and spoke it with complete absence of fear.”

In 1935, he planned to go to India to study with Gandhi. He was deeply committed to pacifism and the principles of non-violent resistance. But as he was making the decision, history overtook him - he was asked and accepted the role of leading an underground seminary at Finkenwald to train pastors for a resisting church. Not one of the university theology faculties was willing to side with this arm of church or prepare ministers that would stand in opposition to the state. In no time the Nazis withdrew all of his Berlin professorships. The young pastor calmly replied “I have long ceased to believe in universities.”

It was while instructing students for ministry at Finkenwald that this young theologian and pastor started to seriously explore the notion of community. These young people were banded together in an intentional community – they lived together, ate together, laughed together, learned together, and prayed together and did so because they know their commitment to the church and to their own beliefs would be costly. He started writing a little book entitled Life Together which explored these notions of community. In that book, he argued that community rests on two pillars – commitment to a creed and commitment to those who share that creed and its implications for living. He argued that it was only in community that true religious strength exists. In it he argued that every community is deeply flawed because it is comprised of human beings who, themselves are far from perfect. But he saw that it was in the radical commitment to the whole community that truth is discovered and true religious experience is found. He argued that it was only in community that the church would find the strength to stand in opposition to injustice and cultural arrogance. His teachings were unabashedly Christian, but the truths they contained were profound in ways that transcended their theological trappings. He argued that the only way for truth to endure was for the community of the faithful to be faithful to one another and to their most cherished beliefs.

The seminary was closed by order of Heinrich Himler in August 1937. It was at this time that he wrote an extended discussion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – which I will mention again in a moment. From 1937 until 1939 he traveled secretly from one village to another supporting and encouraging his students who were working illegally in small east German parishes.

In September, 1940, the Gestapo issued an order forbidding him from speaking in public and in the following May he was forbidden from printing or publishing his written works. In 1939, he had begun meeting with elements in German intelligence and other high ranking military officers (including Admiral Canaris and General Oster) and some well-placed civilians who were part of a very serious circle of resistance. Over the course of the next few years, this group slowly and, in many cases reluctantly, came to the conclusion that the only moral course open to them was to conspire to assassinate Hitler. Coming to this commitment to regicide caused the young theologian (who had been deeply committed to a path of non-violent resistance) profound disquiet and pains of conscience. Once convinced, however, he worked tirelessly as a courier and otherwise, to further the plot.

In, 1943, he was arrested for his work in helping a group of Jews escape to Switzerland and was imprisoned, together with his sister and his brother-in-law in the Gestapo’s prison in Berlin. He suffered some torture. In July 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was ordered to attend a General Staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair – Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia. When he came into the conference room his briefcase was full of high explosives and he placed it under the conference table. After leaving the room ostensibly to take a phone call – the case was moved behind the heavy support of a large conference table thereby barely shielding Hitler from the ensuing blast and allowing him to survive. The ruthless investigation which followed turned up incriminating documents implicating the young theologian.

After summary trial, on April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonheoffer was hanged from a gallows with piano wire at the Flosenburg concentration camp. He was 39 years old. The camp was liberated 3 days later.

Why am I telling this story about Deitrich Bonheoffer when our subject this morning is community? I bring him up because it is always easy to look at the upside of community, but not so easy to look at the downside. Dietrich Bonhoeffer looked long and hard at the cost of real, intentional community – he realized that community is not simply about warm and gauzy feelings of closeness. To Bonhoeffer community was about commitment – commitment to a creed (or a set of basic beliefs) - and commitment to others who share that creed and its consequent mission in the world.

Creed

Now the word creed is strange to us as Unitarian Universalists. We are fond of joking about our inchoate faith and that you can believe pretty much anything and be a Unitarian Universalist. I would like to raise the rather heretical possibity that, in fact, do have a creed – a set of beliefs we hold very dear. Like all good creeds, it is a simple one. Our creed is embodied in what we say in this community every Sunday when we gather together and light our chalice as one body. We commit to loving our neighbor as ourselves. We commit to searching for truth with an open mind. We commit to making the world a better place to live.

The words can be cheap to say. But I think we all have all found where it is costly in practice. Indeed, we were confronted with the implications of our creed last Sunday when we voted to welcome Tent City 4 as our guests, despite the potential costs. That vote reflected a commitment of faith in our creed (and I say this for both those who voted in favor and those who voted against). Some of us have been pushed out of our families because of what we believe. Some of us have lost friends or been shunned by coworkers. Most of us feel our voice is crying in wilderness in a culture in the predominating values are contrary to our own. Our creed of tolerance is met with intolerance. Our acceptance of all people is seen as subversive. Our call to equality and peace and justice are seen as hopelessly naïve.

We turn to each other for support in our journey. We provide sanity checks to one another and we remind each other that we are not alone. We turn to each other for inspiration, information, laughter and….ultimately, for community. The term community itself derives from the same root as the word common. It is what we share together – what we have in common - that makes us a community. It is what we have in common that binds us together. And it is this common set of beliefs that is the basis of our community.

We don’t have exclusive beliefs. In fact, we throw our arms open and invite anyone in. And that makes our beliefs are radical. They are counter-cultural and they are more than a little dangerous because they confront deeply held values in the dominant culture. Calls to truly love your neighbor as yourself are fine in theory – but for those who will love you if you are not too gay or too heretical or too homeless or too Islamic or too this or too that, the kind of unconditional love we call can deeply trouble them. For those who think they have stranglehold on the truth, our call to continue to search for truth with an open mind is offensive. It challenges an accepted understanding of the world that brings great peace of mind to many. And for those who like and benefit from the status quo, working to make the world a better place to live is deeply confrontational.

And so we are often out of step with the culture around us. It seems to me that we are in many ways a community of prophets in an age where prophets are not held in high regard. We don’t espouse a doctrine, but I do believe we have a creed that rests in a common mindset - a set of beliefs that sets us apart as UUs. Those beliefs give us our identity and call out to people who are likeminded – we provide a sanctuary for those who need what we need – a community of likeminded people. So we grow in numbers and strength and so we stand firm as a liberal religious presence in Woodinvile.

Covenant.

If Bonhoeffer’s first principle of community was adherence to creed – his second was a commitment to the community. Any serious religious community requires the existence of a covenant: a commitment, and perhaps even a radical commitment, to one another.

A community built on covenant calls for a deeper understanding of individualism than the one held by popular culture. It stands at odds with the notion of religion as an item for consumption – spirituality as something you get as easily as you visit the Gap, as buying into a cheap, uncostly cultural conformity. Our culture, and our civil religion, promote a type of individuality that is conformist, self-centered and ultimately self-serving. Religion in our culture is mostly about feeling good, not doing good. Spirituality is often reduced to a personal “righteousness” on a very superficial and undemanding level rather than a passionate commitment to true justice and a deeper and harder work of cultivating righteousness of the spirit and righteousness of community.

In contrast, our Unitarian Universalst understanding of individuality sees us as part of an interconnected web of all beings and that true individuality exists in our connections with those around us, with the earth, with nature, and even with peoples we don’t know. In our creed, there can be no I without a You. It is in the relationship between the sacred “I” and the sacred “Thou” that we find out who we really are. It is this recognition of the web of being – and its expression in our commitment to love our neighbor as ourselves and to make the world a better place to live – that we come into our own as individuals. We are not islands. We recognize that we cannot truly be an individual alone. Our individuality paradoxically requires that we be in community.

Just as it can be costly to have a creed, it can be costly to be in this type of countercultural community. This type of community is like marriage…it can be the most rewarding thing in our lives or it can be the most exasperating. It requires that we accept one another and hang with one another through it all. It requires that we give in and give up a portion of our lives for the greater good of the whole community. It demands our time, our resources, as we look forward to our stewardship season, our funds, and could, potentially, if things got bad enough, require our very lives in exchange for the ability to claim our beliefs – our creed. That is not likely, but it probably didn’t seem likely in 1930 in Germany either.

Bonheoffer’s book about the Sermon on the Mount, entitled The Cost of Discipleship, begins with these words,

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of the church. We are fighting today for costly grace….Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack’s wares. Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God thought as the Christian “conception” of God. The mere intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself, sufficient to secure redemption. The church which holds the correct view of grace, it is supposed, has that grace. In such a church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no real contrition is required, still less any real desire for transformation. Cheap grace amounts to a denial of the living Word of God….

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field, for the sake of it a man will gladly go and sell all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell as his goods. Costly grace is the good news which must be sought continuously. It is a gift which must be asked for over and over again. It is a threshold we must always seek to cross. It is costly because it costs a man his life. It is grace because it gives a man his only true life.

These words, to us as Unitarian-Universalists, may be, at best be odd, and worst a little offensive as laden as they are with the Christian elements of Bonhoeffer’s theology – words like redemption, contrition, and grace are not words we typically use – yet if we take the time to unpack them they contain a profound truth. What Bonheoffer is saying is that spiritual maturity (however you define it) cannot be had on the cheap. While it is infinitely rewarding, it isn’t an easy journey. While it creates true and profound joy, it is not a comfortable journey. Having a spiritual life (having a truly human life) requires being committed to a creed and to covenant with a spiritual community. I believe that we are far down the road of forging that type of profound community here at this church. Our community is here, in this place, and it is now, in this time. And it is in our community – in all its humanness, weakness and goofiness – that we find that we are able to love our neighbors as ourselves, seek the truth with an open mind and make the world a better place to live.

Peace, Shalom, Namaste, Blessed be.

*Sermon delivered at Woodinville Unitarian Universalist Church on 2.20.2005

© 2005. Matthew W. Wesley. All rights reserved.