No, what bothers me is something else. If Churches are supposed to help us wrestle
with personal and social demons and sort out ethical dilemmas and inspire us to
do good in the world, and if, surely, a central figures in many of these human
dramas is the role of money – sometimes as the good guy and sometimes as the
bad guy, then money seems a very worthy topic on a Sunday morning - not to ask
for it -but to help the congregants deal
with it! And yet, in the churches I have
attended, I don’t believe I have ever heard such a sermon. Have you?
Instead, many religions proclaim negative images of
money: Buddha gave up princely
wealth, Gandhi gave up his job as an
attorney. Jesus has mixed messages about
money. So I endeavored to make something
up!I started with some research, as I always do. I discovered that a number of churches and religious leaders do talk about money, and interestingly some of these are large and growing congregations, like Lakewood and the Unity congregation in Houston. These are described by some people as “churches of abundance” and “ministries of prosperity.” I’m sure I’m simplifying their messages, but they seem to be that God wants you to have a life of abundance, which includes financial prosperity. Norman Vincent Peal wrote: Put God to work for you and maximize your potential in our divinely ordered capitalist system.”
Now I don’t feel particularly comfortable with these points
of view, so my thoughts turned to what people actually do with their
money. Money doesn’t appear on Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs alongside water, food, shelter, safety, but isn’t it really
shorthand for all of them? Money is a
way to measure and secure so much water or so much food or shelter. This transactional role of money is pretty
clear cut.
But it also occurred to me that if the number one reason
cited for divorce is not love or sex but money, it must have other roles or
meanings, too. Earning, accumulating,
sharing, spending, and saving money are freighted by symbolic meaning for
people, and that meaning may differ for a husband and wife or a father and son
or employees in different departments of the same business, or for political
figures.
So here is my approach:
It seems to me that money means four different things to people, and
each one has a spiritual challenge and a spiritual gift. These four meanings are safety, power,
opportunity, and affection. It can hold these meanings for different
people, or to the same person in different circumstances. I hope that as I
speak, you’ll consider what money means to you, and what challenges you face
because of that and what gifts you gain.
Maybe you’ll come up with meanings altogether different than the ones I
list.
Because financial arguments often line up with safety on one
side and the other three opposite it, I am going to talk longest about saving
money as a safety strategy, and then more briefly about the other three.
SAFETY: When safety
is our financial goal, we are often savers – obviously a word with the same
root. We use phrases like, “Save for a
rainy day, you don’t know what might happen, build a nest egg.” Although other people use such phrases as
“things will turn around” or “this is just a short rough patch” to explain
their financial strategy, savers probably don’t.
In the Tate family, who are the ones you guess to be
savers? Those who do value this
financial approach will describe themselves as frugal, prudent,
foresighted. Those who don’t value
saving as a financial strategy may describe them as pessimistic or penurious or
selfish, or use old fashioned words, like mean, or niggardly.
Saving tends to be a defensive posture, based on an
assumption that if something bad happens, you may have only yourself to rely
on. Savers admit incomplete information
about the future, and don’t see the world and other people as particularly
reliable. Not all savers are the same
though: There are two types: targeted
and untargeted savers. Targeted ones
seem oriented toward self-reliance. They
save because they doubt that Social Security payments, Medicare, or a pension
will yield enough to live well to the estimated 92 years of life for women and
high 80s for men, or they doubt that their salary or house value will keep
rising. These intentional people
organize priorities like, “My wife and I maintain savings worth 6 months of
living expenses in case either of us loses a job” and stock up before hurricane season.
In what department of a business or a congregation would you
expect – and want to find – savers? If you aren’t one, when do you want one’s
advice?
What are some of the challenges of savers? One twist may not be savings so much as
anti-spending. You’ve read articles
about people who lived like paupers but then die with millions in a shoe box,
or people whose home or car is no longer safe because they wouldn’t pay for an
obvious repair. Another negative twist
on saving is packrats who save rooms full of “stuff” out of some vague view
that “they may use it some day or “it will be worth a lot some day,” although,
truth be told, they don’t even know what is in those decades old boxes, much
less their possible value. For some,
hallways filled with piles of newspapers and boxes can be an indication of
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For
others, it may not be saving as much as “anti-decision making.” My Mom may fall
into this category. So every time I
visit, I organize and label her cabinets hoping that will make it easier for
her to make decisions about the 33 plastic trays and 57 ceramic pots and the 27
expired cans of whatever.
Two of the gifts of saving are self denial and living
intentionally. The saver says no to a
lot of spontaneous expenditures that might indeed make him happy in the short
run, with the belief that the denial is more worthwhile than immediate gain. Many religions incorporate a spiritual
practice of self-denial. Poverty,
chastity, and obedience for the nuns, priests, and monks of various religions
are extreme examples. But there are
others practiced by your friends and neighbors, and perhaps by some of you,
too. For example, the 40 days of Lent in
Christianity and the fall month of Rammadan in Islam, and the eightfold path of
Buddhism encourage the faithful to deny themselves things as basic as food or
drink.
The spiritual idea is that this denial sensitizes us and
increases our appreciation. We don’t
take the food for granted, we are more empathetic to those who go hungry every
day, and we think about our wants vs. our needs.
Saving by self-denial can contribute to a second gift:
intentional living, such as Unitarian Henry David Thoreau epitomized. He intentionally thought about the life he
wanted to live and then determined how much money he needed to live it and how
much work he needed to fund it, and how much space he needed in his home. For example, he asked calculated questions
like, how many guests did he really have at any one time, so he built that
number of chairs in his little cabin on Walden Pond? How big a garden did he need to till to feed
himself and sell or barter for other goods?
How could he simplify his home in order to spend time doing other things
he valued more?
One advantage he had in developing his ascetic lifestyle was
that he never married. It seems to me
that policies of extreme frugality work best only if both adults in a family
agree to it and adhere to it, otherwise it can seem liberating to one and a
prison to another.
Bryan and I have thought a lot about savings and
expenditures as we split our time between a high-rise in Houston and a log
cabin in rural Alaska where money is put to such different uses. Here, we see lots of opportunities for
spontaneous expenditures at restaurants, supermarkets, entertainment venues as
well as spontaneous get-togethers with people that, if distance were an issue,
we probably wouldn’t bother to see. In
Alaska, we live in a very small log cabin:
just 2 rooms and 760 sq. ft, 42 miles from the nearest road. Since everything has to be brought in by snow
machine in the winter or by small airplane, we have been very intentional about
our supplies and furnishings and clothing, and, once there, there is no reason
for money and no spontaneous expenditures.
We found that this experience really helped clarify the differences
between wants and needs, and I imagine that many of you have had this
experience when traveling to different parts of the country or world where you
found that you didn’t miss something or other at all. Occasionally doing without can free you from
assumptions you may previously have held, and can free up time you spend on
other things.
Since where we spend our money says as much about us as
where we save, let’s talk about the next three categories of money as
opportunity, affection, and power.
***
OPPORTUNITY: When
money means opportunity, we believe that by deploying money now, we can ensure
something of greater value later. People
who are confident and optimistic about the opportunity, use words like
investment, asset, equity, or venture.
Those who are pessimistic about the opportunity use words like gamble,
chance, speculation, and my personal favorite, “tax write off”.
What are the spiritual challenges and gifts of financial
opportunism? Surely one of the gifts is
the practice of looking beyond self-imposed limitations to the potential of
people and ideas, to the possibility of creation, or abundance. It involves the element of self-discovery
through taking risks – maybe winning or maybe losing, and seeing how we handle
either one. Manifest destiny is part of
our national history – go west young man.
Seizing opportunities is an important indicator of adaptability and a
different approach to self-reliance than savings. Life is unpredictable – those of us living
through hurricanes and droughts and job changes have to be adaptable.
The challenge inherent in seeing the opportunity of money is
to evaluate its potential for risks and rewards. The element of enlightened self-interest is
key. I’ve read a lot about financial
opportunism, over the past several years, and I bet you have too. The financial scandals are filled with so
many cautionary tales they could be written as fairy tales with titles like:
“Little Red Riding Hood who Trusted the Email Solicitation from a Nigerian
widow that promised her $1 mm,”and
“Goldilocks who Wanted Something For Nothing Right Now, like a house, or
a credit card” or “The Rumpilstilskin Financiers Who Charged Excessive Fees for
Bags of Manure wrapped in Gold.
Picture the conversations and arguments between a saver and
an opportunist in a family or a church committee or business? Each can take the criticisms of the other
personally: One says, “You are tight
fisted!” The other says,”You are
gambling with the future!”
Yet, if the conversations are conducted differently, with
the symbolic value of money in mind for
both parties, the same expenditure may be agreed to, but for different reasons,
one for safety and the other for the opportunity of future gain.
For example, the person who sees financial opportunities can
go a long way toward alleviating the inherent cynicism of a saver by presenting
the opportunities with some grounded research and analysis. The optimistic investor may want to buy land
he believes will be developed as a strip center and triple in value. The saver may become willing to buy the same
land without that optimism, but as a long term hold that mitigates the risks of
other investments. AFFECTION: The third meaning of money is affection or inclusion. This may conjure up images of the rich old man and his mink clad young girlfriend, but I’m willing to bet that most of us have spent money to retain or secure affection or inclusion. How many of us have yielded to a child’s plea to buy some silly toy because of the hugs and kisses we got? How many of us have donated to a charity we don’t particularly care about because a friend or boss asked us to? Many of you attend charity galas at which the honoree is exalted through a series of speeches, an honor he essentially paid for through a large financial commitment beforehand. Many of us know that associating with certain friends or family members involves picking up the tab or driving them or loaning money or items that never get returned. If we value the friendship or the relationship, we consider this the cost of that relationship. If we resent what we perceive to be an imbalance, the friendship suffers.
How many of you have had pillow talk with your spouse after
a night out at which one of you picked up the tab for a bunch of friends and
the other spouse didn’t think that was a good idea? How many of us succumb to spend on gifts
during the holiday season or for parties for friends because “they like it” or
“they expect it.” Would those
friendships really falter if you spent less? Are there other reasons,
unsaid? When conflicts arise among
family or business colleagues because one regards such expenditures as fruitful
and the other as fruitless, the difference may be a clue about values worth
discussing. Perhaps such discussions can
be an opportunity to list the people we value most, and compare that list to
our expenditures.
What are the spiritual challenges and lessons of money as
affection? Our bank statements are a
really easy way to quantify the levels of some of our affections. Does one man
spend more money on his mistress or a hobby than on his wife and the things she
values? Does a woman spend more money on
herself or her friends than on her children?
Do we spend more money on fast food than on charity? What do your black and white bank statements
say about your affections? Do they reveal an uncomfortably clear tendency to
“big talk/little do”? If a lot of the
money is listed as ATM withdrawals, maybe money as a spontaneous pleasure is
important to you. I had an experience
that took me a while to understand. When
my older son was in Junior HS, he and I were not getting along. The therapist we visited suggested that I buy
him some things. This really went
against my frugality at a time when money was really tight. The therapist explained that spending some
money on the things that my son wanted was a way of validating his desires and
showing that I was listening to him. I
think he was saying that the expenditures may have seemed like
safety/opportunity issues to me but may have been perceived as affection/power
issues by my son.
***
POWER: Money as power is the last category, perhaps because it is
so obvious. We are aware of uses of
money by politicians or businessmen, but I want us to look at the power of
money closer to home. What power can
you or do you exert with your money or lack of it? Think about your expenditures as votes. You are voting for this restaurant or
business or charity and not voting for others.
As a result of our collective choices, 50% of all new restaurants fail
the first year because they don’t earn the votes – the money – from enough customers
to stay afloat. Similarly, one third of
all start-up businesses fail within 3 years.
Only 5% of start up businesses attract investment beyond family and
friends.
Think about your financial choices in terms of the power of
relative impact. Sometimes a little
money goes a long way, or the timing of an expenditure means a great deal. A loan may be more valuable before pay day
than afterward. Or a well timed donation
to as charity or the purchase of a car or stock may have greater impact made at
one time vs. another. For example,
because the Houston Food Bank can buy bulk quantities, your donation of $100
may be worth more to them than your buying $100 worth of food at Kroger for
them. Your congregation has explored
micro-loans, I believe, in which the power of a $100 loan can effect more
impactful changes for some people in some countries than for others.
What are the challenges and spiritual gifts of money as power?
One challenge is certainly that money can be used to control
others. For example, low salaries with
high, year- end bonuses tend to secure the services of employees until after
that bonus is paid, but perhaps the loyalty is to the money, not to the company
or clients. Many a law suit in business or families has resulted from promises
or expectations of funds later withheld.
I’ve noticed that a belief in affection can sometimes obscure a
relationship based on the power of money.
Another challenge occurs when we perceive a financial
hierarchy, such as the haves and have nots that then wield power because they
claim to have or because they claim to lack money. I’ve seen both and I bet you have, too. The former may utilize the power of their
money to induce others, who feel greed or envy or selfishness, to make certain
choices. The latter may utilize the
power of not having money to induce others, who feel guilt or pathos, to make
certain choices. Either way, the claims
of having and lacking money can be use powerfully to extract more from others.
I am going to combine the spiritual gifts of money as power
in this way: we can use our monetary expenditures as a measure of
our values. We can shape those expenditures
to be more consistent with our values, and by doing so, we may grant ourselves
and those around us greater contentment.
Doing so may take time to extricate ourselves from financial choices
inconsistent with those values. It may
take time to assess, “why do I spend time and money on this club or that
widget” and to figure out alternatives or to decide to do without. This week NPR had an article on the science
of happiness. Perhaps you heard it. The gist was that below $75,000 in America,
money can really make you happier because that money buys Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs. But above $75,000/yr, money has
no clear correlation to increased happiness.
Perhaps because of our bifurcated Alaska/Houston life, I hear a lot of
lifestyle choice stories, often with a “woulda, coulda, shoulda” plaintiveness
about them. People seem intrigued by
some of the choices we’ve made because, I think, they feel that they are stuck
in lifestyle choices they can’t get out of.
It’s usually inappropriate for me to ask in these conversations but what
I often wonder is this: “What if you started with the question of what you want
instead of starting with the bills you have to pay? What makes you content or energized? What makes you feel ethically clean? Might such assessment open up some enriching
conversations with your spouse? Might
you save more or spend money on opportunities or affection or power that are
more consistent with your core values and priorities?
CONCLUSION:
Since I’ve never heard a money sermon before, I don’t know
how useful this one is for you. But I
hope it encourages you to think about your views and use of money and those of
your family and other decision making circles, like co-workers and
committees. I hope that doing so will
render you more attentive to underlying values of other people. Then, I hope that the process will help you
live more intentionally. Whether you
save or spend your money, I hope that your intentionality will empower you,
will reduce your stress, and will bring you peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment