"MONEY AND THE MEANING OF LIFE”

 

                                                 A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, September 30, 2007

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

 

 

        Some people suggest that Catholic priests, because they are single and celibate, are not qualified to counsel couples about marriage.  I’m not sure that is necessarily true, but it certainly is a common observation.  I thought about that comment as I was prepar­ing to deliver a sermon this morning on the subject of money.  If you're looking to me for advice on money, I suggest there are far more qualified folk I could recom­mend.  For me to give financial counsel is not unlike a priest counseling marriage:  if I happen to give good advice, it isn’t coming from personal experience. 

        My experience with handling money is fairly slim.  I have not dabbled in any stock or bond markets, and I don't know the difference between a front loaded investment and a junk bond.  I've never rolled high, or for that matter ever rolled medium or low in markets of money.  The only wisdom I can dole out is the old saw, “buy low, sell high!”  Beyond that, I have no advice.  In short, I am to financial advice what celibate priests are to marital advice in the view of many.

        It should help for you to know, at this point, that I'm not going to give you advice on how to make or spend your money.  I am going to philoso­phize, not give advice.  Philosophizing is something I do know about.  Perhaps to a fault. 

        I have stolen my title from a book published some years ago.  It is called Money and the Meaning of Life, by Jacob Needle­man.  Needle­man is a professor of philo­sophy and comparative reli­gion at San Francisco State University.

        It is a strange topic for a philosopher.  Since Needleman writes mostly on philosophy of religion, I have run into his writings several times over the years, and it startled me when I first saw his subject matter for that book.  His premise is that in our time money permeates all aspects of living, and if we want a good idea of what life is about for modern Americans, we ought to know how money influences our values. 

        Money has come to be the most personal of topics.  You can ask your close friends, your really close friends, almost any question you want:  How's your health?  Why don't you like your sister?  What do you think about the election?  Why are you so angry?  Or even, "How's your love life?"  But not even to your closest friends are you permitted to ask, without fear of being rude, “How much money do you make? or  "How much money do you have?"  It's much too personal a question, perhaps the most personal question that can be asked in our society.

        Needleman tells of a C.P.A. who was a student in one of his philosophy classes.  She told Needleman she had expected her work as a C.P.A. to be only a matter of arithmetic, mathematics, rules, and regulations.  But she said this:

 

        "I had no idea of the people element in this profession.  I'm not dealing with forms and figures.  I'm dealing with people.  I'm dealing with lives.  I'm dealing with hearts.  Maybe even with souls....

        "When I see someone's financial records -- or lack of them -- I'm seeing more about them than I want to see.  I'm seeing their lies, their contradictions, their hypocrisies, their sexual hang-ups, their hatreds and pettiness, their phenomenal cruelties and their incredible wishful think­ing." 

 

        Her comments reminded me of the observation that you cannot write a complete life story of anyone unless you have access to his or her checkbook records or credit card receipts.  Unless you know where the person's money has gone, you can only guess at what their true values are. 

        I would like to use Needleman as a starting point for my comments.  He begins by observ­ing a sociological fact.  In the Western world in particular, and in the United States especially, money has become, overall, the primary goal of living.  To the poor, there is never enough.  To the middle class, there is never enough.  To the rich, there is never enough.

        He asks what we mean when we say we are a "wealthy" country.  Here is how he responds:

 

        "What really makes our country so 'wealthy'?  I can remember the first time the question occurred to me.  I was only twelve years old, just after World War II.  In news­papers and magazines and in the school­room, I was constantly hearing the United States referred to as 'the richest and most powerful nation on earth'....

        As a child you may have had very different experiences with money (from my experiences), but we have all grown up in a wealthy country.  And it was only much later in my life that I began to understand what this means.  It means, at least in part, that ours is a society that has given material wealth first priority in our common life....  This means not only that we have much material wealth, but that we want this wealth more than we want anything else....  As I studied the history of different cul­tures, I began to realize what was for me an astonishing fact:  not every civilization has wanted what ours has wanted!"

                [Rearranged, but italics original]

 

        We can see this premise in almost any political election.  People in this country "vote their pocket books," as they say.  Social issues are important, war, abortion, race relations, issues of freedom and justice are worthy campaign concerns, but according to all polls, the economy becomes the determining issue in almost all national elections.  The first George Bush won his election with the campaign slogan, “No New Taxes.”  Bill Clinton confessed he won the presidency only because his advisor’s drilled into his head to remember during debates, “It’s the economy, stupid!”  It has been so, to greater and lesser degrees, in every national election I've seen.

        We want wealth, says Needleman, more than we want anything else.

 

        You may gather from what I've said so far that Needleman is critical or judgmental of the wealth of our society, or at least of those who seek wealth.  If you think that, you would be wrong.  His thesis is more complex than that.  The great hero in his book is a wealthy friend who is successful in business.  His thesis, which I'm about to summarize, is, in many ways, a self-cons­ciously religious argument.

 

        Needleman surveys the great literature of religion and philosophy to point out the very common observation, from a broad spectrum of civiliza­tions, that our lives are often experienced in two domains.  Sometimes these domains of living are called the "inner" and "outer" experi­ences.

        The "outer" experiences refer to the physical world we live in:  our home, our friends, our day to day encounter with work and weather and things.  The "inner" experience is our psycho­logical (or sometimes spiritual) understand­ing of who we are.  It is the way in which our every day experiences have meaning.  Our "inner" experience is how we embrace our values and aspire to visions of a better world; values and visions that are greater than we are, that transcend our routine experience.  The "inner" experience has to do with what we might call "the meaning of life."  Religions have often made a distinction between the "outer" and the "inner" experi­ence as the difference between the "secular" and the "sacred."

        If we fall in love, our experience of that person is an experience of our "outer" self.  The effect of that falling-in-love experience has on us, on who we are and what we think about our life, is an "inner" experi­ence.  We learn not just about that person, but also about "love," which is something greater than any one person.  If we take a class, a course, the information we learn in that class is an exper­ience of the "outer" domain of life.  But if that informa­tion changes us or affects how we live and what we believe about life, it becomes an inner experience.  We learn not just information, but we learn something about knowledge and something about truth.  And we may learn something about ourselves.  Or, if we experience a serious disease, our physical coping with that disease is our outer experience of it.  But if the occasion drives us to confront our self-understand­ing, or to confront our personal strengths and weaknesses, or our own mortal­ity, if it causes us to look at ourselves in a new way, then to that extent it is an inner experience.

        Which leads us to money.  Money has become the coin of the realm for all outer experience in our society.  Every aspect of our outer exper­ience, from our education, to our parent­ing, to our recreation, to our health care, is influenced by, and often measured by, money.

        And why does this title, "Money and the Meaning of Life," strike us as an odd juxtaposition of topics?  Money governs that part of life that is mater­ial, not spiritual, not that part to which we look for meaning in life.  Money has everything to do with our outer life, the material world we experience.  But the meaning of life seems to have nothing to do with the material world.  Meaning in Life does not have a price tag.  We all were taught that the best things in life are free, and that you cannot buy or sell happiness. 

        Everyone, rich and poor and in between, have been taught this funda­mental truth:  that money can't make you happy.  Why then does everyone expend so much physical and psychic energy for money? 

        Needleman's thesis is simply this:  it is a mistake to think our outer worlds (in which money dwells) and our inner worlds (which contain mean­ings of life) are separate.  The mistake is not to think that money can bring us happiness.  Indeed, there are some who believe that spiritual happiness comes from forsaking money and taking some vow of voluntary poverty and simpli­city.  These people are equally mistaken, he says.  The mistake happens when what we do with money, and how we think about money does not express the values of our inner life.  If we claim for example that we revere nature and wish to protect it from destruction, and at the same time, what we do with our money exposes nature to ever increasing danger, then our life is out of harmony.   Our outer world which is how we spend our money is at odds with the values of our inner world. 

 

        Let's leave money aside for just a moment.  What does it mean to live a life of integrity?  For many thinkers, and for many religions, integrity is found in living in harmony with our values, in keeping the inner self in sync with the outer self, in practicing what we preach.

        This is especially true in the Unitarian tradition where we don't look to beliefs for salvation, or even to good works for salvation.  We don’t see integrity of character to be just the product of following a set of rigid rules.  Rather, the value of a person's life is in the integrity of his or her values.  ONe hundred and fifty years ago, one Unitarian thinker summarized it as a belief in "salvation by charac­ter," a phrase that reminds us of Martin Luther King's admonition to judge people by "the content of their character." 

        What does money have to do with this?  If it is true that in our society our outer life is governed by our attitude toward money – that is, that money is the way in which we attribute value to our outer life – then integrity is found in the correspondence between what we do and think about money, and what we believe, in our inner life, to be the meaning of life.  Put differently, if there is no correspondence between our values and our money, there is -- especially in our society -- little integrity of life.

        This judgment is not contingent upon how much money a person has.  The task of integrity, of harmonizing our outer life that is ruled by money and our inner life that is ruled by values, is the same for rich and poor.  Money has a great deal to do with the meaning of life, especially in our culture, for money is the measure of how we live outwardly, and the meaning of life is the measure of what we value inwardly.

 

        I would like to explore briefly two traditional theological words:  faith and idolatry.  Both have strong relevance to our attitudes toward money. 

        Money, as any Economics 101 course will tell you, is founded on faith.  We started with gold, or some other precious metals, to which we assigned value.  There is of course no inherent value in any piece of metal -- the only value it has is the value we as a society agree to impose upon it.  If our ancient ancestors had an ounce of gold, it would have value only if they had faith that other people ascribed value to it.  Eventually, we shifted from the metal itself to pieces of paper that represented that value.  Money.  The pieces of paper had no intrinsic value, but we all agreed that it would repre­sent something of value.  We agreed, as a society, to have faith in the value of that paper.  If we should ever lose our faith in the value of that paper -- as happened during the Great Depression -- the paper would in fact lose its value.  Money has value only on the basis of faith.

        This description of money is offered in explicitly religious language by economist William Greider in his book on the Federal Reserve System. 

 

        "The Federal Reserve also function(ed) in the realm of religion.  Its mysterious powers of money creation, inherited from priestly forebears, shielded a complex bundle of social and psychological meanings....  Above all, money was a function of faith.  It required an implicit and universal social consent that was indeed mysterious.  To create money and use it, each one must believe and everyone must believe.  Only then (do) worthless papers take on value."

 

        But faith in money becomes even more mysterious today.  Instead of just paper, we have agreed that little plastic cards will be treated with monetary value, upwards to $10,000 and more.  All department stores share our faith in those cards.  Or even more mysterious are electronic transfers of money.  Each day, literally billions of dollars are traded back and forth without a single piece of money changing hands, often just through computer impulses.

        This, it seems to me, represents an extraordinarily powerful faith.  No religious object comes close to rivaling the immense faith all of us have in the symbol­ism of money.  If any faith is real, our faith in money is real.

        We really don't have to use a religious word like faith here.  Most of you know that economics has its own words that operate similarly.  They say money works because we have "confidence" in it or "trust."  Money won't work for us if we lose our confidence.

        These words work fine in economics, but what is significant to recog­nize, I think, is how closely economic confidence does resemble religious faith:  how much the power of money is made real through our belief in it just as in many faiths divine power is made real by an act of faith of the faithful.  Whether such power is real independent of any faith is not easy to guess.

 

        And this brings us to the notion of idolatry.  Idolatry is normally thought of worshipping a false god -- an "idol," if you will.  It is not irrelevant to observe here that the most famous idol -- the "golden calf" that was wor­shipped at Mt. Sinai -- was made of gold, the basis of money and wealth.

        But idolatry is more than just worshipping an idol.  In technical theolog­ical terms, idolatry hap­pens whenever we attribute ultimate value to some­thing which is not ultimate, but finite.  Idolatry can refer to almost any attempt to revere something as ultimate that is not ultimate.  Power is one of the most common idolatries in this sense, and history is littered with figures who have believed power to be the ultimate value.  Unitarians have commonly viewed creeds as idolatrous objects, when people hold to creeds, when correct belief about God becomes more important than God.  

        Money, we know, has come to be the ultimate value for many lives.  The issue of idolatry is an issue of our attitude.  Idolatry does not reside in making lots of money, it resides in our attitude toward the money, whether money becomes more important than what we can use that money for.  There­fore, rich and poor alike can be idolatrous in their attitude toward money, since rich and poor alike can hold money as the ultimate value of their outer and inner life.

        And as with faith, we really don't have to rely on a religious word like "idolatry" to express this attitude.  The word "greed" seems to serve that purpose for most situations.

        What is significant, I think, is to see how closely this common situation resembles the religious category of idolatry.  We don't need to use the reli­gious language, but the fact that words like "faith" and "idolatry" seem to fit so closely our experience with money indicates to me, at least, that when we are dealing with money we are considering something that has more signi­ficant meaning than simply currency of exchange.  We are dealing with something which addresses human character.

 

        The simple lesson that Needleman teaches is not always simple to practice.  The connection between money and the meaning of life is that the meaning we find in our inner life is never fully realized until it is understood in harmony with our outer life, which in our society, means in harmony with how we use our money.  The resolve to make our values conform to our relation­ship with money is equally difficult whether we have a little money or whether we have a lot of money. 

 

        What Needleman addresses, and what I've been considering this morn­ing, is not just theoretical.  It is real life experience:  one of the most common, and one of the most difficult to face.

        I know my experience with money is similar to the experience of many others.  Money is a constant struggle, the focus of many personal dilemmas and frustrations.  I don't need to lay my financial burdens before you, for I know many of you share similar stories.  Over the years of my ministry, I have had many people come to me to discuss serious personal struggles in their lives.  The prob­lems vary, but I would say it is fair to estimate that of all the people who have come to me with personal problems, over half of them have identi­fied finan­cial worries as one of the main contributors to their problems. 

        The problem of money is not necessarily selfish.  Money is a means to an end.  And the real issues always revolve around ends, around values, around meanings of life -- and money (or lack of it) complicates that.

        Needleman reminds us in the end of another ancient tradition found in many philosophies and religions.  That tradition is to see life given as a gift.  We have not earned it, we have not worked for it -- life is just given.  Many traditions, he goes on to show, treat gifts differently than we are used to.  Gifts are never to remain static.  If you receive a gift, you are expected to give a gift of equal or greater value.  There becomes a virtual economy of giving in which people give, and then give more as they receive more gifts.  This tradition is strong in many cultures, but especially so in Native American traditions, he says. 

        Needleman asks us to consider, as we look at the task of relating to our money, what it means to receive life itself, existence itself, as a gift.  To those who feel challenged by having too little money, and wonder how to live without it, and to those who feel challenged by having a lot of money, and don't know what should be done with it, there is an understanding in the tradition of viewing our life as a gift.   How do we respond to that gift?

        I will close with his words:

 

        "Personal gain is not excluded from a spiritual life.  On the contrary.  But the aim of personal gain is clearly defined:  one gains something in order to give.  This is the essence not only of human life, but of existence itself.....  There is a view that is expressed in every mythic, philosophical, and religious teaching of the past, that there is no such thing as just existing.  Everything is in service to everything else.  Existence is giving and receiving.  A stone gives and receives no less than a saint."


                                                                 READING from

                               "Money and the Meaning of Life"  by Jacob Needleman

 

[Note:  Jacob Needleman is professor of philosophy and comparative religion at San Francisco State University.]

 

 

        Money enters into everything.  We can look at every aspect of our lives from the point of view of money and the force it conducts in the life of present-day civilization.  Love and hatred, eating and sleeping, safety and danger, work and rest, marriage, children, fear, loneliness, friendship, knowledge and art, health, sickness and death:  the money factor is a determining element in all of these -- sometimes plainly visible, sometimes blended into the whole fabric like a weaver's dye.

        Think of our relationship to nature, to ideas, to pleasure; think of our sense of self-identity and self-respect; think of where we live and with what things we surround ourselves; think of all our impulses to help others or serve a larger cause; think of all our psychological and biological needs; think of where we go, how we travel and with whom we associate -- or just think of what you were doing yesterday, or what you will be doing tomorrow, or in an hour.  The money factor is there, wrapped around or lodged inside everything.  Think of what you want or what you dream of, for now, or next year, or for the rest of your life.  It will take money, a certain definite amount.

        If we broaden our vision and consider the whole condition of the human family, we see the same penetration of the money factor into every facet of the crisis of the modern world:  war, social injustice, the oppression of peoples and classes, crime in all its violent and nonviolent forms, our dying natural environment.  We see money carrying and catalyzing the mammoth illusions of power, fame, and pleasure that move the masses of the world and to which our society devotes so much of its energy through the continually accelerating production of ever-new inventions and technologies.

        We see to what a great extent the heroes we admire, if only for an hour, and the achieve­ments and marks of "progress" of nations and cultures, are a reflection of financial forces, whose glory fades when these forces change, like eddies in a stream that have no reality apart from the currents of water that create them.  We see how many of the dreams of empire, utopia, and religious salvation, as well as the paranoiac nightmares of mass resentment of new ideas or alien beliefs, are fueled and, to some extent, even created by money -- directly or indirectly.  To regard money in this perspective is to see who and what we are.

        That is why now, in our time, the problem of money has to be faced as a problem of consciousness, as a problem of being human in the universal world.  It is more than just a psychological or social problem which one strives to correct in advance of attending to questions of the spirit.  It has become the key to understanding the great purpose of human life and what, precisely, prevents us from participating in that great purpose.

 

                [adapted]