Musings

Money and God

What is money?  Cryptocurrencies push the question up in our faces.  The “crypto” in cryptocurrency means “hidden” – obscured.  But in a way, all money is cryptocurrency.  What is a dollar, really?   Ultimately a dollar is worth what people believe it is worth – it has little intrinsic value in itself.  Now that we have a president who is spectacularly inept at managing the economy with his wild turnarounds on tariff policy, and now that Congress is about to add trillion dollars to the government budget deficit, which is funded by selling dollar bonds to governments and investors all over the world, amounting to the government "printing" more money  -  people around the planet are beginning to question the stability of our currency.  The value of a dollar is a figment of the collective imagination of humans.  It is a habit of mind that can change.  The dollar is getting more “crypto” by the day. 
 
When you get down to the root of it all, money is the quantification of trust, of faith.  There’s something religious about it, eh?  You put a twenty dollar bill in your wallet and you trust that it will be worth something when you go to the store.  You trust your employer to tells its bank to send a number to your bank, and you send numbers from your bank to the banks of the companies that provide you with the stuff you want to pay for.  Our cash is printed with the words “In God we trust”, promoting the fiction that there is supernatural backing for its value.  A backing that most assuredly isn’t there, whether or not you believe in God!  If we were honest, we’d have these words printed on our money:  “Just trust that this piece of paper is worth something”. 
 
Money isn’t divine.  But there is something divine about maintaining trust and faith in each other.  Children trusting their parents to take care of them – that is a sacred trust.  Neighbors trusting neighbors to pitch in and help in times of crisis – that’s a sacred kind of trust.  The trust we put in each other in our churches is holy.  And the institutions we create to enable our economy to run smoothly and predictably – that too necessitates a sacred trust. 
 
The global financial system, precarious as it is, backed up by little but habits of mind, inspires both awe and suspicion - especially now, as we are getting a look behind the curtain to see the very flawed humans turning the cranks and pushing the levers that generate its illusions.  The weirdness of cryptocurrency, and the peculiar characters behind it, practically beg us to do what Dorothy did in exposing the Wizard of Oz for who he really was.
 
How do we change the money system so that it serves humanity more equitably and humanely, without tearing away the delicate filaments of trust that hold it all together?  At its root it is a religious question, a spiritual question.  How we make and spend money – that’s a matter of morality.  How we structure the way money is created and how money flows – that’s a matter of a morality founded on spirituality.  How does love move us to gain and distribute money – both as individuals and as a collective? 
 
Money itself is not sacred, nor are the banks and financial institutions through which it moves, but the trust that gives money value has a sacred quality which we must hold precious even as we demand reforms to the financial system to achieve greater economic justice.  We’re going backwards on this front today, but soon enough we’ll have the chance to elect politicians who can move us forward on economic justice.
 
In the gospel story about him, people hated Zacchaeus because of his ill-gotten gains.  Tax collectors in the Roman empire effectively were robbers.  They were given an amount they had to deliver to the Romans and they were set loose to gather it up by hook or crook, backed up at sword-point, and keep whatever extra they collected in the process.  We can be sure that he set neighbors against neighbors, getting them to rat each other out about who had more money than who, so he could extort as much as possible from all of them.  Zacchaeus was a cog in a machine that tore apart the filaments of trust between people.  So folks were boggled when Jesus invited himself to dinner with this social pariah.  Jesus inspired him to pay back what he had extorted from people.  Jesus’ mission was to restore trust among people, to inspire people to forge communal relationships that would enable them to thrive.  His encounter with Zacchaeus was a microcosmic reform of the money system of the day, moving its needle in the direction of economic justice.  Let’s do our parts toward the same end today!

Mending the World

(A cartoon from Iran, after a terrible earthquake there....)

 

Every hole and tear and sign of wear in a beloved piece of clothing tells a story.  As do the dings and scars and wrinkles and divots on our bodies.  They make us who we are, they recite our sagas for us without words. 

I know a lot of folks who have tattoos, and my theory is that they haven’t had enough damage done to their bodies, haven’t experienced enough wear and tear to have any visual stories to tell, so they feel compelled to tat their skin in order to tattle their tales!

In Britain during the Second World War, Coventry Cathedral, dating back to the 14^th century, was blasted mostly to bits by the German Luftwaffe.  What took many decades to build, and seconds to destroy, took decades more to mend.  Just like what’s happening today – in just 100 days, whole swathes of essential government services were wiped out, and when this disastrous administration finally ends, it is going to take years to mend what’s been ripped and torn asunder.  Coventry Cathedral today is a striking modern edifice that beautifully incorporates the remains of the medieval structure.  The mending restored the cathedral to its function, while letting its long and rich story remain visible.  I pray that when our current political debacle is over, the mending process will memorialize what has happened, so that our people will remember the damage done and the price paid.

Arty, cool-looking patches on old clothing satisfy our eyes but also touch our souls, resonate with our hearts, because they are powerful metaphors for our human experience of striving and suffering and redemption and renewal.  Seeing patches on holes in the knees of Levi’s remind us of the strain and sweat we exerted while we were wearing them – gardening, building, fixing, cleaning, working.  The patches are badges of honor for our labors that resulted in the holes and tears. 

The sacred myth of the Christian gospel tells us that after Jesus resurrected, he walked and talked like he did before his crucifixion – but he wasn’t quite the same.  The wounds that killed him were still visible on his hands and feet and side, though they’d apparently mended enough that he wasn’t bleeding any more.  You could say that Jesus was tatted out!  And those tats told his tale. 

So let us wear our visible signs of wear and tear with deep respect for what we’ve been through, for all we had to deal with to get where we are today.  Those divots and dings give us character, and let us revel in it.

Of course, some of the most significant dings and divots and wears and tears are those we suffer within – ones that aren’t immediately visible.  But one way or another, these invisible marks will become visible.  And often the best patches for inner invisible tears are visible tears.  I remember plenty of times when my tears have mended my heart.  And when I’ve been a witness to the same in others. 

When we mend what has been torn, there’s usually no use using the same kind of cloth as the item needing repair.  The idea isn’t to make it look the same as it did before it wore out.  Often that’s a hopeless enterprise.  Might as well make it obvious that you’ve mended it – but be creative about how you do it.  Japanese culture has much to teach us about artful mending.  There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken bowl is made whole with lacquer dusted with gold holding the pieces together, highlighting and beautifying the cracks.  A kintsugi is worth more than the bowl before it was broken! And sashiko mending is a Japanese art form, embodying the principle of wabi-sabi – perfect imperfection. 

Let us artfully, creatively mend the world of its rends and tears – not pretending we can make it like it was before.  That just makes things worse.  We’ve got people running our national government now who want to “take America back”…. But back to what?  They want to “restore” our country to their hallucinated image of its former greatness, but are wrecking it in the process.  What we need to do is to mend it and build it better than ever before, creatively employing elements both old and new...