We have to ask ourselves—why is money such a charged topic? Why does thinking about it make us feel uneasy? Why does speaking about it make us feel naked?
Think about all of the most intimate details of your life that you’ll discuss with your closest friends and confidants—relationship troubles, mental health issues, insecurities, addictions, physical ailments, and so on.
Now think about who you would feel comfortable telling the exact amount in your bank account. Who would you feel comfortable asking?
Why is it that money is such an intimate and guarded aspect of our lives?
Money is a means to facilitate exchange. It replaced bartering long ago to simplify equations such as how many chickens I have to trade for a cow, who’s traveling to whom to pick them up, what if a chicken dies on the trip over, etc., etc.
Money originally held a sacred space in society. The Greeks original coinage displayed images of their gods. And yet when moneychangers set up at the temple, Jesus flipped their tables. Our money now says “In God We Trust.”
Perhaps there’s a key here in the relation of money to the sacred. Perhaps the key is for us to treat money and what’s done with it as sacred, and if we do, money will flow to us as water flows down a river, because it is the natural state of things.
Perhaps our neurosis about money is what causes blockages between money’s position in the stream and our position in the stream.
And maybe that’s because our attitude toward money is frivolous; in other words we spend it on frivolous things. We don’t treat it as a sacred means to acquiring sacred objects or sacred states.
We hoard money rather than gift it to others. And so we feel it is worthy of being hoarded, rather than worthy of being gifted. It pains us to part with it, so we associate the exercise of spending money—which is what it’s for—with pain.
Our priorities around money are so confused. We can buy a coffee-to-go every morning but feel it’s too much to spend a few dollars extra on pasture-raised eggs.
Or we don’t allow ourselves to have any fun with our money, only spending it on things we can thoroughly justify.
Or we go the other direction and spend money impulsively, only to later regret what we’ve purchased.
But I believe there is a principle of reciprocity in the world, that if you do good in the world, good is brought back to you. You can call this karma or justice or universal law.
But whether or not you believe in it, you can test it. Try giving money away to someone who needs it and see what happens. Try spending a bit more on the highest quality food even if you feel like you can’t afford it. When you purchase an object or item, buy one that’s going to last a long time, even though it costs significantly more than the one you’ll have to replace in a year.
Try these things, because even if the principle of reciprocity doesn’t work in a 1 to 1 way where you get back the same amount you put in, think about what you’ll have made happen:
You gave money to someone in need. Their day will be brightened, their load will be lighter, they will be more capable of helping themselves.
You bought top quality food for your groceries this week: your meals will taste better, you will derive more nutrients from what you eat, and the land the food was grown on or animals that were raised will have been treated with more reverence.
You bought the object of solid wood rather than the plastic alternative: you’re actively shifting culture away from treating things as throwaway, you’re keeping plastic from ending up in landfills or the ocean, and you’re investing in something you may be able to pass down to your kids.
Now if you don’t get an exact one to one return on that money, does that matter? And what’s more, what if you do? What if the reciprocity principle is real, and because you acted with reverence and treated your money as a sacred midwife of things that are real and important, the universe rewards you with more money, so that you can continue to move the culture in that direction?
Money is not something to be feared, hated, lauded, or hoarded. It is a means for highlighting the sacred through exchange. When we enter into sacred relationship with money and what it facilitates and represents, we uplift meaning in the world, become more meaningful ourselves, and are rewarded for doing exactly that.
