4 June

Essay Today: Can You Serve Both God And Money? When Men Chase The Wind

by Jon Katz
Can You Serve Both God And Money?

In his book From Wild Man To Wise Man, theological scholar Richard Rohr writes about the spiritual plight of politicians and businessmen who work only for money.

“No wonder,” he writes, “that so many men are emotionally stunted. Money is a fiction,” he writes, “created to facilitate the exchange of goods and services…From the perspective of spirituality, it is an illusion,, and very dangerous indeed. Money is a game of numbers said to bolster  self-image and to perpetuate a false impression of power. It is the same with phone  or Internet sex.”

I had to stop and think about Rohr’s writing about money, it struck a nerve in me, for sure.  And it got me to think.

Money is important to me, perhaps because I lost so much of it and have struggled so intensely to try to learn  how to manage it. I think about it often, I monitor money closely and pay my bills meticulously. Every morning, I wake up early to see what I have and what I owe.

Money helps the refugees and the Mansion residents, it pays for my blog and photography and gives me the time and space to write books.

It is really an illusion, or is it essential to a life of pride and peace of mind?

The people I know who have no money lead hard and frightening lives, especially in our country, where the poor  and the mentally ill are treated increasingly like slothful criminals.

Men and money have always been tied together, it is so apparent if you look at the news.

For me, work and to some extent money have, in fact, been connected to my self-image and my pride and peace of mine. I never thought less of myself than when I declared bankruptcy four years ago, I never felt like more of a  failure, even though I have had many far worse failures in my life.

Yet I have never worked only for money, or taken work likely to make me a lot of money. It has never been the foremost concern of mine. I have never defined myself by how much money I had, or equated it with a meaningful life. The early prophets hated and feared rich people, I have felt that in my life.

Loving my work has been the most important thing to me, next to wanting love in my life. I have loved my work all of my life, and nothing makes me prouder than to write that.

Masculine energy is mostly directed outward, writes Rohr, and I see the truth in that.  For much of human history, male energy was directed outward to the world, towards making and producing things, towards improving life and  safety. Men, women also,  worked hard to build a better world.

In today’s culture, writes Rohr, men’s energies are hardly directed towards the creation of life for others and the production of real things or things they can take pride in.

The most “successful” men in our culture primarily make more money and produce only money, a goal in itself.  No one ever seems to wonder if it is moral in this world to make 100 times as much money as you will ever need.

No one questions successful men (and women) who make so much more money than they could spend. It is considered the height of success, almost heroic, even as the poor grow poorer and more. Polls reported that a major  reason our President was elected is that people respected the fact he had amassed so much money. He had to be a great leader, they thought.

Hundreds of thousands of farm people migrated to the coasts after World War II and gave up their calling to make money, and so many of their ancestors today languish in jobs they hate working for people who care nothing about them. They abandoned the idea of a calling, it is rarely  even considered as a possibility.

Rohr claims that money itself has no meaning, which is why it can hold any false meaning  we want to put on it. For me, I decided early on in my work life that working only for money was just another form of slavery. Since then, I have always worked for myself, and I have always sought a spiritual life and a spiritual life seems incompatible with a life defined by money. I have always thought of  writing as a way to do good.

Pope Francis said in an interview that “You cannot serve both God and money,” and I looked up the origins of the quote, it was from Jesus Christ, who said it in Matthew 6:24. Yet Rohr and other Christian authors say that idea has never been made a central moral teaching, or even a minor one, by Catholicism or Judaism or Protestantism. Today, it seems almost completely forgotten.

For me, money has always held a central place in my life, I always wanted money and for a long time, made a lot of it. Then I lost all of money when I broke down and then got divorced. I decided then that I wanted my work to be something I l that made me feel worthwhile and creative, not just something that made money.

The ancient religious cautions about money seem to have  been discarded or forgotten by many of the most powerful political and religious figures of our time. I don’t hear the political evangelicals warning about craving money, their expensive  temples would drive Jesus wild, looming over growing numbers of the poor and homeless.

The book of Ecclesiastes says “Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity, and mere chasing of the wind…He who loves money, for some reason never has enough of it. He who loves wealth, can never made enough profit.” I don’t ever hear any religious person quoting that on TV. Religion and money are enmeshed with one another, no one is giving away their money to the poor.

Watching the news today, I thought about what Rohr had written, and I think it is true that men who pursue money and power rather than meaning and service become emotionally stunted. How could they not? Money has no real meaning, the pursuit of money is a lifetime commitment to making something that is inherently worthless and barren, even though our culture has been taught to consider of it the greatest importance.

No wonder all these men in power are angry and empty of empathy and compassion. They think they are conquering the world, but they are really just chasing the wind.

2 Comments

  1. Jon, I couldn’t agree more. So much of life’s lessons can be learned from the bible .

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